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00:00I first started studying antiquity here at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, 25 years ago.
00:12This is the oldest public museum in the world, so it seemed like the perfect place to try to piece together the story of mankind.
00:21Back then it was much dustier and more downhill, but now it's had this amazing £61 million refit.
00:27It doesn't just house objects of beauty, it's an object of beauty in itself.
00:32Then when I was studying, one of the things that I was taught was that the ancient world ended in around about 390 AD,
00:39basically with the outlawing of paganism, and then magically modern history was born.
00:46Our first film explores a city that sits right on the cusp of that epoch-forming moment, the city of Alexandria.
00:55Alexandria was built on a dream, the idea that all knowledge could be stored in one place,
01:01and the caretakers of that knowledge would have extraordinary power.
01:05The dreamer was Alexander the Great, and he physically laid out the footprint of the city by scattering barley flour in the sand.
01:14The men that came after him then invited in the greatest architects and engineers from the known world to make his vision flesh.
01:22Alexandria was a buzzing place.
01:25It was heaving with philosophers and scientists, with high priests and power brokers.
01:31And there's one person who sits right at the heart of that story.
01:35She's an unsung hero, or rather a heroine.
01:39This is somebody who should be a household name, and yet somehow she's been relegated to the footnotes of history.
01:45She's a scientist and a philosopher, a woman called Hypatia.
01:50And since I'm a fan of women, I'm going to give her an airing.
01:54So although it might seem rather perverse in a season that ranges right across the ancient world,
01:59we are going to begin at the end.
02:02It's the dog days of the fourth century AD,
02:05and the glories of the ancient world are about to come tumbling down in a tumult of prejudice and power grab,
02:13religious martyrdom and fire.
02:16Welcome to the beginning of the modern world.
02:29Just imagine a city that housed all the knowledge of the world,
02:33all the mathematical and scientific treatises,
02:36all the works of literature and the flights of philosophical fancy.
02:40A place where writers and artists and scientists met to debate and to pioneer thought.
02:50Just think of what ideas and inventions that city would produce,
02:55what power its knowledge would bring to its rulers.
02:59Just think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge was destroyed, burnt to the ground or scattered to the winds.
03:11A terrible moment when civilisation itself was stopped in its tracks.
03:18This sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy,
03:22but this was a reality and this was the real place where it happened.
03:27A city where its secrets are hidden beneath the sea and beneath its streets.
03:32This is the city of Alexandria and this is its extraordinary story.
03:45Although we might think that Athens and Rome were the greatest cities in antiquity,
04:02for my money that claim could well go to Alexandria.
04:06For over 2,300 years, the city has occupied a key junction between the eastern and western worlds.
04:15Lying in Egypt at the top of the Nile Delta on the coast of the Mediterranean,
04:18today it's a sprawling place and every inch is jam-packed with activity.
04:25But curiously, the ancient city is conspicuous by its absence.
04:31The modern city here really fuzzes with life, but it can be a bit hard to get a handle on ancient Alexandria.
04:50You could spend weeks here without realising that this was once home to what was really a roll call
04:56the great and the good of antiquity because it was here that Alexander the Great was buried.
05:02It was here that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony and Caesar
05:06and this was the home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
05:12Piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzle, I'm going to explore the incredible story of this extraordinary city,
05:17where the Pharos lighthouse shone its beacon out over spectacular theatres, temples and colonnades.
05:24Monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world.
05:28This colossal use is a human scale, it's more than 30 metres high.
05:33Which combined the best of Greek, Roman and Egyptian design to create a dynamic hybrid culture.
05:41We're mixing and matching, we're being purely Alexandria, we're taking what we want, sticking it together.
05:45We're open to everything.
05:47And most importantly, where intellectual advances, new philosophies, new sciences were a driving force of the city.
05:57And that's what makes this place so special.
06:00Although Alexandria was immensely wealthy, it didn't just sponsor grand monuments, it put an absolute value on wisdom.
06:09Because wisdom meant power, and it was Alexandria's ultimate ambition to become the most powerful city on earth,
06:18by capturing all the world's knowledge within its walls.
06:22An ambition which stemmed from its very beginnings and the vision of its founder.
06:28By ancient Egyptian standards, Alexandria was a relative new build.
06:41It was founded only 2,300 years ago.
06:45Halfway in time between the pyramids and us.
06:49The fourth century BC was a kind of in-between time of history.
06:55The golden age Athens had dimmed and Rome was still a provincial backwater.
07:01But a very unlikely corner of northern Greece was about to have a huge impact.
07:07From there was going to come a man who would be a real player on the world stage.
07:11In fact, he was somebody who was going to change the world order.
07:15That man was Alexander the Great.
07:21Great because Alexander's achievements were truly outstanding.
07:25From provincial Macedonian beginnings, he united the Greeks as a nation.
07:30Defeated the Persians and set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen.
07:36From northern Greece, his territories stretched out across the Mediterranean, deep into the Middle East and towards North Africa.
07:44Alexander was prodigiously ambitious.
07:49By the age of 24, he was already cutting a swathe through the territories of the known world.
07:54But he could not rest easy until he laid his hands on the really big prize.
08:00Egypt.
08:06Because this was one of the most admired and envied countries in the whole of antiquity.
08:11The Nile River which watered the land gave it vast agricultural wealth, creating the manpower and resources to cover the land in glorious artworks and engineering triumphs.
08:26Even the Greeks, who thought they were culturally superior to everyone else and described anyone who wasn't Greek as barbarians, respected Egyptian achievements.
08:38The Greek father of history, Herodotus, said that nowhere else in the world were there more marvellous things, more works of unspeakable greatness.
08:50Such a rich prize was irresistible to Alexander.
08:53In 332 BC, he invaded Egypt and overcame the Persians who dominated the Egyptian people for the past two centuries.
09:02But to seal his victory, he now had to win over the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people, whose unique religion and culture had been rooted in the land for over 3,000 years.
09:14By the time Alexander arrived in Egypt, this pyramid was over 2,300 years old.
09:26But the locals here didn't think of it as some kind of antique curiosity.
09:30Because this is where a god-king had been buried, the Egyptians believed that it pulsated with a sort of sacred power.
09:38Confronted with a culture so alien to his own, Alexander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him.
09:49He realised he'd have to come up with an ingenious approach to get the Egyptians on side and accept his new Greek rule.
09:57And typically, when it comes to making sense of the story of Alexandria, the clues to how he did this are buried deep beneath the desert sands.
10:07So, have you been walking down here in Alexander's day? What would we have seen?
10:11We would have seen something quite different. It would have been far grander.
10:14You would have had these limestone beautifully cut blocks and you would have inscriptions.
10:18There would have been a big processional way lined with sphinxes.
10:22So, it would have been quite glamorous, not quite what it is now.
10:26And was it typical to have things underground like this?
10:30For the ancient Egyptians, yes. The underground stuff is a good place for rebirth and resurrection and anything secret.
10:36So, they used it a great deal.
10:39Well, it's certainly pretty atmospheric. Yes.
10:46And that's what Alexander had to get to grips with.
10:49A culture which not only believed in life on Earth, but which was obsessed with life after death.
10:56Wow. Wow, because I knew there was a sarcophagus down here. I had no idea it was this size.
11:02It is absolutely enormous. It's sort of three metres by five metres and it weighs more than 60 tonnes and it's made of absolutely solid granite.
11:11Oh, it's got glyphs on it? Yep. Yep. Here, see?
11:14You can just make out, this is in fact the name of who it belongs to.
11:17It's Hapi in glyphs and it actually returned into Apis by the Greeks.
11:22And so it's Hapi, which is the great bull god, the Apis bull. And this is his sarcophagus.
11:28So it's a bull buried in here? Yeah, it's a bull.
11:31I just presumed because it's so kind of glorious it would be a human.
11:34No, it actually is a bull burial because this was a sacred incarnation of one of the Egyptian gods and so he was buried here after his death.
11:41And here it says, Apis, beloved son of Osiris, may he be given life, eternity and prosperity and so on.
11:56And here's his name one more time, saying really near to whom it belonged.
11:59I mean, the Egyptians do do that in their religion, don't they? They mix up animals and men very happily.
12:04Very much so. For the Egyptians, each god had a totemic animal, so they were always closely allied, which is very different from the Greeks.
12:12And so how did Alexander deal with that very alien landscape when he arrived here?
12:16Alexander was brilliant. I mean, he, instead of coming in and saying, you all are fools, he instead said, ah, I am part of this whole thing.
12:25And he came and he made offerings to the Apis. He gave money and lands to the temples.
12:31The Egyptians thought, wow, one of us, we love him.
12:34And then, in a just brilliant mood, he also visited a temple where he was hailed as the son of the chief Egyptian god.
12:42So he was supposed to be the divine ruler on earth, which fits in with the Egyptian belief system that their pharaoh is divinely born and a god on earth.
12:49And so there was Alexander as a pharaoh, really, and the Egyptians loved him.
12:54Alexander was canny. By choosing to embrace Egyptian customs rather than just stomp on them, he managed to affect a very sympathetic kind of regime change.
13:19The Egyptian people didn't think of him as one of them, but one of us.
13:25You know, he had done remarkably well. He realised his grand Egyptian dream.
13:30And now he was being celebrated here, not just as a conqueror or a king, but as a true living god.
13:37But even that wasn't enough for Alexander. He didn't just want to be another in a long line of pharaohs.
13:51He really wanted to dominate the country. And that meant creating a new city that would bear his name for all time.
13:58But first, he had to find a suitable location.
14:04The ancient Egyptians had always looked inwards, their key cities centring on the Nile.
14:10But in this, Alexander differed.
14:13He also wanted his new city to look back towards his Greek homeland and outwards towards his new empire.
14:20And it was said that he had a very illustrious figure to guide him on his way.
14:30The ancient author Plutarch tells us that Alexander was drawn to this very spot, a place called Pharos, by a prophetic dream.
14:39Then in the night, as Alexander lay asleep, he saw a wonderful vision.
14:44A venerable man with shaggy hair and a beard appeared to stand by his side and recite these verses.
14:51Now, there is an island in the much dashing sea in front of Egypt. Pharos is what men call it.
15:00Alexander believed that the mysterious visitor was none other than Homer himself, the great epic bard.
15:06And as well as being a hard-nosed politician, he was an incurable romantic.
15:11And so he took his advice. And this is where he came to found his city.
15:19But the barren stretch of coastline Alexander encountered couldn't be more different from today's hectic metropolis.
15:27When Alexander got here, Pharos was still just an island.
15:31There was a tiny little settlement here, and the coastline of Egypt was very jagged, which meant it was very difficult for boats to land.
15:39But Alexander had a grand plan to link Pharos to the mainland.
15:44And so he built a causeway running all the way across, almost a mile long.
15:49And he extended this bit here to create a man-made harbour.
15:55This would become the busiest port in the world.
16:00The gateway to one of the richest and most multicultural cities on earth.
16:06And that was only part of the dream.
16:08Alexander and his successors, the Ptolemies, ravined for knowledge.
16:13Knowledge that would give them the power to trade, to build, to conquer.
16:18Their ambition, for Alexandria to become the intellectual engine room of the ancient world.
16:24Ancient Egypt.
16:40Land of the mighty pharaohs, living god-kings, whose people built fantastic monuments in their honour.
16:46A civilisation which had been a key player in the region for over 4,000 years.
16:56In the 4th century BC, the Greek Alexander the Great conquered this land, winning over the Egyptian people and making it his own.
17:05Creating a new city in his name, Alexandria.
17:09Starting from scratch, Alexander envisaged a unique model city, strictly laid out on an innovative grid system.
17:20Where Greek and Egyptian culture came together to create one of the richest places on earth.
17:30Today, so little is left above ground.
17:32To get a sense of the ancient city, you have to descend deep beneath the modern metropolis into a city of the dead.
17:40I mean, they're fantastic, aren't they?
17:43Well, this is, it's, you know, typically Alexandrian. We've got this mishmash of different styles.
17:48Yeah.
17:50You know, the Medusa, purely Greek, the demon, Greek, but then Egyptian elements.
17:55The frieze up there of cobra heads and little solar disks on top, all of the Egyptian tradition.
18:00And this was just the tomb for one family?
18:03Well, one family, we presume. We're not sure. There's three sarcophagi in there. No bodies were ever found.
18:07The tomb robbers got here long before the archaeologists did.
18:11They might not have left any bodies, but they've got some pretty lifelike guardians to the tomb.
18:15Well, archaeologists over the years have presumed the statues on either side of the entrance represent the owners of the tomb.
18:20But what's interesting about them is, if you look at the head of this male character over here, the face is detailed, the hairstyle is pure Roman, Greco-Roman tradition,
18:27and yet the body, you know, stiff, one leg forward, arms for the side, typical of Egyptian statue.
18:33It's quite ugly, in a way, the way the two have been stuck together, though.
18:36Oh, it's not particularly well done, no, but that's part of the charm of this place, is we're taking, we're mixing and matching, we're being purely Alexandrian, we're taking what we want, sticking it together.
18:42We're not melding, creating a new art form. We're just, we're just, we're open to everything, we're very receptive.
18:49And there's a great example just inside the doorways here. To the left, you get another really good example of it as well.
18:55Oh, yes!
18:57Because this is the Anubis figure. Anubis was the Egyptian god of embalming, the dog-headed figure.
19:01But look how he's dressed. He's dressed as a Roman soldier, but with his Egyptian head, guarding whoever's buried within this tomb.
19:07It is, it's fantastic. It's just like Top and Tails, isn't it? Because he said he's got a very Egyptian head and then this kind of Roman body, this little Roman skirt.
19:14It's mixed and match.
19:16The only thing I think, though, is that throughout the ancient world, you do get this exchange of cultures. You know, in classical Athens, you've got Eastern cults and the Romans are very good at taking on the East as well.
19:27So why is Alexandria particularly good at it?
19:30I think because Alexandria was a new town and it had to sort of, he had to create its own legitimacy. It was a new town on a very, very ancient level.
19:37ancient land, which had a certain weight within the ancient world as well. I mean, Egypt, the Greeks were in awe of Egypt.
19:42So there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already. But they also brought with them their, their, their, their notions of Hellenic culture, of Greek culture.
19:50And by doing that, it draped itself the mantle of Egypt, but at the same time, brought with it its, its Greek notions.
19:58It was also an extremely wealthy town, and it's a port town, and they're always open to influences.
20:04What you have to remember is that this was no ordinary city, and it hadn't grown up organically at the Bronze Age or the Classical Age, like so many of the great cities of antiquity.
20:24This was, if you like, a kind of high-minded new town, the brainchild of a visionary and highly educated man.
20:34From the age of 13, Alexander had been taught day in, day out by the great philosopher Aristotle, and a spirit of inquiry was imbued in every cell of his body.
20:44And when he founded Alexandria, he passed that spirit on into the very DNA of the city.
20:51This was a place where knowledge was as valuable a currency as grain or gold.
20:57And in a precious archaeological oasis in the heart of the city, Com el Dica, archaeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it.
21:15A Polish team have been working on a discovery which reveals exactly where Alexandria's ideas were played out.
21:21Here we are in one of the lecture halls. Probably it was one lecture from the complex of the university.
21:29It's really interesting, so you've got the lecture rooms right on the main street.
21:33Yes, it was the centre of the social life in late Antic Alexandria.
21:37Now, here, we are here, three rows of benches in the classrooms, and the benches devoted for the students.
21:44And here we have the main chair, topmost seat, probably for the teacher.
21:51You can just imagine how intimate this lecture hall would have been, seating just 30 students, studying law, rhetoric and science.
22:03And here we have a singular block of stone, probably this kind of platform or kind of podium for the students' declamation.
22:11So, okay, so the students have to do a kind of demonstration.
22:15Yes, to the opposite side to the teacher.
22:17I'm going to be the teacher, so if I'm sitting here, so I'm the teacher, very comfortably, on your steps, and then the student would be there giving their paper or presentation.
22:26Yes, exactly.
22:27Did it get hot here?
22:29You know, the lecture halls were covered probably by the flat roof.
22:33We don't have any indication, but probably the auditorium could be high as up to 5,5 metres as the level of the columns.
22:41And how many teaching rooms like this are there?
22:43So far, we found 20 lecture halls. Probably it was much bigger.
22:48These teaching rooms were a hothouse of knowledge in the very heart of Alexandria.
22:53This was in no way a city of ivory towers. It was buzzing with provocative and cutting-edge ideas.
23:04Its rulers had wanted to acquire the intellectual tools to unlock the mysteries of the universe to allow them to rule the world.
23:12It was where the mathematician Eratosthenes proved that the earth was round and accurately measured its circumference.
23:20Where a thousand years ahead of his time, Aristarchus suggested that the earth moved around the sun.
23:26And where the greatest minds and most extraordinary thinkers began to map their way through the stars.
23:32Now, I've got to confess that Alexandria has got a particular allure for me for one reason.
23:42It's a rather wonderful and mysterious woman called Hypatia.
23:47Now, Hypatia ran her own philosophy school here.
23:50And by all accounts, she was quite extraordinary.
23:55Hypatia was born in around 350 AD.
23:57And the very fact she was a woman in a world dominated by men makes her achievements doubly exceptional.
24:05For over 40 years, she made groundbreaking advances in algebra and revolutionised astronomy.
24:14And correspondence from a fellow philosopher really sums up just how much she was valued.
24:20It's a collection of letters written to her by one of her former students called Sinesius.
24:25The language used is very, very intimate.
24:29So you get a real sense of her character and just how respected she was.
24:34Sinesius says, for instance, that nothing in the world is more wonderful than her.
24:39And that even in Hades, she is the only thing that he'll remember.
24:44Actually, she's been remembered by some others too.
24:48A crater on the moon's surface bears her name.
24:51A journal of philosophy is called Hypatia.
24:55And she's just been immortalised in a new film.
24:58Agarar.
25:02Imagine Hypatia working late into the night.
25:08The famous Alexandrian street lamps burning outside.
25:12Her staring up into the night sky for inspiration.
25:14She was a philosopher in the true sense of the word, in that she was a philosophos, a lover of wisdom.
25:23What's really interesting about Hypatia though, as with so many of her Alexandrian colleagues,
25:29is that she didn't just deal in abstract thought, but she had a very practical application for her ideas.
25:34And for instance, she used her mathematics and her geometry to redesign this amazing gizmo.
25:42And it was really a kind of multifunctional instrument, the sort of iPod of her day, if you like.
25:47Only in her day, it had a much more romantic name.
25:51Because this was called an astrolabe.
25:54And literally, that means a catcher of the stars.
25:57One of the things that was worked on here in Alexandria and perfected was this amazing instrument, the astrolabe.
26:15You're clutching one.
26:17What did it allow people to do?
26:19The astrolabe has many functions, telling the time of the day, telling your latitude, your altitude.
26:24It can measure the height of mountains.
26:28It can measure the width of rivers.
26:30But I'll tell you how to measure the time of the day.
26:33Now, here is the astrolabe and here is the pointer.
26:36This is what we call the pointer.
26:38We align these two holes pointing to a star.
26:41When we align these two holes like this pointing, we get a reading with the pointer right here.
26:46We take this reading here, which is a letter, an Arabic letter, but for them it's a number.
26:51We take this number, we turn the astrolabe, and we have this spider here.
26:57We point the pointers here to the number that we have taken from the back.
27:02And when we point it to here, we get the reading.
27:05You see that pointer here?
27:07It will point to the degrees.
27:09The degrees that the sun has risen or the star has risen from the horizon.
27:14360 degrees is equal to 24 hours.
27:20So each one hour is 15 degrees.
27:24So if we have here a number of degrees, I can know the time of the day.
27:28It's a very powerful instrument because it allows you to do all kinds of things.
27:38If you know the night sky, if you know your latitude, if you know the height of a mountain, you can explore, you can trade.
27:44It has actually changed the way they functioned.
27:48Alexandria did sponsor pure reason, pure thought, ideas just for ideas' sake.
28:01But it was also an immensely busy and practical place.
28:05The astrolabe, for example, was very beautiful, but when it was applied, it allowed men to trade and to travel and to conquer.
28:11The whole city was very enterprising and outward looking and that ethos was directly in line with the vision of its founder.
28:19Alexander had created a unique city, a central point between East and West, where the greatest thinkers not only explored pure thought, but applied their ideas to become real players on the world stage.
28:32The scale of Alexandria's intellectual ambition was immense, to house within its walls all knowledge.
28:42And with that knowledge, make its rulers the most powerful people on earth.
28:47Although ancient Alexandria is virtually invisible, the ghost of its presence is there in the layout of the modern city.
29:05I'll tell you what is very exciting. Because the modern city is laid out on the ancient grid plan, when you walk down these streets, you are physically walking in the footsteps of Hypatia and all those other fantastic philosophers.
29:20And that feels like a very good place to be.
29:22As a cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition, ancient Alexandria became a unique environment for scholarship, a place where the extraordinary thinker Hypatia, schooled in Greek thought, could also draw on Egyptian history.
29:51Egyptian wisdom and Babylonian science to help her map the stars, where a wealth of traditions from around the world combined, enabling the greatest thinkers to make scientific advances achievable nowhere else, creating a new Egypt and a model for society in the future.
30:10One of the great characters of medical history came to Alexandria.
30:11One of the great characters of medical history came to Alexandria. He was a man called Galen. And even though he traveled right across the eastern Mediterranean, it was the cosmopolitan conditions of this city that allowed him to make quite extraordinary advances.
30:33In fact, he was here, he made scientific breakthroughs that wouldn't be better for another 1500 years.
30:39So what are these treasures that you're removing from the tubs here?
30:49They're a variety of things. There's the brain of a horse. And this one with the spinal cord attached.
30:57Oh!
30:58That's a dog.
30:59Oh, it's lovely. I hope you realize I'm a very strict vegetarian. This is way beyond my life experiences.
31:05That's all right. I'm not expecting you to eat them. It's all right.
31:07Good. Just explain to me, because you're a veterinary anatomist, so why have you got a particular interest in Galen?
31:14It's really because of the brain. Because I think Galen was the central mover in the history of studying the brain. He was the first person who realized what it was and what it did.
31:24And why was Alexandria such a key city for him?
31:27In the European part of the Mediterranean world, there were taboos and then eventually laws against chopping up dead people, dissecting dead people, which made life very difficult for him.
31:36So he had to use animals like these, where really what he wanted to know is he wanted to know about what was going on in humans.
31:44And this was much easier in Egypt, because the Egyptians had much more of a tradition, and partly because of mummification, they had much more of a tradition of dealing with parts of dead human people and perhaps not worrying about it so much.
31:57But the brain wasn't of any particular importance to the Egyptians, because there are stories of them when they're doing the mummification, of them pulling the brain out through the nose, for instance.
32:05Yes, we don't know whether, it's Herodotus who said that, we don't know whether that's actually true. You need an enormous nose to get a brain out through.
32:12But it's certainly true, the thing that the Egyptians and the Greeks had in common, neither of them thought the brain was very important until Galen came along.
32:19Aristotle said it was probably just the radiator for the heart. The heart creates all this heat, and the brain is just a way of radiating it away out of the body.
32:27And so why was Galen different? How did he come to realize that there was something else going on?
32:32Because he looked at the brain, you look at the human brain, but you look at animal brains, and he said, well, if you look at them, they're incredibly complicated.
32:39He said, for example, here's the cerebrum at the front with all its folds, and here's the cerebellum at the back with all its even finer folds.
32:46You look on the inside, and you see, there's the brain stem down there, it's even more complicated.
32:52So it's got all these different bits, so it doesn't look like something that's just there to radiate heat away.
32:57He said it must be doing something more complicated than that.
33:00The other thing he noticed about it was, first of all, if you look at the brain, it has the senses attached to it.
33:06If you dissect a brain, I'll get this out, this is a sheep brain with the eyes still attached.
33:14Yeah, lovely. Thank you.
33:16And that's the important thing. He said, well, the brain is connected to the special senses by these large, thick nerves.
33:24He said that must mean something. And he had this wonderful phrase he used where he said, the brain is surrounded by the special sense organs as if they are the servants and guards of the great king.
33:35So he'd already elevated the brain to being in the position of a king in control of the special senses.
33:42I'm glad he added a bit of poetry to something fairly disgusting looking like that.
33:46And so he demonstrated that not only it's the brain where all the sensory information comes in, but also he'd shown it's where all the nerves radiate out to the body to move the body.
33:55So he's really showing the brain, takes the information in, processes it, puts it out again. Really, the brain is where you think, it's where you are. And really, he was the first person to show that.
34:06That is immensely important. I mean, if you prove just how powerful the brain is, that's going to revolutionise what people think about the human body and all sorts of things, and the human soul as well.
34:17He completely changed the way we think about the body and especially the brain.
34:25Alexandria created a buzzing environment where men like Galen and women like Hypatia could meet light minds and begin to reveal the workings of the universe.
34:45Because these thinkers weren't working in isolation, and that's possibly Alexandria's greatest achievement.
34:51It had created an environment where great minds could gather to discuss and develop their ideas. The largest store of knowledge the world had ever known.
35:03Like so much of ancient Alexandria, its libraries have long since disappeared. But modern Alexandrians have begun to acknowledge their amazing heritage with a new state-of-the-art library capturing its predecessors' spirit.
35:17There have been collections of texts and books in other ancient cities, but the ambition of the library here was quite extraordinary.
35:27Alexandria wanted to be the repository of all knowledge on earth, and so a copy of every single book in the world was to be stored here.
35:38Every work of literature, tragedy, comedy and poetry, every history, every scientific treatise from maths to medicine, physics to astronomy, and not just Greek texts, but works from around the world, in Hebrew, Latin, Babylonian and later Arabic.
36:02Even today, putting together such a collection would be quite a feat, but this was the age before mass publishing.
36:11Each work existed as a handwritten papyrus, and that scroll might be the only copy of that papyrus in the whole world.
36:20Today, the majority of the few fragments that remain now survive not in Alexandria, but another bastion of learning, Oxford University.
36:35How many of these texts would there have been in the libraries?
36:39I reckon half a million. Everything from Homer, some of the earliest Greek papyri were texts of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Plato, philosophy, written in Greek on papyrus, to, in the later period, Arabic, and even earlier, Hebrew.
37:02But the scale of ambition is extraordinary. So physically, how did they get the work into the city?
37:08They were sending people out to all parts of the Mediterranean.
37:12They had a list of the nine canonical lyric poets that they wanted their works of, and they sent people to the festivals where their works had been composed, Olympia and Delphi,
37:23and they borrowed the official copy of the Athenian tragedies from the Athenians, so that they could make a copy of it. Then they refused to give it back.
37:31So they were in some ways acting like antiquarian book collectors, in other ways acting like an institution building up a fundamental collection for scholars to work on.
37:42But if you've got this massive volume of work, how are they keeping tabs on it all? How are they organising it?
37:48They developed a system which was really the invention of the modern book catalogue. The Alexandrian scholar, Callimachus, invented the first book catalogue,
37:57which simply had an entry for author, title, genre, type of work, in this case comedy, and also the total for the number of lines at the end.
38:07Scribes were paid by the number of lines they copied. So here you can see the name of the comic poet, Aristophanes.
38:14You can just about make it out. Yes, Stephanos. And in Alexandra, are they mainly copying material or are they actually adding to it? Are you getting new scholarship there as well?
38:27Absolutely. They're constantly commenting on them. This is a copy of Plato's Republic in which a tiny hand has been writing a marginal commentary into the margin,
38:37explaining and correcting the text. So you get the feeling of a kind of buzzing hive of readers and scholars working and operating on the text.
38:47It's so impressive, isn't it? So you've got the genius of Plato, then you've got somebody else, centuries later, adding their own ideas.
38:54Access to information enabled the Alexandrians to revolutionise scientific thought.
39:01But they also studied theology. It was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek.
39:13By understanding a wealth of cultures and beliefs, they had the power to master and control.
39:19They were so intent on obtaining all the knowledge in the world that laws were passed so that no book could leave the city,
39:31and even ships entering its harbour were searched to see if new texts could be found to be added to its famous library.
39:41The modern library of Alexandria has got over half a million books, which is actually almost exactly the same number as they had in the ancient library.
39:48But what it's also got here is this mega computer, which every few days saves all the information on the world wide web.
39:57In the 21st century, we're just so used to that ease of access to information where everything is stored electronically.
40:03But in the ancient library, they often held the single existing copy of a book.
40:09So just imagine if that was lost, you'd lose those ideas forever.
40:13And tragically, that's exactly what happened in Alexandria.
40:20Knowledge had made the city an intellectual powerhouse of antiquity.
40:25It had made thinkers like Hypatia powerful forces within the city.
40:29It was an environment where new thoughts could flourish and evolve, where anyone from anywhere could voice their ideas.
40:38So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point, some ideas would come into conflict.
40:43And for the ancient world, Alexandria, its libraries, and for Hypatia herself, the result would be catastrophic.
40:52By the end of the 4th century AD, Alexandria had been flourishing for nearly 700 years, producing extraordinary thinkers like the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia.
41:19It was an immensely powerful city, second only to Rome in might, yet its power wasn't built on military force, but on the strength of ideas and the ambition to house all the knowledge in the world.
41:36And that included beliefs from the latest school of thinking, the fledgling religion, Christianity.
41:44Alexandria was always attracted in cutting-edge thought and men who were at the top of their game.
41:49So it should be no surprise that from the 1st century AD, the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here to play out their ideas.
41:57Only a few years after Christ's ascension, the Gospel writer Mark came to Alexandria to spread the news, bringing Christianity into Africa.
42:10As one of the most forward-thinking places on Earth, with its tradition fusing Eastern and Western cultures, Alexandria was an ideal place for Christianity to gain a foothold.
42:20But reconciling a multi-faith environment with a religion whose followers believed exclusively in one God proved a testing challenge for the city.
42:36Saint Mark himself died at the hands of pagans for preaching his faith. It was a foretaste of the violence to come.
42:44Yet, for centuries, Christians and pagans did manage to live alongside one another, happily, productively.
42:53The very early Christians spent a great deal of time and energy trying to square pagan and Christian thought.
43:00For instance, one of the most prolific early church fathers who lived in Alexandria said that the works of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were science-tinged with piety as long as they were righteous.
43:14Now, in a world like that, where Christianity is just another stream of thought, then Hypatia has a very secure place.
43:23But the problem came when the Christians wanted not just spiritual, but temporal power.
43:30And then all that tolerance and piety becomes muddied with power politicking.
43:36And, unfortunately for Hypatia, she'd come into conflict with one of the greatest political operators of the day.
43:45Hypatia herself wasn't anti-Christianity. Many of her students were, in fact, Christian.
43:51But the problem came when a new bishop, Cyril, was ordained in the city.
43:57Cyril not only wanted spiritual authority, but power on earth.
44:02And he didn't want to share it with pagans.
44:06His arrival would change the face of Alexandria forever.
44:11You walk into somewhere like the Caesar Inn and you see what originally we built as an Egyptian and Greek temple,
44:19with all the heads removed from the statues.
44:22And the cult statue has gone and in its place you have a huge cross looking down.
44:27And you see how people like Cyril could change a world.
44:30He is a man seeking power and he wishes to gain control, not just of the religious state.
44:36He wants to really run a theocracy, be in charge of everything.
44:39Hypatia is a wealthy, educated pagan. To him, that means witch.
44:46He puts around rumours about all of the objects she makes for astronomy, her instruments.
44:53Clearly they're used for divination.
44:59Therefore, finding out what will happen in the future, it is black magic.
45:02And as such, she has to die.
45:05And in one contemporary account, we learn that it was Hypatia's work with the astrolabe in particular, that sparked hatred against her.
45:17Spurred on by one of their leaders, the blood of the Christian mob was up.
45:23They started to seek Hypatia out through the city and found her driving through these streets on her way home.
45:36They dragged her out of her carriage and ripped off her clothes.
45:42For a highborn woman like her, this would have been a terrible public disgrace.
45:47But then things got even uglier.
45:50They pulled her into the Caesareum, which had been a temple and then recently converted to a church.
45:56And there, picking up anything they could find.
45:58We're told they were ostraca, which were probably broken pots or broken roof tiles.
46:03They started to flay her alive.
46:07Once she was dead, they pulled her body limb from limb.
46:11And then they took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city, where they burnt them on a pyre.
46:21In effect, this was a witch's death.
46:33Hypatia's tragedy was the tragedy of Alexandria.
46:42The destruction of its spectacular monuments.
46:54The desecration of its extraordinary libraries.
46:59And with that, the heart-breaking demise of the wealth of knowledge which had made it great for over 700 years.
47:12There are a few lines, desperately sad, written by a pagan who was wandering through the streets of Alexandria,
47:19watching the world he knew crumble around him.
47:22Is it true that we Greeks are really dead and only seem alive?
47:33And in our fallen state, we imagine that a dream is life.
47:38Or are we truly alive and is life itself dead?
47:43For some, Alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare.
47:50After centuries of onslaught, only 1% of Alexandria's vast book collection has survived into the modern world.
47:58Rather bizarrely, one of the survivors of Alexandria's destruction has ended up here.
48:14It's that massive lump of red granite, the obelisk that we very affectionately now call Cleopatra's Needle.
48:21And it was brought here from Egypt in 1878.
48:25But in its heyday, it stood just at the edge of the Caesareum.
48:28So it was only a stone's throw away from where Hypatia was killed.
48:32I think that in many ways Hypatia was an incarnation of Alexander's dream.
48:46She was living proof that knowledge is power.
48:50She was immensely knowledgeable and therefore the extraordinary city that she lived in allowed her a huge amount of influence.
48:57But the key word here is extraordinary because Alexandria was a city less ordinary.
49:09And perhaps it's ambition that that dream to acquire and to caretake all the knowledge of the world was just too perfect to last.
49:18We should bear that in mind because it is of course a very modern dream.
49:24I mean, after all, that is what the World Wide Web does.
49:27And so when we know that Alexandria failed and as a result a whole epoch failed,
49:33we should take a very careful note.
49:40For that reason, we mustn't bury the memory of Alexandria, but celebrate it.
49:47And Bedney Hughes is back at the same time next Wednesday on More 4, exploring how Egypt's two greatest pharaohs built their way to immortality.
50:10Just what drove them to construct pyramids on such a massive scale.
50:14Well, next tonight, Tony Robinson's at Stonehenge where what we thought we knew is about to change again in a Time Team special.
50:21Thank you for your time.
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