Pompei Italy 79 ad at approximately 1: p.m. on a peaceful late summer day this ancient Roman city in the shadow of Mount vvus is shaken by a massive volcanic eruption within minutes superheated gas and lava engulf the city and its surroundings in an instant thousands of people are buried alive as a city that was their home suddenly becomes their tomb nearly 2,000 years after the eruption Pompei is a city that remains Frozen in time this eruption was what we call a pyroclastic eruption where clouds of of Ash and debris hundreds of degrees hot came flowing
down the mountain flash flying everything in its path and miraculously the heat of this Cloud was enough to carbonize and preserve rather than destroy all kinds of information we have well-preserved architecture wood and organic materials food stuffs human remains animal remains that have been preserved for 2,000 years beneath uh this volcanic debris today the excavated ruins of Pompei offer archaeologists and tourists a breathtaking look at the doomed ancient city perhaps the most intriguing Discovery found beneath the ash from Mount vesuvius's eruption was an ancient Roman structure located not far from Pompei known as The Villa
De [Music] papy the villa de piri was a Roman luxury Villa that was full of sculpture and marble and bronze The Villa was discovered by chance in 1750 by well diggers who tunneling about 75 ft through volcanic debris first hit a colored marble floor with an amazing pattern made up of bright red and yellow Marbles and we think this was once the vacation home of a Roman senator the highest rank of an old Noble family named Lucius cerus piso the volcanic ash that buried Villa De papii did not only preserve the physical structure it also
entombed a library that contained more than 1,800 Papyrus Scrolls these scrolls are an extraordinary record of the thoughts and writings of people who lived nearly 2,000 years ago those texts were discovered when the city was excavated and some of the artifacts were first found they people who discovered them didn't know what they were they thought that maybe they were pieces of branches or logs because they were rolled up and carbonized until someone finally realized these are texts on Papyrus the villa de piri library is significant because it's the only surviving library from Antiquity with it
contents there were Scrolls found that date to the 3D 2nd and 1 Century BC and the 1st Century a about 300 of them or so have been unscrolling texts some poetry some literary criticism a little bit of history but many of the scrolls are so tightly bound together and carbonized that there's been a moratorium on attempts to open them fear of damaging the Scrolls has left many of them virtually untouched for over a 100 years but new technology has presented a potential opportunity to read these mysterious ancient texts scientists in the computer science department at
the University of Kentucky have developed a new method known as virtual unwrapping which uses a sophisticated x-ray machine to scan the Scrolls without damaging them the virtual unwrapping that we innovated basically allows a 360° set of views to be collected from an object that rotates in front of an x-ray beam this is a real scroll that's 2,000 years old and in cross-section we can see there's there's damage there are parts that are missing sections that are broken now we're using our software for the Second Step which is to trace these wraps all the way through
so that we can build a 3D model that lets us flatten that out and then read the text that's on it and once we're done we've achieved this image that's on the left which is the final completely unwrapped version this is a quote from democratus who was an early Greek philosopher and is very well known for having postulated with others that materials are made of atoms I think it's remarkable that 2,000 years ago Greek philosophers were postulating what we now know is true from science thus far the team has been able to digitally scan two
complete Scrolls and a number of fragments they hope that in the future technology will advance and allow them to reveal even more but what Secrets might be contained in those 2,000-year old Scrolls one exciting possibility that has been suggested is that the original letters written by Jesus's Apostle Paul could have been kept within the library of villa de papay The Villa of the papayi was inent tuned about 40 to 50 years after the death of Jesus at this time the original Apostles are now out doing their mission work in various parts of the Mediterranean so
it's entirely likely that the Villa of the papayi could would have a collection of copies of Paul's letters if the letters from the Apostle Paul circulated and found its way into the collection such a discovery would represent the earliest Christian material that we have almost dating back to the time of Christ and the disciples being able to use these techniques to understand history in a way that's almost forensic is going to bring surprising things forward and we're going to be revealing more secrets than we'd ever imagined [Music] before the aan sea 1900 just off the
coast of the small Greek island of antia a group of Greek divers are hunting for sea sponges when they come across the remains of an ancient shipwreck what they discovered was the wreck of a Roman era trading ship and and soon it was apparent that there was a lot of archaeological stuff on board and during the years 1900 to 1902 a major expedition was mounted from Greece to pull up everything they could find there were statues there were marbles beautiful glass wear and it was clear from what else was on this ship that this was
a a ship that had gone down in the classical era dozens of Priceless artifacts were salvaged from the wreckage including one object that defied explanation it was the remains of a coral encrusted wooden and bronze box that curiously looked like a clock they looked and there were Gear wheels inside this bronze it was obvious from the rest of the stuff on the rack that this was from the classical world but the Gear wheels were not known from the classical world and it was then that they realized that this particular piece of bronze was something special
the artifact was sent to the national museum of archaeology in Athens archaeologists dated it to the 2nd Century BC along with the other relics found in the wreck but they were unable to determine what function the geared object served for more than 50 years its purpose remained a mystery but in 1951 British physicist Derek John DOA price began a careful examination of the artifact and found something astonishing the Box contained the workings of a highly sophisticated device by this point the mechanism was in a bunch of different pieces there are seven major fragments labeled a
through G and there are 75 other smaller fragments Derek Des Sol price took a renewed interest in the mechanism and he was able to put the major fragments into their correct position for the first time the anti-ra mechanism as it became known is made predominantly of bronze it would probably have been in a wooden case originally possibly with bronze plates on the front and the back was about the size of a shoe box essentially there are two main display faces there's the front face and the back face and probably a handle on the side that
you would have turned in order to make the thing work on the front of the mechanism there's something looking rather like a clock face would be the best way to describe it in June 1959 price published his find his in the journal Scientific American and described the antia mechanism as being an ancient Greek computer this was a spectacular device it's an analog computer it doesn't use digital it uses wheels and gears this was a device that we wouldn't see again for another 2,000 years until the 1800s but if the antia mechanism really was an ancient
computer then what was it designed to do well in 2005 an international team of researchers known as the anthera mechanism research project used cuttingedge scanning technology to obtain a detailed 3D image of the devices inner workings for the very first time and the results were even more remarkable than anyone could have imagined the X-ray tomography clearly laid out what the gear train must have been and also a complete reading of basic Al all the surviving inscriptions on the device both inside and out and those inscriptions are an instruction book on what the mechanism is and
what it does and it's clear from those inscriptions that it was intended that the mechanism should display the positions of the planets as well as the sun and the moon the anti-ra mechanism is an astronomical Computing device that also visualized the Revolutions in the time periods of the Sun the moon and the five planets that were visible in Antiquity which are Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter and Saturn so via the gear work it mimics the rotation of the Sun and the Moon and the planets it displays many different things at a given time where the planets
are in the sky where the Moon is in the sky what the phase of the moon is are there going to be any uh eclipses this month and so on we've done some computer calculations to work out how accurate the device would have been taking into account the shape of the teeth the slop in the gears and so on and the answer is it shows very accurately the sort of behavior of these things the Greeks were thinking really deeply about the universe how it worked what it means to have a universe that's in some way
mechanical that is [Music] predictable Lisbon Portugal November 1st 1755 across the city a celebration is underway thousands of Christians are packed into churches to celebrate a festival known as All Saints Day but then at about 10:00 a.m. without warning disaster strikes a massive magnitude a earthquake occurred in the Atlantic Ocean seafloor right along the tectonic plate boundary between Eurasia and Africa the shaking from this earthquake knocked down about 85% of the buildings of Lisbon even worse this earthquake occurred while most people were in mass in church or Cathedrals on allain's day lisban nightes are in
all these churches and many of the most major churches in lisin were destroyed it was one of the most devastating earthquakes that Europe had seen in centuries in a matter of minutes the massive earthquake reduced the buildings throughout Lisbon to rubble and opened a 16t wide crack in the ground through the center of the city estimates place the death toll as high as 50,000 people or about 20% of Lisbon's population in the early 1700s if you had listed the five Great cities of Europe London Paris Rome you well might have included Lisbon in that list
but after 1755 Lisbon's Glory was reduced literally to ashes Lisbon rebuilt but never really reached the same Glory that it had in the aftermath of the horrific Quake the residents of Lisbon struggled to understand why this tragedy had befallen their City many among the Christian populace who had only heard of such Devastation in the Holy Bible believed the earthquake to be an act of God Lisbon was dominated by the Catholic Church a very very religious City so lots of theologian started to ponder the meaning of this event in religious terms because the fact was this
earthquake had struck Lisbon on one of its holiest days the Feast of All Saints it had killed tens of thousands of Christians while they were worshipping why did God choose this day to bring an earthquake upon the people of Lisbon and this was a confrontation for many theologians and they blamed the people of Lisbon they said you must have been sinful the only reason this could have happened to you is that you were not living by God's laws while some people thought the earthquake was a punishment from God others focused on taking practical steps to
guard against such a Calamity in the future one of those people was Portugal's prime minister the Marquee of pombal in the Reconstruction of Lisbon the marquist of pomel oversaw really critical Innovations the first is to build earthquake resistant buildings these are built around wooden frames that can actually sway within earthquake rather than collapse and then he improves the city before it was these winding medieval streets which people could get blocked up in so the marquist de pombal he redesigns the city on a grid iron system so all of a sudden you have now really wide
straight streets which are ideal for evacuating people and in fact the way that he hand the Reconstruction of the city is the first instance of modern Disaster Response in history where someone actually tries to take a rational response to the effects of a natural disaster the varied reactions to the Lisbon earthquake have actually been quite common throughout human history for thousands of years mankind has tried to make sense of these violent Tremors that often strike without warning earthquakes have a really unique Place uh in human consciousness because you can't see it coming it's not like
a giant storm that you can see the clouds approaching see the lightning hear the thunder earthquakes you feel and you hear but that happens in the moment you can't run out of the way there's nowhere to hide the problem of earthquakes and how to deal with them goes back to Antiquity the first size mometer to measure earthquakes was actually invented by a scientist named Chang hang back in China in the first century of the Common Era this was a beautiful bronze almost like a cask that had dragons around the perimeter with balls in their mouths
and beneath them were a little array of of bronze frogs and the way the device worked is the pendulum inside would rock just so bumping a lever in the direction where the earthquake occurred and a ball would fall out of the dragon's mouth and land telling you the orientation of an earthquake that had happened and all developments since then on earthquake detectors we call them seismometers have been variations on that theme today experts understand that earthquakes happen when massive underground rocks known as tectonic plates suddenly Collide causing seismic forces to be Unleashed beneath our feet
scientists can measure an earthquake's power and even pinpoint its location but in spite of everything we've learned we still have a hard time predicting where and when the next earthquake will strike Wilshire England a top Salsbury plane stands arguably the the most iconic ancient structure in the world Stonehenge constructed around 3,100 BC this enigmatic Monument has captured our Collective imagination for centuries but what most people don't realize is that this Stonehenge landscape is also a massive graveyard throughout the area thousands of ancient skeletons have been recovered and apparently many of the deceased suffered from devastating
afflictions the area around Stonehenge is absolutely littered with people who have got all sorts of traumas from the mundane true to some very serious conditions it's very clear that many of them had physical injuries gone on broken arms all the usual range of things for example one of the skeletons of those people on his left the kneecap is missing there was some kind of trauma the second thing which is obviously wrong with him is that there is an abscess on his jaw which must have been excruciating in life it's easy to assume that so many
people buried near a Stonehenge suffered from numerous ailments because they simply lived in ancient times and did not receive proper medical care but according to archaeologists the truth may be far more intriguing in 2008 an important Discovery was announced regarding ston hedging there was a discovery of a mass of skeletons buried in the region and 50% of these skeletons discovered had come from somewhere else so what does this tell us they came here for something it's possible that Stonehenge could have been been used as a healing site a type of Temple for healing did ancient
people travel to Stonehenge in order to be healed and if so what made them think that coming to this mysterious Monument would cure them some say the answer can be found by examining the stones themselves and more specifically what are known as the blue stones R Stone Henge the outer structure is made from essentially local Stones that's the things we often see but inside Stonehenge we have these blue Staines they're called Blue Staines because they do have a kind of a Bluey greeny color to them and they also have white spots inside them we've got
a number of strands of evidence which support the idea that these stains were being used for healing one of them is that we know from scientific studies that those stones come from Southwest Wales in what we know as the prelli Hills it's about 140 M and so as the crow flies from Stonehenge the stones in the prell Hills must have been considered special in some way because we can trace back through folklore the Cs of people using water in association with the stones to help promote healing and so Stonehenge was a place of healing I'm
sure we shouldn't though compare it to a modern hospital because Medical Science P then was much more to do with belief was much more to do with faith Stonehenge was all about using belief using the power of the blue St as the means by which healthc care was dished out as it were these ancient cultures particularly in Britain were immersed in the traditions of believing in the power of nature and certainly something as Majestic as these Stones would be something that could have an energy that could potentially help them e
