5 Hours Of Facts About Ancient Lost Civilizations

[Music] [Music] in a time when new technological advances come at us every day the world of the Ancients can seem even more distant what could we with our smartphones and driverless cars our 3D printers and satellite technology possibly have in common with the ancient Egyptians Greeks or Romans a great deal as it turns out you literally can't lock a door take any kind of Transport or read something in the newspaper without paying a debt to the ancients as long as there is a human race these early Footprints of civilization will [Music] remain Modern Marvels of

architecture Burge Khalifa in Dubai The Shard in the city of London the the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbow they all impress with the scale of their physical size and the scale of their [Music] ambition some seem to defy gravity While others seem like something lifted from the pages of a science fiction novel why do humans decorate why do humans design why do humans build [Music] good architecture and the kind of architecture that we're still talking About today from all these thousands of years ago we Marvel at the way they're built and technological innovations and so on

but there's something much more than that that attracts us to them and it seems to be a rivalry perhaps with nature first of all it probably touches on an innate human desire and longing for something Beyond this natural world something metaphysical if we speak about Footprints of civilization and Especially in architecture in design and focused on buildings mainly or other structures made by man we can compare of course the old structures ancient structures to the new ones the white house it looks like a palace it has a monument facade that makes it look like a

[Music] temple in this episode of footprints of civilization we peel back the layers of time to discover that behind even the Most space age of modern buildings there's an incredible Legacy that stretches back centuries if we are in ancient times in Egypt times we can see that the pyramid was built for someone who was the number one in Egypt it was a Faron he was like a god their footprint is the idea of certainly power but also the idea of aspiring to something beyond the physical beyond the human the Greeks turned that into Something Dynamic

something expressive that brought the supernatural the metaphysical the Divine a little closer to humans and the Romans Were Somehow able to combine the two make the Divine the Transcendent metaphysical incarnate that is allowing humans to perhaps feel themselves Divine the achievement of the Romans was to combine three basic elements that is the arch as an architectural form Together with Concrete and brick these three elements combin in various forms provided the foundation as it were for all Roman great building achiev [Music] today we build the highrise buildings also for kind of spiritual reasons the spiritual reason

may be commercial purpose money it's a new religion [Applause] primary function of architecture at origin is to provide shelter for people From the elements and that starts happening when people decide to settle in one place whether it's permanently or if it's just for a season for hunting or fishing for example or to uh graze their flocks or whatever it is early early man moved around a lot was nomadic there must have been all sorts of temporary buildings Igloo for example are still made today and those are evanescent structures of course cuz they will melt eventually

the ancient buildings were Made from natural objects trees bent over to create some sort of shelter there is something about man's innate makeup that makes him want to improve upon nature that old idea of nature versus nurture and so we see first of all the architecture imitating what were natural forms tree trunks bushes of flowers [Music] Etc aside from creating buildings that were purely functional Bronze Age Societies also had an interest in design look at some of the architecture they left behind it's beautiful we humans very much like to feel that we are in control

of everything which is why humans naturally tend to prefer symmetry as opposed to asymmetry in architecture and design the Ancients imitated shapes and forms found in nature a footprint of civilization visible in modern design if we look at any of any modern buildings a lot of the forms inside buildings on on The exterior buildings still imitate tree forms vegetative forms and even if we have a stark building of glass and steel within that building we have waterfalls added we have plant forms trees adding Greenery to the shape of the Interior foyers [Music] Etc if you

think for example the girkin in London it looks very much like um AA it looks very much like a pine cone I mean that's one obvious example the the Sheets of glass arranged on the look very much like a classical pine cone we start our journey with the Majestic pyramids of ancient Egypt these structures are still with us today and still Inspire the same awe as they did when they were built the pyramids were built horizontally by stacking bricks one at top the other it it would be a journey of many centuries before the vertical

Construction of Burge Khalifa today the world's tallest building it has always been the same why we build horizontally and vertically vertically we built something that is important we buildt in centers we buildt something where people go together for some reason spiritual reason business reason horizontally we buildt for living for infrastructure you may be confined to build vertically for practical Purposes that is you need the space where you are confined by the space the other idea expanding on a practical level could also be due to space that is you are not confined by space and therefore

you are naturally going to [Music] expand standing 828 M tall Burge Khalifa has dominated the Dubai sky line since 2009 in fact it is a competition around the world for the past 20 or so years regarding the Skyscraper that it's primarily Humanity's desire for the expression the visible demonstration of power we then project that back onto let's say the ancient Egyptian Pyramids that that was part of it as well the pyramids of ancient Egypt were built as massive mums for the Pharaohs and queens and were intended to last for all eternity they had a picture

of a very happy afterlife and living a an Egyptian form of Paradise in a sort of a Field of reads and a place of Plenty but the Egyptians didn't just build permanent structures for death they built them they also built temples and these are gantan Affairs as well and the two have to be thought of together because the the temples are houses for gods and the gods are Eternal and tombs are houses for the afterlife and the afterlife loss and Eternity the most famous pyramid of all the so-called Great Pyramid of Giza was Built around

2500 BC and is largely still intact also called The kufu Pyramid after the Pharaoh kufu it is the largest of the three Liams at the Giza Pyramid [Music] complex now when we say large it's about the same height is a 50-story building predating high-rise buildings by thousands of years it's amazing to think that for over 3500 years it was the tallest man-made structure on Earth Until Lincoln cathedral in medieval Britain the ancient Egyptians were truly reaching for the sky rather than thinking of them represent presenting man's ambition to touch the sky it could also be

the Endeavor of man to bring the celestial World down onto the terrestrial and if we think about the shape of the panical buildings in many ways they look like the Rays of the sun scattering upon the Earth so it could be that it's not man just merely aspiring To the heavens but the heavens being brought down by man onto Earth the celestial meeting the terrestrial the outer casing of the Great Pyramid was originally composed of 2 million square feet of white Limestone just imagine how the Great Pyramid must have looked 4500 years ago gleaming white

in the sun before in ancient times people were impressed by spirituality of the building today the people admire Engineering practice engineering inventions and they feel impressed of new structures not because these structures present some spiritual meaning to them but for engineering techniques how can engineers build today such high structures will it fall down or not ambitious modern buildings require thousands of laborers Craftsmen engineers and Specialists of all kinds tombs dating back 4,000 years Contain skeletons of pyramid building workers along with jars of beer and bread for their afterlife they were valued workers common slaves would

not have been buried with such ceremony or so near the pyramids within those structures there's going to be a hierarchy of slaves in which the slaves themselves are going to be increasingly technically skilled and we'll find that after the stones have been blocked for example then we're Going to have more refined and skilled workers carving putting the decorations on painting moving the shape moving the blocks of stones into position all of this is going to require a whole hierarchy of slave labor from absolute Brawn to technical skills even below the architect of course it wasn't

an Easy Life by today's standards more like hard labor to raise the Great Pyramid these laborers had to move into position 6 and2 million tons of stone with nothing But wood and rope come [Music] so much for the workers but did the Egyptians value their Master Builders the planning involved in pyramid building required constructing not only the pyramids themselves but also boat pits worker housing temples and cemeteries the appreciated Architects or famous Architects were always connected to the court to the Faron to the Aristocracy to the king and these people were the only people able

or capable to combine the art design and technique the first architect for whom we have a name is imotep and imotep built not the great pyramid at Giza but built the first uh masonry pyramid or first pyramid form the step pyramid of zoza at Sakara in the 2600s BC the Great Pyramid was built by hemu who is responsible for all Royal commissions perhaps hemu is one of the First Superstar Architects or starchitects a line of Master Builders that stretches to the present day greats like Frank giri zaha Hadid and Renzo Fano these people were looked

as a futurist they were able to do something that other people couldn't do the artists couldn't build structures the engineers couldn't pay attention to the art but Architects is some someone who combines the two these people aren't just designers They're not just good designers they're not just inspired designers but they're really stars and there's only only a few of them [Music] [Music] but what is this area like today these are the remains of amarna an Egyptian City built more than a thousand years after the pyramids at Giza the city's remains tell us something about early

urban planning The city was located on the East Bank of the Nile and we can see from its ruins that it was laid out north to south along a royal [Music] route the Royal residences are to the north and in the center were apparently the administrative and religious areas the south of the city and it's outskirts were made up of residential [Music] suburbs the planned city of amarna was Built in less than 20 [Music] years it was a forerunner of today's towns like Milton ke Brazilia canbera and new Belgrade many cities were built naturally from

small cors of towns with small church or in ancient times similar sacrified building and the buildings surrounded the church and the city grew and is its natural and logical Procedure but if you push very ambitious projects you have money to do this but something is missing behind the good reason natural reason or Evolution or good purpose this ambition projects End by total disappointment or abandon the sheer ambition of the Pharaohs though occasionally misplaced left for us these great works some Footprints of civilization get left in the Dust by vital new cultures rising up to challenge

their Primacy emerging around 800 BC ancient Greece was the source of ideas about democracy Justice art and Beauty which are still influential today but even they look to the Past for inspiration menow and art and architecture obviously the precursor for Greek art and architecture uh in some cases very similar some Scholars have suggested that really there isn't much of a difference between Nan art and Greek art or at least early Greek art The Minoans were the forerunners of modern Greeks the ancient Greeks of the ancient Greeks this is the Palace of nois the remains of

a bowan city only found and restored in the 20th century nosis hints of a sophisticated [Music] civilization astonishingly they built aqueducts and yes pretty even figured out indoor plumbing these are things we take for Granted but were unknown to Bronze Age man until the manans they introduced for example in Palace and canosos and Creed system of sewage and uh the freshw was brought in into the houses the Manan civilization had indoor plumbing including flush toilets and that was continued throughout the ancient world even up through ancient Rome with the collapse of the Roman Empire Such

capacity for what we would call Plumbing Water Management uh was lost and it would not resurface again until the 16th century the late 1500s our early European ancestors seem to have figured out the good life yet their advances didn't save the Minoans from a volcanic eruption on the sanini islands and the subsequent tsunami that decimated their largely Coastal populations so much was lost with the fall of the monan But the Greeks were already picking up where the Minoans left off [Music] if we think about archaic to Classical Greece there are three types of monumental building

basically we have the great palaces of the Kings my seni we have Temple structures and we have tombs Monumental tombs the tomb of malus at helicar asses being the most famous and obvious example these three buildings are all monuments to power of Some sort the power of the Gods the power of the Gods on Earth in the shape of the king and the power of the king to continue in the afterlife so we have sort of Continuum through those three types of building I think that the main Greek innovation in architecture design or building is

open space and this open space was allowed only by another invention its column huge and high-rise column that can bear New type of roof they allowed to builders to construct uh bigger spans bigger Halls where people can meet can use these spaces in different way than before no matter where you are in the world chances are you've come across examples of architecture inspired by ancient Greece the Oslo trading building Norway the baly theater in Moscow Buckingham Palace and even the Auckland War Museum in New Zealand these are all examples of Neoclassical buildings neoclassical architecture was

also known as Greek Revival it was particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries but there are plenty of modern homes built in Greek Revival style the Greek architectural influence continued through history especially when Washington DC was being planned in fact um there was a conscious selection of architectural models especially from what was the World's oldest democracy to suit the capital of what was one of the world's newest democracies so there's conscious imitation that these buildings were intended to make a statement about power whether spiritual or political in nature they are Majestic buildings even at

first glance if you want to impress people if you want to make a statement or something you must go higher you go to the upper Levels if you enter the bank today if the lobby of the bank is small you don't respect the bank the lobby must be uh highrise ceiling if you go into the government building uh there must be high cols uh wide Lobby you respect such a environment and in ancient times it was the same so we can see the footprints from ancient times to today people obviously thought of things in terms

of presti and uh a building project like the pathon in Athens is a Prestige building but before it's even that and before even represents the city and before it even becomes a symbol of Greece as we are now told it is it was the house for the goddess Athena who was the patron goddess of Athens from whom the city takes its name and therefore that democracy as well the Combs are so high that people felt very small they respected the building if you go to other times you can see many copies of Pon but these

buildings are modern Buildings the White House was built 230 years ago as a symbol of a newly formed nation that valued some of the long lost classical Greek ideals the M fact that it's build on Capital Hill is in itself proof that we have a Continuum from ancient Rome through to the new States of America there's also a nice story that there was a debate right at the beginning of the foundation of the United States about what would be the language whether they would continue With English or ancient Greek and in actual fact there was

a very narrow vote if I remember correctly that English only won out by a couple of votes and it could have been that the new states were actually going to be speaking the new Democratic language of ancient Greece back to specific architectural features the Greeks didn't exactly invent the column but they certainly perfected it and with the discovery of marble as a Building material which they embraced Greek architecture took a giant leap forward you could think of building a building that might last an eternity um you brick crumbles Ro Uh Wood rots um but marble

just seems to to stay there and the the densest and hardest marbles that take the greatest polish seem to endure all the more we are trying always to use the material that we that is around us Sandstone for example in pyramids uh Today we use a steel marble allowed the Greeks to design and build in ways thought previously impossible marble was building material at the times but Engineers or architects of that time they invented that it can withstand much higher load that they could imagine so they started to build High columns and the marble has

so big loading capacity that they tried to DARE a little bit more they built thinner Combs What the column did particularly for the ancient Greek for ancient Greek architecture there were already Monumental buildings elsewhere and there were Monumental buildings in archaic gree but the column allowed buildings to be Airy it allowed colonades for example places where people could walk take shade and escape the Dreadful heat of the midday Sun so the columns were only useful for support of the building but they also supplied an aesthetic in that They allowed an airiness to a building that

had previously not existed closer to home isn't it astounding to think that the Greeks even pioneered an early form of central heating they spread the heat from a fire through pipes hidden under the floors which then heated their houses naturally the fire would require constant maintenance the classical world had a long run to paraphrase Edgar Allen After the glory that was Greece there was the Grandeur that was Rome [Music] it's definitely a big footprint that the Romans left the Romans invented uh new structures new type building typologies the Romans as rulers of The Gnome world

had an ambiguous relationship with nature they thought nature was there to Be Tamed [Music] the Romans always take something that Other civilizations have done and elaborate upon it they are not great innovators themselves but they are great elaborators they take an idea and run with it the conventional wisdom has it that what the Greeks first invented the Romans improved upon once the Romans expand throughout the Italian Peninsula and certainly by the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC they are now able to use the same materials that the Ancient Greeks had already been using for centuries before

most especially marble so they not only copied what they saw the ancient Greeks doing but they wound up copying the methods and techniques that they used as well a modern glass skyscraper gleaming in the sun owes more of a debt to ancient Rome than you might think the glass as Building Material of today where we can see it on facade we can see it in Windows in doors Everywhere has the same structure or same function like it has 2,000 years ago glass is certainly used by the Romans because there are glass window panes that have

been found at herculanum now it's a very kind of thick glass it's slightly opaque you can see through it but it's a distorting image you see because it wasn't important for them to actually look through a window what was important was that the window Illuminated the interior glass windows in Roman times were first used mainly in the building of public baths a neat solution to stopping a draft modern contemporary culture takes for granted the use of glass scking with architecture it provides you visibility and provides you a degree of security that's true in more and

more in these very beautiful skysc scrapers but now Innovation and architecture using the glass from the outsides reflect what is Also around it by the first century ad homes were being fitted with thick glass windows in addition the Romans were also the first to mix and create concrete the stadium of dyian and the Coliseum are two great examples of their use of concrete in any event we're talking about the very late first century so the 80s in the first century and that was probably those two structures certainly in the city of Rome Could mark the

beginning of what would then become a centuries long construction campaign relying more and more on concrete structurally and less and less on Stone purely technically speaking concrete is the Assembly of lime Stone and water the lime comes through the chemical reaction with water and binds the stones together in such a substance that has some time to mat the capacity or loading capacity of such material is Very high also Roman concrete was made with pot Solana which was the main ingredient in the mortar which is a sort of volcanic sand which came from pow or put

oi in Latin in southern uh Italy and that um had that was incredibly strong it had hydraulic properties so it would set under water for example it wouldn't disperse in water it set now you can imagine that's very important if you're trying to build a bridge or if you're building a harbor or something like that Many practical applications to it and then when it's set it it really went rock hard they called their concrete po salana it was both versatile and durable even better they could produce an unlimited Supply that was certainly not the case

for the Greeks in their marble [Music] the Romans still had an appreciation for the beauty of marble but they used it as a final layer or veneer within there was Usually concrete doing the heavy lifting The Forum in Rome the Coliseum and the pantheon are all visited daily by thousands of tourists all those structures owe their long lives to concrete think of the pantheon a huge huge building and that Dome doesn't have a single reinforcing bar in it and it's still there and in that particular case the Romans were even more clever because as you

go up through the building the aggregate so what you throw into the Mortar to give it body and make the whole thing cohere was changed it was graded so at the bottom it would had pieces of marble so very dense hard Stone and by the time you got to the top of the Dome so where it's curving over you would have just tough twof far so that made the actual weight of the structure itself lighten um as it raised to the [Music] top modern-day sporting stadiums like The Beijing stadium in China greatly impressed with their

size in sheer crowd capacity it too owes a debt to the ancient Roman amphitheaters the first massive sporting and entertainment stadiums the footprints of civilization can also be found on the playing fields we can see of course sorties Kum was a place where people met for even performance or fighting or whatever today we have exactly similar places they don't look like colome but still They they gather many people and these structures are fantastic these are Big stadiums or big event halls the Coliseum is predicated upon the arch without the discovery of the arch and the

combination of the arch and Concrete and brick it could have been constructed certainly to the height in which it stands today there's entrances entire perimeter of the Coliseum and each of those is numbered as well so this meant it was Extremely efficient way of getting 100,000 people into the building without them being trampled and being able to do in a short period of time so the staircase system in the Coliseum and the ramp system to feed people into it and all the various different levels of the building as well um that bears easy comparison with

a modern Arena what a sight that must have been as with today's big budget entertainment spectacular From superhero movies to rock concerts the Romans threw everything they had at these extravaganzas not even the biggest title fight in Las Vegas can compare with the Roman Gams unlike today's entertainment the stakes were high for the participants not just box office returns but life or death and if some people complain about today's entertainment being too violent they should just reflect on the Romans and their Bloodthirsty games sometimes the footprints of civilization don't seem so [Applause] civilized the technique

that we admire at coros that one week there was a fighting match uh then they flooded with water there was another performance Etc it changed quite quickly and they could do it within one day it used to be said that the flooding of the Coliseum was a myth invented by The Poets Marshall in particular who says that in the inaugural games the land magically appeared from sea in the morning recent archaeological work has shown that the poet was probably correct it seems that the drainage system that was used for draining Nero's Lake was later reused

for draining the Coliseum and that doesn't really explain how the Coliseum itself was flooded but it has been suggested that around the arena area there are about 40 channels drains That would fill the Coliseum with rain waterer so we only have to imagine tanks outside the Coliseum which could be released to flood the Coliseum and then the old drainage system opened to let the water out again what are we doing today in even H hor is the same Monday we have a ice hockey match Wednesday we have a concert of pop star and Friday we

have motorcycle races but the Romans left us with more than just a Passion for violent spectacle the invention of the Ark was also revolutionary is the com in Greek times because with the ark or Statics of the Ark you can do bigger panss than with the Combs arches are made up of blocks that are called vas they're wedge shaped blocks that fit together and they make an arc uh and this is what gives the uh the arch it stability is this compression the Keystone at the top is the last of these wedge shaped Stones That's

inserted and once that's inserted the arch is completely stable the Egyptians and Greeks had used arches mostly underground in vaults and sew the Romans took the arch to new heights this is the Mich Callahan Pat Tilman Memorial Bridge it spans the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona part of the Hoover Dam bypass project what it owes to ancient Roman Ingenuity is not difficult to see it's the widest concrete arch bridge in The Western Hemisphere and it's the arch design of this bridge which enabled Builders and planners to overcome hundreds of meters of steep Cliffs the

bridges that were built 2,000 years ago and we are still using today is not really because of invention of concrete or other materials it's because uh The Architects of that time they had no such a precise means to calculate the structures they just put a lot of materials according to their experience To withstand the loads so the bridges of Roman times were over calculated and that's why we can use them still today the pug guard aqueduct in the south of France is another good example arches were an essential component of Roman aqueducts and bridges they

were not built from concrete but from Limestone the spectacular pug guard was still in use until just a few decades ago other civilizations had brought water distances to supply cities but the Romans elaborate upon this and bring water from distances that previously had not been imagined the largest Aqueduct feeding the city of Rome was completed in the middle of the first century under the under Emperor Nero the population of the city of Rome was about A4 of a million inhabitants only 70 years later by the time Emperor hadrien the population of the city of Rome

explodes to roughly 3 million inhabitants in 70 years one reason the Aqueducts suddenly every Roman the poorest of the poor the wealthiest of the wealthy had 24/7 access to clean fresh portable sanitary drinking free water water was fed to various Urban outlets in houses it would only be the houses of the very rich obviously but also to public fountains and some of these fountains were built on a colossal scale [Music] but if you want to get some idea of the Kind of excitement of that the the arrival of water from another world you know from

the mountain you can't do better than going to see the Fontan D which is very much in the spirit of the Roman aqueduct and is fed by Roman aqueduct that original Fountain was supplied with water pumped from an aqueduct which also supplied water to the Roman bands the public baths were a great Roman invention the idea that one Should bathe communally in groups either mixed or segregated was something that the Romans took to the nth degree we think of the great bars of caracal for example which are like huge sport social complexes as well as

baby complexes you could joke that the Romans really put the art into architecture the footprint of their genius for building can still be seen today the arch today is really more of an ornamental feature on buildings that's because building Technologies have changed whether stacking bricks together in a single building or creating whole blocks of buildings Roman urban planning may be surprisingly familiar Roman's main architectural achievement is in City design and City layout we think of the grid system of modern cities like New York that is totally predicated on a Roman military Camp when the Roman

military machine moved north south east west its Encampments be they small or large formed the basis eventually for most of the modern towns across Europe cologne Vienna Paris London Footprints of civilization in architecture can be seen everywhere the Burge Khalifa in Dubai the bird's nest stadium in Beijing the M Callahan Pat Tilman Memorial Bridge in the US modern-day architecture d dazzles with its height its scale and the shapes and forms never seen before in Building Architecture is the environment you live and prosper in it makes you wonder how these modern-day masterpieces will be viewed by

people hundreds even thousands of years in the future or indeed if they will stand the test of time the way ancient architecture has these buildings are test to the Ingenuity and willpower of the ancient world there's always been that idea that man can improve upon the natural world The Romans unlike any other ancient civilization M was able to dominate the landscape the Ancients created the building block for the world around us one we simply take for granted so wherever you look so long as you know how to look you'll see all around you the footprints

of civilization sh [Music] [Music] [Music] we live in an Age of Wonders where Technology moves faster than we can keep Pace human and machine have begun to merge artificial intelligence as both slave and master and space exploration seem set to catch up with the dreams of Science Fiction it might seem hard to imagine what we have in common with our ancestors we still owe so much to the ancient world from ideas about democracy to language the way we build to the way we spend our Leisure Time profound Scientific breakthroughs inventions that change the world if

you know where to look the footprints of civilization are all [Music] around the scientific discoveries and techn techological breakthroughs of the ancient world have shaped our lives in so many ways knowledge is always helping people to understand and to take decisions also to develop Technology based on science which can improve their Daily life in this episode we'll Trace those Footprints from prehistory to the present day from the invention of the wheel to new land speed records from Battlefield surgery on Roman gladiators to the technological strides made in a world war one of the most obvious

Footprints of the ancient world is the use of the wheel the passage from the hunters and gather to the farmers can be considered to be the Most important revolution of prehistorical times first thing that is coming to my mind is the calendar of course it's on every on every mobile phone and we use it and now it's sort of the whole world is using one calendar because of now the planet is so interconnected since the very dawn of mankind even before recorded history science and technological progress helped mold the world around us [Music] ancient Mesopotamia

this part of the world has often been referred to as the cradle of civilization is that part of the world where so many different interesting elements and techniques and Innovations were actually introduced speaking of Mesopotamia of course the single most important uh Innovation was Urban civilization so the city was basically Al born there and it was here that one Of the most important technological developments since fire was thought to have originated the wheel it's believed the wheel was invented and developed in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC and has been with us ever since in many forms

[Music] the first Wheels were Potter's Wheels carved out of wood later some bright Sparks figured out how to use them for chariots with four wheels and two axles From the historical point of view the wheel develops between 3,000 2,000 Before Common Era in different locations so you have different cultures perhaps that aren't using this what then must have been incredibly new technology they see it it's very simple and in its design and so it pretty much spreads rather rapidly throughout the ancient world famously the ancient Egyptians they're used The Chariot in battle having archers moving

at very rapid Speeds and these chariots mounted again on [Applause] Wheels buckle up and hold on to your hats this is the henness V V GT even its name sounds powerful it holds the current land speed record accelerating from zero to nearly 300 kmph in under 15 seconds it can Cruise along at 435 km hour the Venom GT has other high- performance cars like the Bugatti Chiron Nipping at its [Music] wheels of course cars like these are powered by an internal combustion engine but that engine would go nowhere fast were it not for that one

particular early [Music] invention this is the atomic clock it's capable of measuring time within a quadrillionth of a second powered by strontium atoms experts are confident This timekeeper will neither lose nor gain a second for the lifetime of the universe time is um really a footprint of civilization time was uh basically discovered or created as a concept by the uh Babylonians by the Sumerians of course what ancient civilization had was looking at the sky looking at what was happening in nature around them and they could see that there was a SE cycle for example that

the sun was going in a Latitude which Was not the equator up and down during the year at different elevations with respect to the Horizon this kind of observations and the key word out of this was periodicity the Babylonians were perhaps the first people to accurately measure time they divided the year into 12 months with 30 days in each divided hours into 60 minutes and then minutes into 60 seconds both the bamian civilizations and also the Egyptians Introduced the sandal or the obelisk in the case of the Egyptians in order to measure the passing of

time uh the movement of light uh which would indicate the shift from one period of time to the following okay the Babylonians degree of accuracy was not quite a quadrillionth of a second but given their Bronze Age Technology it was still pretty remarkable it's a system that has served us well for [Music] Centuries then from those Mesopotamian civilizations uh this Concepts passed on to uh the Greeks and then from the Greeks to the Romans and so on in the ancient world every everyone knew that there were certain months usually at least four months of a

year when you did not sail in the Mediterranean you did not attempt to navigate the waters because they're very rough during the winter and you therefore risk not only loss of life to Yourself and your crew but perhaps even more importantly depending on your perspective the product that you're trying to gain Capital upon practically all later civilizations learn from the Babylonians to look to the skies for a a deeper understanding of the world around [Music] them they kept on looking at data and finding periodicities and then what happens is on the basis of this data

Then we we have a model for example then we now know that the moon is going around the earth and then we can interpret this cycle in terms of the movement of the Moon [Music] [Music] the Babylonians were also the first mathematicians of note Babylonian mathematics included a rudimentary understanding of fractions algebra quadratic and cubic equations and even Trigonometry this is The Plimpton 322 it's a 3700 year-old tablet which is stored at Columbia University it suggests that the Babylonians were studying trigonometry the lengths and angles of triangles well before the ancient Greeks it is probably

the earliest trigonometric table so this actually would highlight of the role of the Sumerians from the point of view of developing an approach an interest towards higher level of Mathematics According to some math historians the Babylonians may have even calculated the Pythagorean theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides who can forget that from high school it's a formula that is still in use every day [Music] most people when they think of geometry They cannot but think of the Greeks

Pythagoras uclid Etc the interests on the part of the Ancients and specifically the ancient Greeks begins with very practical intentions reasons purposes if you want to design something which an engineer can actually build and make stable you need geometry sadly we are no longer able to admire the Hanging Gardens of Babylon they were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World a Marvel of Babylonian building but what is left of Babylon looks geometrically [Music] correct we can also see from the Babylonian pyramids so-called ziggurats that they understood that the triangle was the strongest form

in Geometry it was also pretty much used for engineering purposes or reasons uh if you need to to build structures such As pyramids or the zigurat in Mesopotamia for example so temples or other huge buildings you probably need to calculate precisely how these structures should be constructed this computer graphic a theoretical reconstruction of the Tower of Babylon clearly illustrates the importance of geometry in building the beginnings of geometry left an un mistakable footprint of civilization standing at top the Ziggurats and looking up at the night sky was the beginning of another scientific discipline nearly 5,000

years ago Babylonian stargazers became the first astronomers of course astronomers did use mathematics and they still do it especially I would say geometry and trigonometry was a much needed why because astronomy has to deal with movements in the sky so you know Mathematics and physics are always somehow catching up each other sometimes mathematics is going farther than what physics is able to to catch it up and sometimes the opposite the physicist discover something that needs a mathematical modeling to be fully understood and [Music] modeled the Hubble Space Telescope has greatly expanded our knowledge of the

universe launched in orbit around the Earth in 1990 it's the most powerful telescope ever built it's about the size of a school bus but unlike any school bus it can span the distance between London and Los Angeles in under 20 minutes it's almost as much a time machine as it is a telescope why because a distant Galaxy appears through its lens as it did when the light left it which might be millions of years ago and it's all a long way from the Ancient Babylonians standing on tiptoes at top their ziggurats they had a similar

purpose to figure out our place in the universe they did not really have the instruments that we can rely on today of course but they did have some instruments some sort of technology that they could uh employ for their observations the armillary uh Sphere for example all those instruments were employed not really to inquir into the nature of the celestial bodies but Rather to measure their movement now we have astronomy but ason is fascinating and especially Technologies is is able to Fascinate people as much as the looking at the stars uh in former times because

what do we have we discovered we have now the paace exploration we have orbiting observatories around the earth they sent us incredible images of the universe of what's happening in the universe of the Milky Way what are the surface of the Planet by around 2,000 BC or 4,000 years ago the Babylonians were recording lunar eclipses by 700 BC they could predict lunar eclipses based on their record keeping prediction is another characteristic of science how you can predict and for example predicting that winter will come again this on the basis of observations predicting an eclipse this

was a big issue in in former times at the time science and religious belief Were a little mixed up so people were afraid if the moon was suddenly becoming dark or the sun was disappearing uh there was a lot of fear and so the government had to know it before in order for civilization to develop a revolution had to take place that should never be taken for granted mankind shifted from being hunter gatherers to Farmers [Music] [Music] The passage from the Hunter and gathers to the farmers happened roughly 10,000 years ago in the time of

the Stone Age occurring between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic so this is the period of time in which you have this shift from those who uh relied on uh hunting and Gathering what could find basically to those who decided to settle within a specific portion of land or territory grow their crops or domesticate their cattle or other Animals as sure as the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening the ancient Egyptians needed food and water then as now most of Egypt was a desert however every year the Nile would flood spilling over

with water that flowed down from the mountains to the South but when the water receded it left behind rich soil in which the ancient Egyptian Ians grew their crops to irrigate their crops the Egyptians created a canal system they Built gates to these canals so they could control the flow of water and they built reservoirs to store water in case of drought whatever the drawbacks of early agriculture the majority of ancient Egyptians could now feed themselves once a society is able to do that it can flourish and develop in all sorts of unforeseen ways of

course uh the Society of farmers is much more specialized than the Society of the hunters and gatherers So there is a specialization specialization of the different roles that they have within this Society also settlement is one the advantage of this while you settle you can live a kind of stable life you can have control of a a specific portion of territory the ancient Egyptians were also obsessed with the night sky they could identify five of the planets in our solar system they also observed that the rising of serious the dog star with the sun would

Precede the annual flooding of the River Nile [Music] some egyptologists even believe the Sphinx the Giza Pyramid complex and the River Nile were a mirror image of the constellations of Leo Orion's Belt and the Milky [Music] Way there are many reasons for doing this religious as an observatory because then you you use the buildings as an Observatory for measuring for example time and the transit of stars uh or just because it's beautiful research suggests the Egyptians were able to align structures to True North within one tenth of a degree as is the case with kufu

pyramid but how are the Egyptians able to line up the pyramids at Giza with the three stars and Orion's Belt we may never know it's nice to think that every I don't know how many years a given star For example Dean is peering through the hole directly to the grave of a great king it has a power for the imagination there's nothing it's just geometry but if you want to see the beauty out of it and the power of building up the whole Celestial mechanics that is doing this to govern Celestial mechanics so certain things

are happening uh this is the beauty out of it it's arguably another ancient Egyptian footprint of civilization that we still Align buildings with the sun although this is for practical reasons such as heat and light rather than religious belief but Egyptian contributions to science and technology originate in some mysterious ways strange as it may seem it was the Egyptian process of mummification that led to some early breakthroughs in medical science mummification involved the removal of organs and stuffing the dried Body with Rags plants and spices so it would keep it shape as they went about

their Grizzly trade these early Egyptian taxidermists learned much about the workings of the human [Music] body the first heart transplants were performed around 50 years ago a mere blink of an eye in terms of world history it was quite a journey from removing organs to being able to perform organ [Music] transplants but that Journey began in ancient Egypt and with mummification thanks to mummification ation Egyptians came to understand much about the human body they practiced basic surgery could fix broken bones and dislocated joints and even stitch wounds effectively Newfound knowledge mixed with deeply held beliefs

the Egyptians believed they were preparing the corpse of the king for eternal Life medicine was mixed with Alchemy and the Quest for immortality as as a technique it belongs to a vast species though of material Transformations which are not medieval in origin or or or Egyptian um but being practiced throughout the Middle East uh in the Bronze Age and earlier and what what's happening is attempts to to transform materials uh to alter their properties um or to make uh synthesis of things that exist in nature if we Consider Egypt they did know how to uh

deal with uh minerals uh from this point of view we can find some kind of connections between the alchemical aim of finding of transforming uh into a higher standard and the way in which they actually use these minerals for example Pottery even the idea of taking clay from the ground is wet malleable substance and then firing it in a Kil begins to give clay the properties of stone because it's harder admittedly It's brittle but it's harder when you then have the invention of glazes given to to Pottery then this is not only like a stone

but it's like a stone that can take a very high polish now no Alchemist ever found a way to prolong life or transform lead into gold but their experiments LED them to some interesting conclusions what sustained it in classical Antiquity and right into the early modern period was also the Aristotelian World System where everything was composed basically a four elements earth air fire water it was believed that basically anything could be transformed with the right processes from one state to another but there was this idea of an essentially um infinite uh interc commutability between elements

of course all these ideas were lost in modernity with the Advent of the periodic table um towards the end of the 19th century and a Completely different Elemental view of the world perhaps it's because we are the only Earthly species aware of our own mortality but eternal life or at least a greatly prolonged existence is something humans still dream of some scientists believe that the first human to reach 1,000 years of age has already been born all thanks to the thousands of years of alchemical chemical and medicinal findings ancient Egypt was the Birthplace of the

medical profession in those days people would come from far away lands to be treated by Egyptian [Music] Physicians but across the Mediterranean another civilization was getting ready to take the Baton of PR when we think of uh Greek philosophy we tend to think of these uh philosophers maybe in their Gardens walking and thinking about pretty much theoretical things but we need to know that Philosophy uh also means science uh so also means uh something concrete for example knowing that the Earth is round that is not flat discovering what is the sides of the orbits of

the planets that is the sides of the solar system the sides of the Sun the big um discoveries from point of view of of physics are those are changes of perspective open opening Minds to a new way of looking at the world and and all the consequences broken down into two Greek words an Intimate love of something felia of what Sophia wisdom and overarching ultimate wisdom the Greeks also continued the good work of Medical Science one should not forget that many people at that time believed diseases were the God's way of punishing sinful humans but

those ideas began to change in ancient Greece mostly due to the work of one man a man whose name we still remember [Music] [Music] it was around 450 BC when a certain hypocrates of Co began conducting experiments to prove the symptoms of disease were caused by the body's natural reaction to diet environmental factors and so on certainly not by vengeful Gods Hippocrates has been called the father of Western medicine the Hippocratic Oath which Bears his name Was the first known attempt to set an ethical stand among medical practitioners the O of hypocrates is the single

most important document in the history of medicine establishing the medical tradition in the west so establishing medicine as a sort of tradition as a scientifical ethical tradition uh in Western [Music] culture hypocrates lived to be 90 a very Old age for that time and his words certainly live on I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so nor will I suggest such a [Music] course in the 1960s uh uh

this was still something pretty much used uh in Western universities for example in the big British universities such as Oxford and Cambridge what is sometimes called the Golden Rule doesn't change but our understanding of the world does what is the universe made of how did it begin physicists today are still seeking answers using particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider well named because it's the largest machine in the world a 20m plus ring-shaped tunnel made mainly of superconducting magnets some 100 m underground scientists hope this particle accelerator will answer the big [Music] questions yet

around 2400 years ago in ancient Greece one man working on his own and without even a small Hadron Collider came up with some remarkable insights this one had the promising name of democratus who declared that all matter was comprised of atams and his footprint is hard to overlook These atoms were he said physically but not geometrically indivisible he also believed that between atoms there lay empty space furthermore atoms are indestructible and perpetually in motion but there were many such Eureka moments in ancient Greece including another one we all learned about in school when a philosopher

named Archimedes stepping into his bath cried Eureka Eureka or I found it I found it in his tub Archimedes had in a Flash Understood that the volume of water he had displaced getting in the bath must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged in essence the law of hydrostatics arimas and what he had and all the studies about the leverage and the way in which you can actually compute the force that is keeping your ship up I always thought as a kid how can an iron ship survived to

still be is why is not droning now we take it for granted but it it sort of Study also this one coming out of science it's an application of Science and of scientific thinking Archimedes wrote admiringly of arist starus a Greek astronomer who had lived before [Music] him aristos of Samos is claimed to be the first one of the first to advance the idea that the art and the other planets were actually rotating around the Sun so we know how this idea then was abandoned uh after a few a few Centuries the heliocentric system uh

was controversial became controversial uh in the 16th and 17th century of cernus and Galileo for several reasons one was that it wasn't included in the model of the universe that had been handed down um since Plato actually even slightly earlier with the Earth at its Center which had been then canonized it been sort of enshrined um in the Aristotelian view of the universe which was the common belief Of how the universe functioned with the Earth at its Center and the sun uh moving around it like the other Heavenly Bodies so it was difficult to shake

off that tradition so much for the universe but what about coming back down to earth and finding ourselves the global positioning system or GPS is a Mainstay for motor vehicles and modern smartphones and where would the motorist or traveler of today be without these Navigation systems completely and utterly lost probably it's important to think that each subsequent civilization is standing on the shoulders as they say of a previous civilization so that's certainly true with the ancient Greeks regarding navigation in terms of going distances beyond the ancient Greek world so basically the Eastern Mediterranean venturing into

Asia Minor modern day turkey or even Beyond um into Persia perhaps beginning with maybe Alexander the Great 4th Century BC and his interaction with the famous astronomers SL astrologers from Mesopotamia the ancient Mir Middle East you're looking at an early Global navigation system it is of course a map at over 2200 years old it's one of the first known maps of the world or more accurately the known world according to the Greeks it was the work of one ostanes a cultured man who ran the Library of Alexandria one of his most impressive Feats was to

calculate the circumference of the earth then it turned out something like like 40,000 kilomet which is extremely close to what actually is the measured circumference of the earth so he uh went pretty close to the truth just by considering the movement of Shadows the movement of light and of the sun around the art so basically by employing the uh Sun di he knew that at a certain date of The year that the sun was going the Sun Ray were going straight to the bottom of a of a well and he knew that in another place

at the same time this was not happening so one of the possibility was that the Earth was not actually flat that was round this was explaining this difference let's then get this funny idea of that the word is ground is not flat can we measure how how big it is and this is the next major step of science measuring the universe cosmology The natural philosophers of ancient Greece were so far ahead of their time it's hard to believe if the Greeks were philosophers the Romans were eminently practical people [Music] more than the Greeks certainly the

Romans did this and once you've mapped the territory you know where point x is in relation to point Z the Romans famously are going to build a road so That they have a connection to that point which then frees them from having to constantly rely on navigating by virtue of the heavens or even by virtue of maps telling the truth they were not always innovators but they were really clever in discovering re-employing reusing the others discoveries so they managed to use the techniques invented or discovered by the Greeks and they bent these techniques For their

practical military and social political purposes with a quite justifiable reputation as the fastest highway in the world the German Autobon is a Motorway designed just for cars anything that can't go faster than 80 km hour is not permitted on the Autobon which pretty much rules out bicycles and pedestrians there's no upper speed limit on much of the motorway and it is illegal to stop unnecessarily that includes running out Of fuel [Music] of course the only fuel on the roads in ancient times was stamina but with horses and carts the only traffic why did the Romans

build such sturdy [Music] roads well Rome did not become an Empire without being able to mobilize its armies communication due primarily to Roman roads the system of Roman roads That the ancient Romans built all throughout their former Empire uh that was the primary vehicle for allowing other vehicles of Travelers uh often times Runners couriers if you will that's where the famous Pony Express probably probably began in the 3r century BC the Via apia a famous Roman Road was constructed connecting the capital with the port town of brindisi now it's a free tourist Attraction although the

first nearly 5 kilm of the Via Appia or appan way are still traversed every day by cars buses and coaches not only that but parts of Britain's A1 Motorway are based on the old Roman [Music] routes so when it comes to transport in a very real sense all roads do lead to Rome they well and truly left the footprints Of their civilization and with their aqueducts drains and baths it's clear that Romans understood the importance of Sanitation placing them way ahead of some later [Music] civilizations so the Romans would inherit from the Greeks this attention

to or for the body water was very important for the Romans we know they constructed so many different aqueducts well the uh the Roman aqueduct certainly Probably one of the stereotypically most famous achievements Science and Technology wise they were among the first the earliest civilization to connect hygienical purposes hygiene and social status and social environment and backgrounds so it came to be understood bathing wasn't just a luxury but a necessity all the aqueducts feeding for example the city of Rome begin 60 Mi outside the city in the central part of The peninsula in the appenine

mountains inside the mountains from Natural Springs of [Music] water the problem becomes for the Roman engineer is what happens when suddenly my tunnel comes out the side of a mountain cliff and I'm facing a another large Valley in front of you before I get to the next mountain and so to maintain that certain gradation for the flow of water the ancient Romans built What we think of as these aqueducts in order to cover these vast expanses of land until we at least get to the next Mountain where we go back inside or ultimately until we

get into the city the Romans themselves discovered and understood that every certain number of feet within the length of an aqueduct right you're great ration had to drop by a very precise amount how exactly the ancient Romans were able to figure that out remains still somewhat of a Mystery the ruins of the baths of kakala outside Rome in their Heyday with high vated ceilings separate hot and cold baths they must have been [Music] Magnificent the aqueduct which served the baths of kakala was in use until the 19th [Music] century the Romans also Advanced the practice

of Medicine by publishing treatises that could be read well by Anyone who could read ordinary citizens also had greater access to professional doctors [Music] medicines were manufactured including pills using plants and herbs next time you take a pill for a headache heartburn or anything really remember the [Music] Romans the Romans also developed specialized instruments for surgery Ranging from forceps to wound retractors specific kinds of surgery techniques and instruments uh especially those dealing with fractures and simil were also due to their activism within the military field this is also the reason why they managed to develop

these specific substances uh like morphine or what we would call nowadays Scopolamine that could actually quench the pain of the sick so they could basically Translate [Music] [Music] even their interest in war seemed to have survived until Modern Times And with it giant leaps in technological progress consider technological advances made during World War II the first jet planes radar and atomic power power the Enigma machine a German code device that anticipated computer technology the German V2 rockets that were the first man-made objects to ever Travel into space so from the point of view of War

of course the Romans developed or reused many instruments especially as far as Siege Warfare is concerned so they invented or just reemployed oldest instruments that were already employed by other civilizations by the Greeks for example the the ballista uh the Catapult the SI tow so all those instruments whose function was that of rendering or making the life of Roman soldiers uh a Little easier but it also somehow would be the precursor what we have really in contemporary civilization in another ancient footprint creating a greater and greater distance between two enemy forces it almost numbs one

to the impact that such Bloodshed Devastation death naming has on the human psyche so much so to this day that now we have drones and someone sitting thousands of miles away from a Target can rather disinterestedly neutralize as we like to Say that Target what we really mean is kill destroy in War and Peace time the technological and Engineering Feats of the Romans just kept coming but even the glory of this civilization couldn't save it from a fall a fall that meant a giant leap backwards for Science and Technology so what happened to all that

ancient Ingenuity and knowhow for centuries after the fall of Rome Western Europe was plunged into the dark CES agriculture returned to the subsistence farming of the Neolithic era literacy receded and was even scorned medicine was substituted with Blind Faith and Superstition but in the Middle East there was a glimmer of hope in libraries and places of learning such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved Footprints Of civilization are interesting and relevant and important uh because they say something specific they say what as humans we all share we

have in common and at the same time they highlight what as individuals we develop in a specific way with the 14th century came the Renaissance and a great surge of interest in classical teaching in Europe somehow by the skin of our teeth Humanity has scraped by tracing the footprints of Civilization saved us once and if we know how to learn from our mistakes may even help us yet there are many famous sayings about history and about its value one of the several that I like is to remember not only to learn from errors of the

past to improve positive progress for Humanity but to remember also that we're always standing on the shoulders of giants who have come before us scientists philosophers innovators those who are immersed and imbued with The process of critical thinking [Music] [Music] [Music] the footprints of civilization when we look back on our past we can see them [Music] everywhere when we say our past that implies a past which we can all share the legacy of the civilizations that prospered around the Mediterranean Such as ancient Egypt Babylon Greece and Rome you don't have to be a genealogical descendant

of any of those cultures to live in their long Shadow their traces are all around [Music] so-called ancient history spans a period of around 3 and a half thousand years from the beginning of written language in around 3100 BCE until the fall of Rome in the 5th Century CE we can find a lot of ourselves by examining those morals and those societies from ancient Society we have taken many good things we have taken democracy we've taken [Music] law so far we have never encountered any civilization which didn't have trace of religion so religion is one

of the most common elements that we find in basically all the Civilizations in ancient Egypt there was a plurality of deities divinities polytheism the ancient Greeks the inventors of Western philosophy the inventors of democracy one of the famous questions that many Greek philosophers posed what does it mean to live a good life what is a good life what is being happy what is Leisure all these things some might suggest or we today are perhaps more similar to the ancient Roman measuring Quantitatively the quality of life which is ironic and that Prim primarily had to do

with land ownership and what you can do with land namely growing crops and grazing animals though that all seems a long time ago this series aims to bring that world a little closer when we look at these ancient societies we actually find quite a number of places cities that were extremely Multicultural Alexandria at its peak was extremely Multicultural and extremely tolerant City with a multiple of ethnicities religious Traditions very vibrant culture in a sense Alexandria would remain dead up to we could claim modern [Music] days one of the building blocks of any society is religion

consider the massive Gatherings that take place in its name such as the crowds of up to 300,000 people that assemble in St Peter Square PR in the name of Christianity faith has continued to Evolve over the centuries today the dominant world religions seem to share the concept often called the Golden Rule though that might not seem to have much in common with ancient beliefs at their core all religions have something in common [Music] what does this word religion mean two words to bind together again to bind what together again members of society we can all

think of examples Where faith has divided Nations and peoples there are dark chapters such as the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition [Music] for early man alone in the dark with every day of battle for survival the belief in a maker and an afterlife must have provided some comfort and meaning to an existence that was cruel brutish and often short primitive societies were essentially Polytheistic in that they believed in many gods this was an attempt by these societies to make sense of the natural world each God represented either a particular element the sky the Seas the

lands or indeed parts of the land what they did when they could not understand a force of nature they identified this as a god that is a power beyond their understanding most of these gods are very different from divinities uh that we know today these gods are not Particularly benevolent gods they are not gods that exist or are assumed to be beneficial to man the pyramids Majestic reminders of the cult of personality and the enormous power of Egyptian phars we normally tend to divide these areas between religious sphere political sphere economic sphere cultural sphere and

so on Ancient societies didn't think about religion in that way religion was something closely Connected with everyday life closely connected with human society with politics with culture though the Pharaohs were flesh and blood they were considered gods on Earth and part of the Divine family of about 2,000 Gods mummification embalming and the pyramids were all meant to preserve their remains belief in the afterlife shaped the lives of ancient Egyptians from the archaeological evidence it Seems to suggest that the Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife we must temper that a little bit by thinking terms of

regeneration because a lot of the Egyptian stories of their gods deal with death and [Music] Resurrection this idea that preservation of body is important because it somehow ensures future Life we'll also see in this idea something that has direct political Implications because what it means that when a king Pharaoh dies that he somehow still exists ensuring the survival and well-being of the state and its stability maybe we can look at the afterlife as something that actually is there to ensure stability and well-being of their society and their state we take for granted that most religions

today worship only one Divine entity but our ancient forebears would Have found the idea of one God as strange as we find the idea of many [Music] gods amot the fourth tried to establish an early kind of monotheism worshipping the atam which is the uh solar disc basically that was an attempt at establishing at introducing a sort of [Music] monotheism that was an experiment he famously attempted right around 1,000 BC and it would not be seen again for Another thousand years with the ancient Romans when we look at various religious systems of both the ancient

world and also modern world uh we actually don't find their monotheistic religions and then polytheistic religions actually what we find in reality is that there is a variety of different religious systems that are somewhere in between those polls between something that we could call strict monotheism and then a Polytheistic system or even some religious systems that don't even have a God or Gods Christianity is one of those cases where uh there is technically speaking one God but then there is the concept of Trinity uh which is not really a completely consequential monistic system the religion

of ancient Egypt certainly made a lasting impression today we can see tangible remains of their [Music] faith but what about the other grp great civilizations of the Mediterranean the Greeks and Romans more or less believed in the same set of gods and goddesses the Romans changed the names of the Greek gods so that Zeus became Jupiter Poseidon became Neptune and so on but the underlying principle was the same the gods were believed to be one big happy family or were they the brothers sisters Sons uncles we have Jupiter Juno Zeus and here actually brother and

sister husband and wife that in itself is going to lead to complications and if we think of them in terms of a modern dysfunctional family then we don't have any real problems in understanding the Waring factions because like any family they fight they make up they fall out again they're in love with each other they're out of love with each other though the Greek and Roman gods Were overtaken by chrisan ity they were never quite forgotten Christianity is a synthetic religion Ed borrowed from ancient religion a great deal he had borrowed from ancient philosophy because

during the evolution and changes in the Roman Empire the elite class and the literate class eventually as the population become more and more literate abandon their devotion their recognition of the ancient gods and religious practices and Turned more and more to [Music] philosophy helenismo centuries BC and u helenismo cosmopolit culture it's not unlike americanism today and speaking of americanism where would the most powerful economies of today be without their wealth superpowers are not built on ideals alone money is another Cornerstone on which society is built [Applause] the New York Stock Exchange Wall Street on an

average trading day shares worth billions of dollars are bought and sold here the bidding wars taking place on the bustling Market floor may look modern but they have their origins in something much older [Applause] prior to using money what we call money as an exchange instrument the economy rusted and moved on the basis of Exchange of goods from its Inception money was a way of simplifying trade money made it easier to calculate the value of products there is no fundamental difference between those ancient civilizations and the way we think about money and what money brings

nowadays we can actually see that very often as we all know money and social and political power go hand in hand it is widely believed that the first gold coin to be Used as currency was created by lydian King Cris around 550 BCE he lived in a territory of Lydia where he was King and that's a Center of Trade that is in the south west of Asia Minor of turkey today that's where many different cultures met there the Phoenicians to the South to the north the Hittites to the West people from Cyprus and even Egypt

coins allow a statement of value Where all of these people can trade with one another and they know that there is a given value to a particular instrument it didn't take long before the divisions between rich and poor Have and Have Nots began to emerge among human beings living in settlements today's hedonistic life lovers can trace their spiritual ancestors to the sensualists and Pleasure Seekers of ancient Rome but even then having a great deal of money was never enough you Were expected to flaunt it while doing anything to acquire more though the ethos of conspicuous

consumption was not the noblest footprint of civilization there's no doubt it had staying power [Music] [Music] the access to Elegance uh the access to Gold the access to wealth to money to perfumes for example and so on it's really connected to the social class you come from so this is a footprint of Civilization the fact that the higher is the social class you belong to and the easier is the way you can access or can have access to this kinds of products or materials such as marble gold [Music] Amber today the difference in social class

is a little bit smaller or lighter than it was or than it used to be at the times of the Romans or the Egyptians the uh wealth is social class was much smaller as far as the ancient Civilizations are concerned than it is [Music] nowadays it was much more diverse and we have cases where actually people at the bottom of the social pyramid that they acquire wealth even slaves acquiring wealth both in Greece and in Rome that would allow them to buy their freedom and then they could be free citizens and participate in trade or

even in political life today the wealthiest people in the World control the markets because they are the markets the people who influence all the power in the world have a net worth of billions and billions of dollars they are not the first the net worth of Marcus linius process was said to equal the budget of the Roman treasury obviously Cris famous right before the end of the the fall the collapse of the Roman Republic often referred to as perhaps the wealthiest human being at least in the ancient World if not maybe all of human history

centuries before Marcus crus and certainly by the time of the Old Kingdom of Egypt class distinctions were set in stone [Music] at the top of the social pyramid was the Pharaoh nothing less than a living God next came members of the nobility followed by high priests and government officials all the way down to the slave class the question was is one's fate Decided the day of one's birth or was social Mobility possible even in those times there wasn't much of an upwardly mobile class in ancient Egypt but later civilizations had a little more room for

self-improvement ancient Greece not even somewhere between ancient Egypt and ancient Rome it was just very different Ancient Greece city states never a unified monolith like the Roman Empire would become a number of city states With vestiges at least vestiges of tribalism therefore everything is kept local but as might imagine within such a reality as a tribe even if it sound a little better calling it a citystate there certainly will be elements of that class distinction within each city state in ancient Greece but not on the vast level that it would have been certainly in ancient

Egypt or the class disparity in ancient Rome [Music] [Applause] within the context of Roman civilization there was the possibility to pass or to shift from one social class to the other we also need to be remind that some VIPs like Emperors for example very often came from such high rank Dian for example he came from poor family from Dalmatia but also Augustus the famous Emperor AUST the first Roman Emperor came from family the jent Octavia which used to be of plean Orion later on we no longer find Roman emperors being Roman or indeed Italian we

have Spaniards traan and hadran becoming Emperors and we have Emperors from North Africa for example cpia SAS in ancient times the being born a male was another distinction that marked one out for advancement let's compare the role of women between those societies and today we keep forgetting that in most of the western societies women acquired the Same legal status only in the 20th century and in some of them only by the mid 20th century so that's less than one uh average human [Applause] [Music] life ancient Greece is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of democracy but

a democracy where voting was a privilege extended only to property owning men and excluded women women behind the scenes could be Dominating the household by the way they run the household but we have to think in terms that wife could be divorced by a word from the husband and dismissed from the house and a daughter was considered a father's property and when the daughter was married off the wife became the property of her future husband so in many ways that seems to limit the woman's role in society however in Practical terms that doesn't seem to

have been the Case sadly human nature probably hasn't changed all that much undoubtedly there have been strong women ever since there have been women they very often were part of meth or mythology if we consider the example of the Amazons of which Herodotus speaks so we have an interesting example of women who were considered to be very strong very powerful we can also mention important individuals who although strictly Speaking were not part of the ruling class but were equally influential uh famous mothers wives who actually very often led to important conflicts we can mentioned they

also Cleopatra who appeared at that crucial moment in Roman history when basically two leading generals were part of the story about Cleopatra and the succession of the Roman throne essentially at the beginning of this period that we call Empire the infamous Cleopatra was Effectively the last pharaoh of Egypt scholars believe that up to six women may have ruled ancient Egypt either in partnership with the Pharaoh or on their own as empress among them Nath hotep who egyptologists have deduced by the Colossal size of her mava or tomb and her Royal Crest that she was the

de facto ruler of the first dynasty of Egypt then there was Merna at first an empress Regent who then possibly ruled In her own right during the first dynasty of Egypt and SOC neferu who ruled Egypt for four years after the death of her brother ammat IV nefer TTI she of the famous bust is believed to have ruled as Regent with her Pharaoh husband ainan there are interesting connections that we can make uh between the role of women uh in a classical times or in the ancient times and the the role of women today if

we consider the role of Contemporary female politicians we see how relevant their ideas the policies that they try to develop actually [Music] is male or female make no mistake the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were absolute rulers to oppose them was to oppose the will of the Gods when would ordinary citizens get to have a say in their own Affairs the foundations for the modern-day concept of people [Music] equality democracy famously forged in Athens Greece in the 8th Century BCE ruled by the crowd ruled by the mob quite literally which has the unfortunate consequence that if

out of any given number of people a simple majority rules the day around 2500 years ago in ancient Greece the populace worked out a way of governing themselves a concept we recognize today as Democracy a regular and compulsory Gathering of male citizens met at the assembly there anyone could speak including proposing laws these laws would be debated by the Council of 500 made up of citizens chosen at random to serve in government not unlike our jury duty today and finally there was the court this was true people power or more correctly Manpower one thing to

keep in mind that uh all these democracies were in some Sense restricted so women and slaves were excluded Aristotle himself said the slaves were were just walking animals we're talking and walking animals so the Greeks had a very very firm and strong hierarchy which never changed you no way you could live forever in Greece as a foreigner and there were many foreigners you could never enter and and identified as a Greek as they so often did the Romans Took from the Greeks in adapting their own democratic system the ancient Romans modified tweaked their Greek model

democracy inventing a little something known as the constitutional republic which is a representative democracy among other things allowing for the minorities within such a society to nevertheless have a voice the Roman Republic with its consuls and Senate and its ideas of checks and balances on power was Destined to last a long time the Republic would endure for nearly 500 years the Senate would still have an important role in running the Empire even after the rise of the Emperors the Roman governing system has been emulated for centuries in fact the establishment of the highly esteemed United

States Senate was influenced by the Roman model the 3/4s of the world today has Roman law so in some way Roman law uh Penetrates the mentality and the social structures classes of those societies the ancient Romans pointed dep partch in Roman law was Finding Equitable balanced harmonious as best as possible solutions for all members of human society not based on religion divine revelation or any particular philosophical model but based on a rational logical approach critical thinking the other thing is exactly what Roman law has always been lauded to have produced that is things Like justice

Freedom Liberty equality equitability are fruits of Roman law so the idea that uh uh nobody should be sentenced uh to any uh any penalty before he or she has the right to defend themselves in a public court is something that we would still at least theoretically affirm nowadays together with that we should also keep in mind another important concept of citizenship because citizenship defined who are those who Have certain rights with within a certain political Community uh initially uh a Roman citizen was of course just a free citizen of Rome no matter what class there

were also procedures uh through which even slaves could become uh Roman citizens and as the empire grew uh it actually uh started a applying the concept of citizenship to more and more people including people who are of different ethnic Origins the road to political power in The Roman senate was naturally different for wealthy patricians than for lower class pans the manner in which the Roman democratic system such as it was operated fostered a clear path to corruption favoritism and double dealing perhaps some of that sounds familiar Roman and Greek society is predicated upon a huge

slave population we mustn't think of slaves as one blanket Nation the slaves could be Manual laborers or they could be refined teachers of rhetoric in an elaborate household they could be Gladiators or they could be road workers there were in fact times when people rose up against the system they were under one obvious example was the the slave revolt led by Spartacus and another is tiberious graus [Music] what the grcki brothers try to do basically to give some portion of land To those who didn't have so it's a rather modern so this is a kind

of footprint of civilization why because uh there is a modern kind of attitude in the attempt to equalize social classes in the attempt to give something to those who didn't have that much and in the attempt to try to limit the way in which wealthiest classes were trying to become even [Music] Wealthier even democracy has its downside there are many visible Footprints of repeated human mistakes and failings the rise of the strong man who overthrows democracy the Ascension to power through The Ballot Box only to have democracy undermined From Within These are the political Staples

of the 20th century and the parallels in the downfall of Julius Caesar for the Romans the dictatorship Was an emergency measure in extremist when the political situation usually foreign policy had broken down somebody was needed to come in who was all powerful who could literally dictate say how things were going to be and the original office was just for 6 months Caesar may have seen himself as a benevolent dictator however that's virtually a contradiction in terms he first of all Makes himself dictator for five years and then dictator in perpetuity that is he's made himself

a king [Music] Caesar was murdered ostensibly to save the Republic sadly the Civil War that followed produced unintended consequences for his assassins the Senate would still wield some power in Roman society but Rome would from now on be ruled by Imperial Dynasty [Music] though Rome had been a republic for nearly 500 years it would be known for its highest achievements and excess during the first 400 years of its empire history always seems to repeat itself the Roman emperors left their indelible footprints on our civilization following Germany's loss in World War I the town of viar

declared itself a republic they drafted a Bill of Rights That gave men and women the right to vote and also protected freedom of speech and religious beliefs so far so good but we all know what happened next a system of proportional representation allowed Fringe parties like the na National Socialist Party to gain a foothold on power a clause in the new constitution allowed the elected president to use extraordinary powers in an emergency ironically what constituted an Emergency wasn't defined Hitler exploited this weakness in the clause and as a consequence the world would [Music] suffer in

contemporary times I would say that some elements of some what are referred to these days as populist movements are very similar to some of the ideals within ancient Greek democracy power back to the people again the problem being that sometimes that can be taken to an extreme or certainly A non-productive productive path [Applause] [Music] what in fact does democracy need of society in order to work the answer is people today big populations made up of different ethnic groups with varying beliefs live together in the same town is that a modern concept or an ancient one

can we find another footprint of [Music] civilization in the ancient world world The separate nations of Egypt Greece and Rome seemed more like they came from different worlds the Egyptians built pyramids the Greeks debated democracy and the Romans lived to excess in their Villas but reality was infinitely more complicated trade war and population migration would cause the ancient peoples to intermingle as they traveled arguably there were multi cultural Empires even before if we think about Persia uh Persian Empire was Multicultural and was also pretty from what we know pretty tolerant when it comes to the

existence of various ethnicities and various religious groups within Persian Empire uh then we also have of course Mana which was primarily uh Greek Empire but was encompassing all these regions with a variety of local traditions and and different ethnicities and we have Roman Empire Which uh was one case that is closest to us and most significant for the later history of the West uh for which we can truly say that it was something uh open to inclusion of various cultures various ideas various we could call it lifestyles uh nowadays a legendary story about the beginnings

of multiculturalism comes from Macedonia and of its legendary Warrior King Alexander the [Music] Great Alexander of course was a great conqueror indeed the great conqueror his Empire included Greece Macedonia the Middle East and most of Egypt all the way to Afghanistan in keeping with the standard practice of his era whenever he conquered a territory he infused it with the Greek language and its custom something else was also true as a rule he and his armies never sought to absorb the cultures they encountered One exception was Persia though Alexander thought them to be his bitter enemy

he sought to unite the two peoples with a mass wedding that lasted 5 days he had many of his generals married off to Persian Noble women the Macedonian Persian marriages were intended to be symbolic but also to unite these rival nations in blood after all any new offspring would be children of both civilizations I'm afraid he favored like All the Greeks um a very narrow definition of a society and the ethnic basis of a society uh I do not think that this famous incident uh where he married off his officers uh to local women uh

is um uh very valid basis for saying he uh was creating a multi-ethnic Empire but subsequently he becomes a symbol of that interestingly enough at the very least it was short-lived and a failed attempt because of his own death and perhaps the greater proof that human Society was not quite yet ready for such an experiment is precisely because his own generals wound up immed immediately infighting and basically destroying what Alexander had created it really would not be until really the ancient Roman Empire that for the first time what we could identify to be a multicultural

experience within one societal governmental reality exists in that is one of the genius inventions of the Romans the Romans realized and Capitalized on the notion that let's not be exclusive rather let's be uh inclusive when the Romans conquered a new Province they really didn't tamper with government that much they put in their own Governor but as long as the native government worked and worked well the Romans left well alone I think this this model uh was proven very successful because it allowed instead of exclusion of everybody who had a little bit of Different religious practice

or ethnicity or even language to be included into Empire and then toward uh the 3r century uh ad uh to come to the situation when all these different ethnicities can actually climb up to the very top of the social structure and still be considered Romans and the state still be considered the Roman state sport is one activity that has always brought people together the modern Olympic Games a Testament to humankind's ability to temporarily put their differences aside and compete the ideals of friendship solidarity and fair play have become known as the Olympic spirit [Applause] [Music]

the Olympic game obviously begun uh in the ancient world in Ancient Greece in particular and would last until effectively shortly before the collapse of the Roman Empire so at least a Thousand years everything stopped in that period in August for the Olympic Games once every four years huge crowds were attracted to Olympia for the [Music] games sure there was money involved betting all those things we associate with modern sports people were making money on it but for better and for worse it was a real recognition of human individuals need and a collective need to ultimately

realize we're all in this Together and that maybe somehow through a competitive a sporting but also Sportsman's like attempt at engaging one another regardless of race race ethnicity uh geographical location class in society uh wealth that we can all recognize that we're all human beings and we're all we're all part of something much greater than [Music] ourselves Sprints and horse races were the events of the first recorded games That took place in Olympia in 776 BCE longer foot races were added later as were Sprints wearing full armor if ually added were track and field events

that combined running throwing and jumping into multi-event competitions the pentathlon comprised five such events and the decathlon was made up of 10 events major difference between the games was the brutality of the ancient games um bare knuckle fighting for the Boxing the wrestling again not allowing eyes or biting and then the ultimate kickboxing wrestling mixture the pantion which was a fight that could all could and did sometimes lead to the death of one of the competitors nevertheless the popularity of boxing has never waned continuing to attract millions of enthusiasts without regard to ethnic origin or

socioeconomic status [Applause] [Music] [Music] the best and worst of human nature was on full display in the ancient world those Empires or those States or those societies that were proven to be successful at least in a certain uh period of time that grew uh grew economically culturally and also politically it's all very well for us to judge their Folly cruelty and excesses but what would they make of [Music] ours there's never been a time in history uh since Antiquity when the values the movement of people the diversity of people the encounter cultures has ever been

greater than today perhaps it's safer to commemorate their considerable achievements and the footsteps of civilization they left behind ancient Society multifaceted has given us good points and some bad Points we've learned from the good points we refined the idea of democracy into an allinclusive idea with votes across gender race and Creed [Music] [Music] [Music] at the dawn of the space age during the 1950s and 60s it was generally assumed that by the 21st century we would be eating our food in pill form and yet here we are still shopping At the farmers market for fresh

produce dietitians may be able to accurately measure the nutritional value of a tomato but somehow a vitamin pill is no substitute you may be surprised at just how much of our techniques in agriculture horiculture and fishing have remained essentially unchanged since ancient times there was a lot more to ancient farming and fishing than Loaves and fish grapes and Figs as long as the human race needs to feed itself these early Footprints of civilization will remain [Music] [Music] in many ways we have it so easy we pick out what we want to eat and drink as

we Cruise the supermarket aisles or surf the net it's all there packaged and labeled even delivered right to the door [Music] still it can be tough putting food on The table just talk to your ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago they could tell you a thing or two about hardship early humans may not have had much Variety in their diet but they survived though the odds were against them we have many lessons to learn from from the Ancient World Imagine for example their water management and how they succeed in growing products greatest probably

innovation in agriculture took place in the Mediterranean in fact and mostly in the eastern part of the Mediterranean that is Western Asia when uh grains were domesticated so it's still very important today yes of course I mean it's BEC increasingly important agriculture is still important because we are taking and receiving from agriculture all that we use for our living basically and the beginnings of Agriculture Mark the beginnings of Civilization the connection between literature and farming on the developments in agriculture are fascinating we have a whole series of early literature that is based around the shepherd

for example and the Shepherds produce the shepherd's day to understand the impact of ancient agriculture we must first travel to a time before history it would be quite a journey from early hunter Gatherers to the food orgies of ancient Rome but these Footprints of civilization are with us every day planet Earth according to the United Nations there are around 7.6 billion people on our Blue Green Planet that's a lot of hungry mouths to feed worldwide production of grain in 2017 to 2018 came to about 12.38 million metric tons that's a stupendously large bowl of [Music]

Cereal modern methods of grain production use Advanced agricultural equipment irrigation fertilizers and [Music] pesticide and to think it all began with someone planting the first seed Europe around 40,000 years ago to get here early Homo sapiens had to Traverse a great distance having Come Out of Africa it's estimated that as few as only 10,000 completed the track the rest had not survived the Perilous Journey once they got to the new lands there were new challenges to face our ancestors had to compete with other primate species for the territories of Eurasia like Homo erectus and the

anderol man as they were a nomadic species Homo sapiens kept moving from place to place hunting and Gathering all along the way very often these men of the paleolitic also as scavenged organs or the fat from Animals that had been killed by much larger animals so they had you know different ways of acquiring food for acquiring calories from the mamals [Music] [Music] basically then around 10,000 years ago someone had the idea to try something different they planted a seed in the ground well it's all about taming nature isn't it it's beginning to think about man's

place within the natural world Taming the natural world taming animals taming the Earth taming the waters and making a comfortable living for oneself you have these uh changes and the transformation of societies the settling down of people in more permanent vill IES that become sometimes cities we also know that these first let's say Revolution happen in uh the area of Mesopotamia the Middle East and Anatolia though we'll never know who came up with this idea it took off and Spread quickly throughout the entire world the planted seeds of wheat rice and corn meant that future

Homo sapiens could stop their ceaseless wandering and live off the land they had the possibility and at the same time the need to experience what could they make with this regular staple not anymore maybe simple boiling but more complex process such as bread making where you know you have the dough and you have all the process Involved with the industrial revolution of course in modern time since the 19th century and right up to our own time storage now has become Way Beyond what the Fresh Foods that are available so what we're struggling with in the

Contemporary diet is this lack of balance the one hand we are overwhelmed with food that has been stored prepared foods on the other hand Fresh Foods become less and less available and more and more expensive because agriculture Has become industrial the process of storage has become more sophisticated a lot of the Fresh Foods we had before totally disappeared so actually there is a kind of evolution towards the past rather than towards the future in terms of what we want to eat today we are looking for healthier food for a food that can sustain in a

more natural way we are basically going towards the employment of techniques of methodologies that were already employed By our [Music] ancestors evidence suggests there were wheat fields in the Fertile Crescent at least 9,000 years ago those first farmers essentially lived on a vegetarian diet whether they liked it or not once humans gained some Mastery over the land they went about the domestication of pigs sheep goats and cattle today it's called animal husbandry probably around 6,000 BC 8 to 6,000 BC what we might call Wild sheep were domesticated and goats this was a major lift to

the daily diet uh in addition to sheep and goats which were domesticated uh this led of course to the production of milk one of the first settlements from the Neolithic Age points to the very beginnings of Agriculture and civilization as we know it it's chattle huk in turkey and it overlooks the cona plain southeast of the present day city Of [Music] cona today agricultural scientists continue to use selective breeding of animals as they seek to make the animals muscles leaner or their milk richer but how far can we take the science of animal [Music] breeding

imagine an ancient ancestor sitting around with a full belly he got thanks to farming he never could have Imagined the footprints of civilization he was leaving behind farming made civilization a natural possibility essentially without agriculture there' be no culture the early literatures talking about the songs of the herdsman the songs of the Drovers the songs of the Shepherds we see farming so intimately connected with the development of literature that it is is fascinating without farming and the tallying of the Herds we don't get an alphabet developing Samaria was an urban population therefore it follows the

pattern of City development Urban Development and therefore a dependency on outside sources of food so you can well imagine that there we have now a trading element in society people who are bringing the food in from the rural areas trading Marketing in the urban areas uh well this demands uh some kind Of recordkeeping who is buying and who is selling and all this becomes suddenly important uh so the kuna Farm SC was developed uh to make those recordings the Sumerians who lived in the part of the world now known as Iraq were one of the

first true civilizations in world history 11,000 years ago Sumerian farmers began to grow the cereals barley and wheat [Music] the earliest Farmers uh would develop Their agricultural Enterprises within a specific geographical location this is Mesopotamia the land between the two uh Rivers the Tigres and the Euphrates in many parts of Middle East yet today you will see scenarios where these grains are being planted harvested as they were 10,000 years ago it's only with the development of agricultural Machinery that that has changed at all and that's in terms of the overall development of Agriculture this is

very Recent indeed and so what puts a great deal of stress into the production of Agriculture and food is of course the growth of [Music] population while Sumerians were growing their crops flock of wild sheep were being herded in the Zagros Mountain range on today's Maps the Zagros Mountain Range lies predominantly in Iran then about 6,500 years ago the invention of the plow took farming to a Whole new level despite the invention initially being made out of the wrong material the plow was basically made of wood that's not the best technology for producing a high

amount of food products the modern farmer would recognize the still today the basic technology and grain production and food production certainly agricultureal production uh is the plow around this time wool was first used for textiles and clothing the Footprints of civilization are found woven into the shirt on your back today's global fashion industry generates $3 trillion or 2% of the world's gross domestic product [Music] annually here's another way to think of it the fashion industry including clothing and textiles currently employs around 60 million people during the Agricultural Revolution that was more than the entire human

population of the World [Music] the first Agricultural Revolution quietly developed over the course of 3500 years but its Footprints are still with us agriculture transformed humankind and made everything else that came after it possible it's inescapable a society that has trouble feeding itself isn't going to last long agriculture's upside was clear but living off the land and living so close To animals was not without its side effects every footprint of civilization also has a shadow the proximity to cattle to their daily agricultural activities and to the land itself all these also generated concrete threat of

being transmitted with different kinds of disease and infections like in recent cases of be flu or infections transmitted by pigs for example still the great killer that is malaria that is our water in the Presence of water and [Music] mosquitoes but it has shifted other elements of agricultural where culture may be related to Modern ills and maladies comes largely from prepared foods not from the fresh food so much or the world but to Industrial Foods so prepared foods uh can often contain of course if they're not well prepared bacteria which can be deathly the pressure

on farmers and agriculturalists To produce massive massive on a mass scale food product particularly in animals has caused such diseases as madcow disease nevertheless by 3500 BCE farming had spread far across Eurasia in only a few thousand years sometimes for better and sometimes worse humans have totally transformed this planet in evolutionary terms that's a blink of an eye an example of this transformation is The Palm Islands in Dubai these islands were artificially created relying on the ancient method of irrigation around the world there are many such examples that were created using ancient agricultural techniques [Music]

the Ancients were the first to transform their environment from arid to arable soil now in the not too distant future man plans to leave the footprints of our current civilization on another Planet contemporary scientists are working on ways to affect the climate of Mars hoping to increase its atmospheric carbon dioxide pressure this would have the effect of warming Mars and make it possible to successfully colonize by increasing its atmospheric carbon dioxide pressure a process called terraforming we can also build up the red planet's atmosphere and water content which would give us the ability to irrigate

it it's a very lofty Ambition NASA estimates that in order in order to make Mars habitable it would take 400 years of terraforming and a mere $4 trillion thousands of years ago ancient Egyptian Farmers had a more modest goal they sought to produce enough food to feed their population in order to accomplish that they would have to do some terraforming of their own I'm rather skeptical about that why because you basically don't have the Conditions that you would have here on the other planet what is possible to say however is that what our ancestors did

in Egypt or in Mesopotamia in terms of making those lands habitable and good for producing crops so this was a real Enterprise because uh those populations did not really have the instruments the tools the technical methodologies that we have today without benefit of an instruction manual the Egyptians terraformed along The Nile River practically everything they did was being done for the first time they grew crops along the banks of that River the crops benefited from the annual floods that left behind kenet a rich black soil this fertile soil was ideal for growing healthy crops in

its own way Egyptian agriculture was as much of an achievement as the building of the pyramids [Applause] it became important very early for the Egyptians to understand how to deal with their River in order to employ the water of the river itself to grow their crops and to grow grain along the river valley the Egyptians grew wheat barley vegetables figs melons pomegranates and Vines they also grew flax which was then made into linen grain was certainly a versatile crop the ancient Egyptians relied on it for their staple diet of bread porridge and beer Egyptian Farmers

also grew Vegetables including cabbage beans cucumbers lettuce onions and leaks through Century after Century it's a way of life that hasn't really changed all that much [Music] [Applause] famous for their Canal system and their invention of the shaduf they may have been the first to use the water wheel they attached a bucket to a long pole at one end and put a weight at the other End the buckets were dropped into the Nile filled with water and raised up with water wheels an ingenious device [Music] traveling along the Nile today you can still see the

shado in use a footprint of civilization well let's just say if it's not broken why fix it it should be even more important it should be a knowledge as more important of course a form of sustainable agriculture and again we have many lessons to learn from The ancient world even in drier regions of the world that they control using smart water infrastructures that were sustainable whereas today as you know with all the technology the water has become more accessible but that has also led to many problems in making the area more arid than before so

this is a real footprint of civilization because how people still use the water of their Rivers how people still employ the water of their rivers To today is very similar to how people of the ancient civilizations used to deal with the same aspect of their economical [Music] life these days we rely on sophisticated equipment and techniques to predict flooding including data sensors Telemetry equipment and satellite assisted weather forecasting but believe it or not the ancient Egyptians invented the very First flood warning system it was called the nyom meter it measured the Nile and predicted its

flooding [Music] between the peak of Egyptian culture and the start of the Roman Empire Greece came to prominence as a culture and civilization during that time one item always seemed to be on the menu regardless of the meal serial the irony that Footprints of civilization lead to the modern breakfast bar is unmistakable In The Odyssey by Homer the diet of the Greeks was depicted as pretty monotonous the bulk of the grain cultivated was barley which was turned into porridge or ground into flour to make bread we know that they had a three meal organization during

the day very early at dawn to make the most of natural light and get ready to work in the field so that's the equivalent of a breakfast but their typical food for this first meal would include some uh cheese some Even fruit like figs and uh some bread and then they would be ready to go to work lunch did exist but it was a minor meal sometime available directly uh where they were was what they consume later in the evening there was the dinner it's called Deon that was definitely their most important meal and this

is when people who could afford would have a little bit more of a [Music] variety perhaps their diet explains all Those six-pack stomachs on Ancient statues back then farming was not an easy way to make a living some things never change but in ancient Greece the amount of good soil and crop land was limited the Greeks relied very heavily on grains and fish in their diet olive oil for example also in fact they developed the olives from what was pit the size of one's small finger into the Magnificent variety of Olives we still have today

so olives were a great Consumption you could have some meat if the family was well off olive oil was very present and um it is known that olive oil and wine were very important component of the their diet not only because of course they make everything tastier and more pleasant but because given the poverty and the limitation of their diet these two extra ingredients Supply vitamins for olive oil and some other uh substances that otherwise would be lacking from what was a very basic Repetitive diet when grapes were harvested they might be consumed as raw

fruit or dried into raisins or of course used in wine production it sounds like the modern Mediterranean diet a healthy diet emulated for centuries that is still fashionable how civilized when the Greeks discovered the grape which was wild at the time also it was no more than a pit the end of your finger and they developed to the grapes More or less that we know today now we have many more varieties of grapes es because modern agriculture but in large part the wines we know today are the various kinds of grapes that make various kinds

of wines were known to Antiquity also wine production was extraordinary important as it was also for medic used as medical purposes and other cooking for example they cooked a lot with and wine of course and drank it all the time [Music] ancient Greek Farms called Storia were generally small consisting of four or five acres of land the farmers could grow enough food to support their families and perhaps a small Surplus to sell in the local market but there were some larger Farms these were generally run by Farm managers so the gentleman farmers who own those

Farms could live it up in the city one record showed such a farmer making 30,000 drmas a year from His estate by contrast the average worker could expect to make just two drmas a day the big food corporations and consortiums of today have an enormous share of the world's wealth there are in fact just 10 companies that control practically all the well-known food and beverage brands in the world [Music] [Music] look serial again these companies employ Thousands of people and rake in Combined revenues of over $350 billion per year in ancient times growing crops and

tending livestock began as a matter of survival but it didn't take long before men being what they are figured that food could do more than fill the bellies of their families food could be exchanged for goods and traded as a commodity in the market until the uh Roman Empire does not appear to be any large food Consortium after the Punic Wars 136 BC however there is a a strong development in agriculture here certainly in Italy because the landbased agriculture workers had been taken off the Farms recruited into the military to conduct the wars which extended

from 264 BC to 146 BC the continual Wars which constructed uh the Roman Empire they were called latifundia so large Estates exactly the translation and we see this problem Becoming bigger and bigger they started with a limited group of elite families the patricians already controlling the best and the majority of the the fields the growth of the latifundia um made it almost impossible for the small holder to survive if you have a small holding that is dependent upon very small Workforce a husband wife and the children growing up and working and the husband and the

Elder sons are away because they've been conscripted Into the army then it's left to a very small and perhaps in feed Workforce that can't maintain a small holding bread was the staple diet of Rome shortages of it could cause rioting or even Rebellion thousands of years later it's still something we see in the headlines of today this became very strong a very dangerous kind of Riot because the rotes threaten the Roman Senator so they had to escape this is Meaningful to make us Understand also the power of the masses in Roman history when the masses

gather and put together their fors and their power they can really ask for more to their Lords and to the ones who are politically responsible for their life there are countries in our modern world whose inflated economies are spiraling out of control in some places this results in shortages of basic Commodities like food and water the desperate populations there Have taken to the streets more than once the result looters plundering food trucks and state-run supermarkets and even slaughtering [Applause] [Music] livestock this isn't to suggest that food riots are a footprint of civilization but Rome's eventual

response to these shortages was for once actually quite civilized the Romans created one of the earliest government Welfare programs it was the 2 Century BCE when some Roman Senators established a wheat allowance for the poor Tiber Gras is probably the first Roman who realizes the disparity between the displaced small holder and the huge estate owner and wants to do something about it of course his fellow senators are very upset about this they don't like the idea that their new found wealth is being undercut by one of their own eventually the only way that Tiberious can

be stopped in his land reforms which were not that revolutionary at the end of the day was by murdering [Music] him consequently these problems of food supply continued going on and on and on until Octavian seized Egypt from Cleopatra and Anthony in 31 BC and the Romans found themselves in all their Glory occupying Egypt the great food supply the Romans began to bring Enormous food supply from Egypt uh grain massive amounts of it they develop ships that would carry massive amounts of this they created a new port aanka to receive that those grain fleets they

created enormous storage facilities down along the Tyber river which are still in Ruins that can be seen today and near Tacho all along are huge facilities for storing grain so they had a food bank and they initiated a process of grain distribution uh to the population of Rome of grain oil wine and later in the Empire they also distributed pork there even was a St eight officer and a connected position to monitor constantly and make sure that there never was a break in this continuous supply of grain it was called anona and it was an

important office that responded to the emperor Julius Caesar a hard-headed man if ever there was was suggested people queuing for grain should be means tested that practice continued for hundreds of Years these were the first ever food banks something still seen around the world today though the Romans could doubtless be a cruel lot they also set the scene for some forms of social justice let's take the example of the US government they have forever subsidized the agriculture in the United States and continued to do it they must maintain a certain level of food supply it's

because that whole system that distribution system that production and Distribution system is closely closely controlled by governments and of course that's exactly the relationship uh that the Empire the Roman emperors had in the ancient world their only legitimacy was the approval of the populations so they focused unlike the Republic they focused their attention their favors on the population at large and that's evident everywhere the satirical poet juvenile famously wrote that the Roman Empire was Fueled by Panet kenas Breads and [Applause] circuses then as now the rich and Powerful the high and mighty Senate the noble

counil or proc Consul the all powerful Emperor still depended on the good graces of the mob or common people and the people said juvenile with a sneer could always be plated by two things PanAm met census bread and circuses the trouble of course was that Juvenile was not suggesting this was a good thing no he was saying the common people were selfish as well as being ignorant of and uninterested in Civ Duty and the modern equivalent to bread and circuses could be junk food and violent video games or maybe fat diets and social media addiction

judge for [Applause] yourself this is a typical footprint of a civilization that we still find today pretty much employed in contemporary Political situation so the Romans used to to provide their people the populace with this with panm at Chens meaning that people just received the little bit they needed in order to survive or not to starve in terms of food and they also were provided with some fun the populace was insured of a basic staple diet grain to make make bread or bread itself and the amount of entertainment either the gladiatorial shows or the circuses

that is the Chariot racing increased Exponentially under the Empire the success of the Roman Empire and its march across the then Known World owed a lot to bread and farming the Romans typically capitalized on the tools and inventions of all other civilizations that had come before them well it's because room production at all levels depended on slavery and uh where you have slavery a large supply of human labor you're not uh prompted you're not inspired to Create machines to replace those slaves in fact it could be dangerous if we look at the big picture slavery

continued in the Western World right up to the Industrial Revolution it was only machines when machines were available that replace the slaves this was an issue in the American Civil War in fact big issue that is the southern states did not and did not want to develop an industrial economy because the slaves would have to be free it would free the Slaves that was dangerous in order to irrigate their crops and plants as well as to sustain both animal and human human life the Romans built aqueducts dams and reservoirs to store and carry water there

are Roman aqueducts still functioning today in France Spain England and Italy the aqua virgin in Rome for instance which supplies water to the Trevy fountains the distribution of food and drink is One of the most important footsteps of civilization there is but trade could only expand but so far over land the sea provided bottomless food baskets or so it seemed they were teaming with life all you had to do was get out there and catch it in the modern world the fishing industry is to put it mildly big business in 2017 the worldwide weight of

all the life hauled from the Seas came to approximately 174 million metric tons No wonder there are widespread concerns about the impact of fishing on the world's oceans demand is beginning to outpace supply [Music] contrast that perspective with how inexhaustible the oceans Bounty must have seemed at the outset of the global fishing trade in terms of the ancient civilizations I would mention the Phoenicians so the Phoenicians really Represents the earliest example of a civilization which is pretty much projected towards the sea because they were inhabiting a very tiny strip of land which corresponds to what

is nowadays Lebanon and they had a very long coastline not only were they the great Navigators of the ancient world but they also invented sea farming this early civilization didn't not really have so many instruments and tools they could not rely on sophisticated Tools in Order to navigate through the sea but anyway they were already expert in terms of the knowledge that they had of the sky and how to orientate their navigation according to precise points in the sky so according to stars or according to the constellations on also according to the motion of the

Sun or the moon the Romans will take the idea of sea farming to the nth degree as they did with so much had agricultural Fisheries I mean it was tended to be for the Exotic end of the market and the production of eels and L pra for the senatorial tables um but it was still sea farming and fishering on a industrial scale this famous Fresco of a fisherman is from the excavation of the Menan town of actii located on the Greek island of Santorini the volcano ravaged ruins of this Menan Town tell us a lot

about the first great seafaring nation of the Mediterranean the Minoans the Minoans were fantastic boat Builders great fishermen and seagoing Traders we still admire the footprints they left behind of their civilization and their life at sea [Music] we know for example the Minoans had almost an obsession with fish and the sea to the point of incorporating all kind of fish in the art including the octopus and other variety of sea animals We know that fish was an important compon component of the Greek diet however in the Greek world we still see fish as a very

humble activity it is with the Roman period that we witness a more industrial approach to fishing comparable to our more modern idea [Music] the great fishing vessels of today trollers catch large volumes of fish in their Nets some of them are still Fishing for tuna off the coast of Sicily in ancient times Sicily was an outpost of Greece there's a poetry about life at Sea then and now modern man mustn't plunder the oceans with the abandon of our ancestors but the ocean's food baskets will most likely help feed the w world for centuries to [Music]

come if it were not for the early Pioneers in agriculture including irrigation Horticulture and viniculture We might still be roaming the wild hunting for our [Music] dinner with Agriculture and the development in Agri culture came civilization civilization through mathematics counting the herds and into literature the development of alphabets Etc so pull up a chair and raise a glass to the footprints of civilization which still lead us from the plate and the pallet what could be more civilized than That man's appetite has not changed uh in all these Thousand Years it may have grown a lot

uh it may have Diversified but food is the central item uh on the agenda all through history [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the human animal it just loves to converse to communicate and these days we have more Ways than ever to connect communicate and Converse there is some concern about how much time we spent on our devices but in so many ways we're just doing what we've always done sending out mess messages the ancient Egyptians Greeks and Romans were always communicating it's one important reason why we know as much about them as we do these were

people who had something Significant to communicate which is why their Footprints of civilization are still with us today [Music] [Music] [Music] Communications artificial intelligence virtual reality they're all evolving so fast [Music] before you know it we'll see technology that can read your mind but don't look Now because it looks like that already exists in 2017 research scientists at MIT announced that they had created a brain decoding device [Music] in the ancient world the only form of communication available to most people was the spoken word there was no email but you might send out a pigeon

or set out for days on Horseback to deliver a message whether it's oral verbal written visual whichever it may be everyone has To agree on certain basic vehicles of communication communication is what makes us human we wouldn't be humans if we were not speaking if we were not communicating to each other our thoughts our emotions the history of language and the birth and the development of different languages is a testament to the importance of communication for the human being the biggest leap in Civilization is the shift from the spoken to the written Word the ability

to write something down and to have records that can be consulted the moment when humans do not rely entirely on memory when it came to the way we communicate the footsteps of civilization had to travel a long and difficult Road in the ancient world we have huge collections of letters there was a primitive Postal Service and these letters were not only intended to be read by the recipient but also later Gather together for publication so we know that there was an exchange of letters on a social level but also transmitting ideas between city states between

armies between generals on the battlefield communication was extremely important but in those cases rather than the written word a lot of it was the spoken word regardless of cultures in terms of maximizing and Expediting the communication of any message the Romans Had it down Bar None more than the Greeks more than the Persians more than the Egyptians primarily because of other things like the network of Roman roads [Music] keep in mind that long after the first alphabets emerged most people wouldn't have been able to read any arriving message the problem of literacy is one of

the most intriguing and important problems for the historians we can say That as far as Egypt is concerned for instance probably 5% of the population could read a text and and the very small percentage of the population that could read I we were talking about 5% maximum 10% at most of a literate public so not everybody of course could read and write so it's not much different between Greece and Rome as far as I know so we have a small population that could read and write very very small and a small population That would actually

understand the great literature that is being produced in this period yet the early and ingenious communicators truly blazed it Trail for all the advances and Communications yet to come [Music] [Music] sending a message it's something most of us do every day press a button and your message is sent via radio waves to a control tower and then to the intendent Recipient's [Music] [Applause] device but while creating and sending messages wasn't always as easy as pressing a few buttons civilizations always had a powerful need to transmit information consider fides the Greek messenger who ran 26 miles

to deliver vital messages during the Persian [Applause] Wars we tend to think today that the Story of phip is running from Marathon to Athens in order to deliver his message Rejoice Rejoice we have W after which he just suddenly died we don't to think that this story is just a nice literary invention or creation why because we just have basically one uh One Source One author lanus of samosata speaking of these centuries after the Battle of Marathon had happened well whether true tale or tall tale the founders of the modern Olympic Games created the marathon

a foot race of 26 miles in his [Music] honor the distance cover is exactly corresponding to the length of a modern Marathon that then inspir Dean and other European patrons to start the first modern Olympic Games where the marathon was an important [Applause] competition eventually there was an even faster way to send a message for those Who could afford it or had the knowhow there was air mail it is believed that the ancient Persians were the first to train birds to carry messages pigeons were among the birds used for this purpose however homing pigeons had

their limitations such as only flying one way and whatever the message it had to be small enough to be written on a tiny piece of paper or the pigeon couldn't carry It ironically even modern communic ations have their limitations for example the limit for one SMS message is 160 characters of course the speed of delivering an SMS message is a bit faster than that of a pigeon alphabetic script and language remains to this day the primary means whether it's on a smartphone or handwritten piece of paper type written on a Blog that it Remains the

most immed immediate and effective means of Communication and sending a message of course technology factors into that and there may be anomalies throughout human history whether that means by using animal services such as the so-called the homing pigeon or whether it's using other acoustical devices the beating of War drums or other visual devices raising of flags different colored Flags especially at Great distances when you want to send a message to somebody you need to be Effective so you want this message to reach the person you want to reach with that very fast this is the

reason why Runners were trained especially in ancient Greece but also in in Rome so that they could take the message and deliver the message on time to the person who was waiting for the message itself the more expensive way was buy horseback humans were much cheaper and Expendable than employing a rider with a horse that Brings up a couple of different issues one is technology and the other is economy while human couriers were cheaper were more economically viable in the long term they were not the most advantageous for achieving such goals [Applause] from ancient time

horses were used to pull wagons and carry people as with most advances in Civilization once someone engaged in an activity everyone eventually would want to participate [Music] [Music] Messengers on Horseback could transport news and letters from place to place all that was required was a good horse a good Horseman and a bit of [Music] coordination the US Postal Service it requires a bit of coordination as well according to their website over 149 billion pieces of mail were delivered by the United States Postal Service in 2017 [Music] but how did we get to this point when

did Postal Services begin to develop there is this important Royal Road uh in the Persian Empire at the time of the key Darius I first a road connecting soua in the South to Sardis in the North in what is now tury in Anatolia it was meant to provide fast connections and communication between the major capitals of the Persian Empire Because within the Persian Empire there was not just one Capital there were four and then five different capitals so obviously it was extremely important for different reasons to maintain good Communications relay Rider networks became a common

feature of every ancient empire worth its salt they were almost exclusively for use by the government or military the Romans being as practical as they were sought to perfect these networks we tend To think that that we are so sophisticated that in the modern time our Postal Service our means of communication are so fast that we cannot possibly be rivaled by what's happening in the ancient world but one of the most interesting little Snippets I think is Kato Kato walks into the Senate and basically triggers the third Punic War by presenting to the Senators a

casket of figs now that might not seem to us particularly interesting but he reminds Us that those figs are fresh and they've just come from Carthage a cargo has moved across the Mediterranean within 3 days Less Than 3 days which means that Carthage the main enemy of Rome could be here within 3 days so if we talking about the transport of produce the transport of information can be even quicker [Music] [Music] of course the cus puus the Roman post Would not have been so efficient were it not for another example of Roman technology their famous

roads a very careful system to make sure that the center of the Empire Rome was connected to the provinces via an efficient and reliable postal system as we would call it today so the cus publicus is in a certain sense the example of a public postal system in the Roman world it was definitely the emperor but also Governors and all the Members of the ruling Elite had access to this [Music] system the Romans were great road builders and the armies are constantly on the March the armies take messages the merchants who follow the Army the

suppliers of the army the suppliers of food stuff are constantly taking messes backwards and forwards so there's a great turning FR in fact there's probably more or just as much movement In the ancient world as there is today messages from one military Camp to another from one General to a general subordinates Etc at the same time everything else in a society will follow from that bring it forward to Footprints of these ancient civilizations and paradigms that we see today this is exactly the same reason motive that the Alan in Germany developed on the European continent

or the interstate system developed under President Eisenhower in the United States of America following World War II primarily for military purposes followed by communication for the military and then every other kind of communication after that Roman roads were the information Super Highway of their time we'll learn more about Roman roads later for now let's get back to the early fundamentals of human Communications to do that we must follow the footprints of civilization back to The beginning the real beginning a long long time before computers could read anyone's mind the ability to speak probably would happen

in the prehistorical time maybe in the ptic period already they could articulate some words they could articulate some sort of primitive thoughts and with the homo sapiens we can see this also from the shape of the scals of this uh hominess of these men so their scull is much more larger than It used to be before this means that their abilities in terms of communicating speaking and or also in terms of thinking uh would actually develop and increase the next giant leap forward was the invention of writing some of the first writing was more like

another familiar form of today's communication these days we routinely send each other pictorials sometimes in a message over Snapchat or Even just an emoji in an email ancient Sumerians Babylonians and Egyptians also routinely used pictorials to communicate the first written languages appeared only about 4,000 years ago they were all partly pictorial telling stories through images but graphemes or alphabetic letters were also developing this is copor script this a Cadian script here an example of classical Sumerian script it is generally accepted that These were the world's first written languages and as this computer generated reconstruction of

Babylon suggests language enabled people to communicate and coordinate their efforts enabling them to create incredible leaps in building that can be held to our modern standards of design and construction we have different testimonies coming also from the subsequent uh Mesopotamian civilizations like the Babylonian civilization with the code of am murabi Where you have this code with more than 200 rules inscribed on this very hard black stone where you have the representation of hamurabi and receiving the Rules from the god the [Music] shamash Egyptian hieroglyphics they were and are amazing they're a unique alphabet with over

1,000 characters after the last Pharaoh in the sunset of the Egyptian World hieroglyphics were no no longer used as A result in only a few centuries their meaning was forgotten we admire these drawings as incredible works of art but for the longest time no one really knew what they meant like the Sphinx at Giza herself the meaning of hieroglyphics was a [Music] secret instant translation devices incl including Google translate these days you can make yourself understood just About anywhere you go now the linguistically challenge need not be at a complete disadvantage when they're abroad it

wasn't always like that in ancient days there were no Wi-Fi connections to complain about and while classical Scholars were able to understand other ancient scripts Egyptian hieroglyphics remained a mystery they were beautiful yes but what did they mean by all those birds and eyes and canes and ducks and bugs and Birds with the faces of men nobody really knew it would have been a very select few and particularly the religious cast and class in ancient Egyptian society that could read or interpret hieroglyphics that they would then communicate to the mass of people maybe people would

have recognized the head of a falcon and understood looking at the face of an obelisk seeing this repeated pattern That that is in fact the god of the sun Horus the Advent again bringing these ancient civilizations and looking at their Footprints today is the Advent of the Emoji now masses of people are using pictograms glyphs very much like Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics at the same time more and more in the so-called smart device culture people are communicating using glyphs and now not using any longer an alphabetic script [Music] Language you can think of this as a

bit like computer coding these days it is everywhere and we've become dependent on it but how many people could actually write a computer code to most of us computer coding language may still be as imperceptible as [Music] hieroglyphic but in terms of reading and writing World literacy statistics are happily On The Rise all the time it's been estimated that a couple Of hundred years ago less than 20% of the world's population could read and write these days less than 20% are estimated to be [Music] illiterate it may come as a surprise to know that even

in the land of hieroglyphics ancient Egypt there were ordinary people who could read and write [Music] in the ruins of an ancient Egyptian town called setat the place of Truth tablets Have been discovered which preserve the stories of the town's people they recorded their thoughts and stories on pieces of pottery such as these some of what they wrote was highly personal and proves that some things don't change [Music] in every civilization people have always shared their thoughts and feelings but with the Advent of reading and writing they were unable to do so as never [Music]

Before so you can't really say that putting the intimate details of people onto social media is something new the Ancients had the same concept but used a different medium one big problem with using hieroglyphics is that while beautiful to look at they require too much time to generate someone needed to come up with something easier to create written communication and eventually someone did [Music] In what is today the country of Lebanon the prosperous Phoenician civilization developed an alphabet regarded as the precursor of all Western alphabets the invention of the alphabet is one of the greatest

innovation in how human communication was made possible obviously writing had been known to previous civilization but it's only when the Phoenicians came up with what is is considered the first alphabetical system that writing and then reading became More and more accessible to larger groups of people a pagram is set and cannot say anything other than that pictogram whereas a word and the association of the word can can move um we can make a word singular we can make a word plural we can decline a verb we can do things with words that we can't do

in pictograms we can say in a pictogram house but we can't say houses without doing two images of houses entering the House we haven't any verbs in [Music] pictograms it's impossible to assign an exact date but the earliest surviving Phoenician inscription is the aheram Epitaph at beblo it is around 10,000 years years old in this close-up view do the letters of the Phoenician alphabet seem oddly familiar it's because this ancient alphabet was the Forerunner of the Latin alphabet which in essence we still use today in a circumstance this Is true with the introduction of emoticons

in a certain sense we go back to a more pictorial expression instead of saying I'm mad you have that little angry face and and you are reverting back to a pictorial writing nevertheless I think that once you have the control of the alphabetical writing for more articulate thoughts it's difficult to fully revert to just a pictorial system modern technology demands fast communication and it means That language is often reduced to pictograms memes or indeed English abbreviated you becoming just a single alphabet word you and that's happening across language in general we finding a lot of

languages coming into difficulty because they don't allow themselves for easy texting um I'm not sure that similar phenomenon was happening in the ancient world but we certainly find a difference between the spoken language of the streets which was abbreviated and The written language of high society or indeed the literary form once the new alphabet was out there Communications could be generated faster the bandwidth had changed with this new userfriendly alphabet and so the written language really began to take off [Music] the Greeks chose to adapt the alphabet and use it to express themselves in miraculous

Ways examples include the great Toms and the Cannons of ancient Greek writings the great tales of the Odyssey and The Iliad by Homer the writings of Plato Aristotle and many more like them but in their early life even great texts such as The Iliad and the Odyssey started out exclusively oral in fact based on our current concept of General authorship Homer never physically wrote those pieces he is however considered the composer of these Tales another author I find particularly relevant for the impact it had with his work is Herodotus he is considered the father of

History because his work represents a full account of the Persian Wars high brow to low brow show business here it's all about escapism and Adventure drama and realism all mixed together creating a big business with box office that's always booming [Applause] You could argue that part of entertainment today is derived from the gladiatorial Arenas of ancient Rome only in the Roman version the blood and guts were [Applause] real the Greeks used the arena to entertain people in a different way they created the arena of theater the drama communicated by the Greeks in arenas such as

these has withstood the test of time the magnificence of the theaters And in their locations shows how important the theater was to the Greeks those slanting Limestone seats made for a great low Tech Acoustic sound system you could be at the Hollywood Bowl the great figures of Greek drama antigon edus Rex Prometheus media were a 50-50 split between men and women such an egalitarian approach demonstrates another way in which the Greeks may have been ahead of their [Music] Time GRE theater storytelling catharsis just think how much we owe the Greeks humans are the storytelling animal

as it is said theater provided an opportunity to let one's emotions out and that then is now could be therapeutic in times of Crisis if you needed to send out a message quickly during times of war or Rebellion or natural disaster what methods were available to you in the year 540 BCE all ancient cultures including those beyond the Mediterranean used smoke signals when visibility allowed to send messages across longer distances by covering a fire with a blanket then by opening the fire again you can actually create puffs of of smoke so you can create signals

by using the fire and the smoke themselves the relaying of messages using beacons and lit torches planted on hilltops was a very common method of Delivery but of course this method was only good for conveying particular pre-arranged signals such as a signal indicating danger or Victory when you have a smoke sign sometimes it can also be detected and decoded or uncoded by your enemy so this is true but there were you know specific techniques whose aim or whose goal was that of avoiding this fact I mean uh so probably your generals could decide to put

the fire on on a specific place on a specific Hill Or Mountains for example that was hidden from the view of of your enemy so there were specific kind of techniques that would make the possibility to be detected or discovered less probable but of course that was not impossible for the enemy to detect your um messages [Music] to culminate the election of a new pope as part of the papal conclave the modern-day College of cardinals in Rome uses smoke [Music] signals the smoke signal is sent when after Secret balloting one Cardinal has received a vote

of 2/3 plus one the ballots are burned after each vote black smoke signals an inconclusive ballot the appearance of white smoke means a new pope has been chosen by the [Applause] Cardinals in the ancient world there were only a few alphabets circulating all J in for attention but of course the Alphabet that spread the fastest and furthest was the Roman or Latin alphabet you might hear it referred to as the English alphabet but be assured it was the Roman Latin alphabet across the ancient empires there was no homogenized language in the Greek Empire we're talking

about the time of Athens we have a number of Greek languages which are separate um not quite fair to call them dialects but Greek was not standardized the Greeks Themselves called anybody who didn't speak Greek barbaroi that is people who tended to bleed like sheeps so anybody who didn't understand the basic tenants of Greek was considered what we call a [Music] barbarian within the Roman World Latin together with Greek which as I said Remain the main language in the eastern part of the Mediterranean was a sort of a global global in relative terms form of

Communication because people were expected to know and uh even read basic Latin and it was a language that went beyond Rome itself and help people exchanging ideas exchanging messages across the entire world of those days so who we I to make a parallel between the use of English that we have today and the use of Latin that we had at the time of the Empire maybe yes probably yes today everybody can uh speak uh English the ancient Roman Empire was vast stretching over many territories as a result the empire was comprised of people with varying

ethnicities speaking many different languages but Latin was the official language of the whole empire it was vital to speak that language for anyone seeking advancement in politics or the military it was also the language of the law and literature eventually there was a high style of Latin spoken by the upper class and So-called vulgar Latins spoken by the poor and the time of the Empire the Latin or the classical Latin was the language employed and used by the elites and among the elites so this is the main the main difference that you had different Styles

and so also different languages also in the time of the development and spread of the Latin you had classical Latin used by writers the men of letters philosophers politicians look at Cesar For example but you also had what is called or what is known as the Vulgar Latin the Ser vulgaris employed maybe in a more archaic phase of the the development of the Latin and also later um spoken the level of the people under the Roman empire particularly under the Eastern Roman Empire Greek was the official language any communication that was done any official documentation

was communicated in Greek not in Latin but the dictates Of the empire were communicated or set up in towns in great Latin inscriptions now whether these Latin inscriptions were understood by a native population is very much doubted leader of the Empire and then towards the end of the Roman civilization and with the shift uh to the early Medieval Times you have the birth of uh National identities and languages step by step throughout the Middle Ages the church will develop and Will flourish on a Roman basis so uh the church WIll acquire and will reuse both

uh the uh territorial structures of the Roman Empire but also the linguistical and cultural structure of the Roman Empire which were represented by the Latin culture basically so the Latin will become the official language of the church as it used to be the official language of the Roman Empire ven VI vich I came I saw I conquered Julius Caesar eus Unum out of many one Heraclitis invino Veritas in wine there is truth P the Elder and carpium sees the day the poet Horus all Latin phrases from the days of the Roman Empire each still in

use to this very day sometimes the footprints of civilization can be found on the tip of your tongue when we choose to tune in to news these days we know we have multiple sources each with their own political view it wasn't quite like that in Ancient Rome but the seeds of the communication Revolution were definitely there the octad DEA was effectively the world's first newspaper this Daily News sheet printed on Prop was distributed at first in the Roman capital and then in different versions across the Empire the ACT to are the daily Deeds the actor

Deeds du on a daily these were notices placed in the Forum to let a literate public be aware of what's going on primarily they were Dissemination of laws military news but increasingly other types of general information were included births deaths marriages um because Rome was very much a superstitious Society um we also have zodiacal readings put in so basically your stars were were actually included the astrologically but those astrologically interested would find that their um their daily Stars their daily horoscope Was sometimes proclaimed in a certain sense it's a form of early newspaper and it

was uh published under the patronage of the emperor in a certain sense it was a way to keep the people updated we know however that in the ancient world the news spread also very quickly orally of course the accuracy of the original content might get deluded but we know that this kind of exchange let's say in the Roman Forum Or at the bath house was really the most important way through which people kept themselves informed on what was going on and that explains why apparently Romans were wasting so much time hanging around in the Forum

or spending long hours in the bath house it's even the ACTA Thea they did not circulate as wide as a modern newspaper not to speak about about TV today the OAA again communication messaging propaganda perhaps is official it's the government It's States those who could read it would read it those who couldn't would ask those who could read it to read it did they trust them Word of Mouth always communication Word of Mouth how did Word of Mouth really spread for example in ancient Rome with the daily news always communication but one of two ways

oral verbal gossip or written graffiti as we understand graffiti today in August 2018 The Washington Post Reported that a team of Danish economists had made a compelling case that roadways built by the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago strongly correlated with present day Prosperity Carl Johan dalgard of the University of Copenhagen argued a causal link between ancient Road building and modern-day Prosperity he and his team took into account modern-day Road and population density and even satellite imagery of Nighttime Lighting in Europe overlaid on maps of the old Roman ways you see all roads really do lead

to Rome the societies that flourished around the Mediterranean in The Classical period they created the alphabet we use today which gave us words of wisdom that were written down and passed on through generations written and communication is very important because uh it gives us a precise idea of our roads the fact that a word is written Down and is no longer has to be memorized but can be consulted in an archive can be filed away becomes a and becomes a permanent record has such a profound effect but what would the people of the great civilizations

be without communication considering that even animals have a form of communication removing communication from the range of human activities would make mankind close to maybe stones death To hearing other humans mute to speak with other humans and ultimately cold to be a human [Music] [Music] [Music] art has the undeniable power to change Minds to Enlighten and reveal the unexpected When Future Generations look at the art of the 20th and 21st centuries what will they make of It and the society that created it in other words what will they make of [Music] us thousands of years

after they were created the great works of art still have influential power [Music] in this episode we will explore the artistic Footprints of civilization that we see right in front of us [Music] today Winston Churchill once said History is written by The Victors that sounds predictably one-sided but the art that civilizations have left behind tells us a great deal about the ancient worlds of the Egyptians Greeks and Romans the concept of art as something that has to do with creativity inspiration personal expression and so on which is more like all the concepts that we generally

associate with the term art nowadays art is ultimately and Fundamentally expression of everything that is Humanity aspires to be that Humanity regrets being art is Humanity's memory of the past and its aspiration and desire for the future it's the first art in parenthesis dates back 26 to 30,000 years ago and is found found in cave drawingss in Southwestern France and in North Western Spain such places as Lasco and the Neo in those places the drawers who are Master drawers Drew figures of rampant animals for example But they also secondly Drew put their hands on the

walls and Drew around their hands they are saying to themselves and to others here is the world we live in I don't think you can find one overarching theme and I think it's probably more useful to think in terms of visual culture than art as such because art implies certain type of value whereas really they're using visual images for different reasons these objects artifacts that we very often use and Refer to as art had normally very different functions in the premodern times not exclusively aesthetic ones but functions such as social political religious and so on

in many cases where especially where there is no written sources that were left from particular periods those artifacts are sometimes exclusively available to us for understanding habits and civilization of the Ancients when we look at the great civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world what do we see what speaks to us nothing spans the centuries in quite the same way as the art of ancient Egypt Greece Rome and others can we not catch a glimpse of ourselves in these relics from the distant past these Footprints of civilization still give pleasure today where does the artistic impulse

begin perhaps at its core it is is simply the desire to express I was here I [Music] existed the chave cave paintings in southern France the artists who made them around 30,000 years ago came from the fine drafts people the paintings display a terrific sense of movement early on they start with visual images of one particular part of themselves which is what we call hand stencils which is the idea of putting your hand up against the wall and then they would Spit paint onto it so you get an outline of the hand what is extraordinary

about this is that it has a very wide geographical basis to it you find it in Indonesia in South America in Africa you find all over the idea of copying your handprint in this way and some people have wondered is this really the start of human consciousness of this idea that I am a person and I am here and this is me some claim that they had some magical Function so that they were meant as a way of reassuring themselves that for example they when they go hunting that the hunt will be successful or that

maybe these drawings also had healing purposes and so on and so forth uh whatever the reason was those initial drawings were also can be perceived as a form of communication it's often said that the early animal depictions are to do with hunting but actually archaeological evidence doesn't entirely Bear that out when we come to examine the diet of early human beings we find that those were not actually the animals that they were eating it may not be they were hunting them it may be they had another significance for them they look at animals and see

some very good qualities that animals may have that maybe we don't have uh today they can see animals as being brave animals as being Fierce so this tells us that man always created the Representation uh the art to speak to him and that's why people in integrity and maybe modern people too speak to statues for example pray to statues they're not asking that matter speak to them but they're asking that that concept speak to them and so art is the continuation and the further development of our communication systems tens of thousands of years after the

first caveman began drawing on walls human beings still leave their Mark Whenever they can the tools and instruments may have changed but the impulse and the concept Remains the Same [Music] [Music] let's go back in history more than 5,000 years when the ancient Egyptians were painting and carving some of the most incredible works of art the world has ever seen an unmistakable style the bust of nef Titi she ruled ancient Egypt mostly as a co-regent but Was for a Time its sole ruler she was at the center of an enormous change in Egyptian religion and

politics this is one of the most iconic pieces of art to survive from ancient Egypt her face is practically symmetrical Flawless what for most people stands out in specifically Egyptian art sculpture or other visual imagery drawing is that it's very static and some suggest that this is precisely to evoke a sense of The Divine Perhaps it is a foreshadowing of an idea that the Divine is not merely beyond the physical but that there is some sort of incarnation in the human of the Divine we certainly have some very idealized features but we also have some

that are clearly not idealized I think they chose the image they wanted for a specific purpose and the purpose was to give a representation of of the person of the most important aspect of the person did nefatiti really look so Beautiful was she so Flawless probably possibly not but maybe that's how she appeared to them the idealization as a method of depiction is not something that was meant necessarily just to give a sty is the representation of a concrete human being but also something that was meant to depict a principle which is something that appears

in the form of a concrete human being but it also represents something that is much more a personal Or something that surpasses concrete individual appearance the Pharaohs and queens of Egypt guarded their images carefully how about women in power today unlike men in power women still feel a pressure to display and maintain a public face their images are retouched and perfected in Photoshop in order to match contemporary perceptions of beauty [Music] [Music] [Music] Nefertiti's bust was created by the court sculptor toot mosa It is believed she actually posed for this bust as the artist's model

in his Studio we know very very little about the sculptors or any of the artists who made the Egyptian art that we see today and this is the only example that we have of an actual arst Studio but we don't know if he was famous in his own day in his own town These Architects or sculptors or painters were not treated in a special way in the ancient Egypt or some other ancient civilizations because they have some talents or because they have something to express in the same sense in which we expect that from artists

nowadays the reason why they had special position was more similar to the special position of scientists uh they have special position they are paid well because they produce something that Within our society or in the ancient Egyptian Society was special was treated as something that an ordinary person cannot do Nefertiti like other pharaohs and queens was instrumental in the creation of ambitious building and arts projects consider the Sphinx at Giza the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings all of these were commissioned by Egyptian royalty old textbooks used to have this idea of the Pharaoh

As bringing in loads of slaves and kind of whipping them into doing this but we now don't really believe that that was so we believe that probably people gave their time that they considered it to be part almost of their tax they may even have felt that there was some honor attached to building this pyramid or building these Monumental temples and so they are doing it at times when they're not at home farming they go and give their time give their Expertise and that's quite interesting why would people do that and it comes down really

to the figure of the leader of course if you were an Egyptian pharaoh such as kufu builder of the great pyramid at Giza money really Was No Object the laborers who did the heavy lifting were paid in food and beer but those same laborers also believe that helping to build the pyramids guaranteed them a place in the afterlife in Egyptian art the importance Of religion cannot be overstated the connection between their religion and art never changed the greatest pieces of art from the Renaissance were also inspired by faith pieces created by Michelangelo d T and

Leonardo da [Music] Vinci indeed with over 2,000 identified deities the Egyptians had a god or goddess for everything while there was one supreme deity raah the sun god there Were gods for mummification wine and beer child birth war and many many [Music] more there were the hawk-headed gods Horus and raw there was sobec with his crocodile head as you can see the Egyptians really let their imaginations run wild there's a significant amount of anthropomorphizing that is rendering human or partially human because humans look to the more noble elements virtues qualities that these things possess the

Strength the power of a lion for example they were expressing the unity of nature that man had particular role which he shared other species a broader species uh in life uh part of it in is dependent food supply or animal which are utilitarian others of it are emotional for example they presented the cats they're cats everywhere in Egyptian art we could say that's emotional possibly the footprints of civilization reveal themselves in unexpected ways There's something strangely familiar about the half human half beast Egyptian deities with supernatural abilities Hollywood has to a certain extent subverted that

by making that bestiality into something heroic and perhaps implying that we might have that inside ourselves as well maybe we also have the ability to be super strong or climb buildings but instead of using those qualities in a bestial way which is what has worried philosophers up till now Perhaps we can use them in a superhero way but the art of ancient Egypt surprises us in many ways realism started to emerge in the art of the later period of ancient Egypt this is the so-called Boston green head it's not a work by Marcel duon or

Luis bis this sculptured head of an Egyptian priest is from the 4th Century bcee the so-called late period of ancient Egypt these days it resides in a reinforced glass case in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a long Way from where was created despite being around 2400 years old it looks like it could have been sculpted in the last 100 years we're so used to stylized inal portraits of Egyptians yet this is a portrait of a man not of a god he has wrinkles on his face and what looks to be a wart on one

cheek and he is definitely overweight we can see that they were depictions of some individual personal Ities but at the same time help us quickly associate them with Egyptian art and Egyptian culture so in a certain sense both heads show us how an artist or sculptor in this particular period can approach his or her subject from the point of view of making a realistic depiction but importing at the same time certain principles of stylization we'll double back to those civilizations around the Mediterranean that rose up after Egypt's decline but now we jump Forward in time

to see how influential the art of antiquity has been to the present the modern-day Renaissance manner woman or to be inclusive Renaissance person they are cultured sophisticated and have polycab titles after their name like writer musician artist for example vgo mortensson is a perfect example he's not only a celebrated actor he also paints writes poetry and fluently speaks Danish French Spanish And English and in so many ways the actual Rena an of the 14th to 17th centuries was about the discovery of ancient works of art if we're thinking about what constitutes a Renaissance person if

we think about the origin of the term the great thing about the Renaissance was that people spanned the Arts and the Sciences so people could be an artist and an architect and examine nature they could write and paint and there is Something about that broad span of knowledge which I think brings knowledge in itself in seeing connections as we've gone on through time we've tended to specialize a lot the Apollo of badier after centuries of neglect it was found in the 15th century and today resides in the Vatican it was most likely carved by Leo

Caris the favorite sculptor of Alexander the Great it was one of the most admired Greek sculptures during the Renaissance it was immediately recognized upon its Discovery in the late 1400s in Rome as a long lost perfect example of the classical ideals symmetry balance Perfection both physically in sculpture as well as in symbolism in interpretation the classical ideal of beauty the aesthetic principle and particularly perhaps the human ideal what it means to be the perfect human the riai bronzes also Greek Discovered in the 1970s by an amateur scuba diver off the calabri coast and finally laokon

and his sons it depicts a priest of Apollo and his two sons in their death throws as they are slain by serpents has there ever been a greater artistic study of human suffering loakan is an interesting character in Greek mythology he was a Trojan priest he was a priest who was very suspicious of the wooden horse and he tried to persuade the Trojans not To bring the wooden horse into TR and this angered the gods because of course they had determined that the Greeks would win the Trojan War so it was said he was going

against the will of the Gods and in order to punish him for that a sea serpent was sent to drag him into the sea and kill him but what is tragic about the story is that it's not just him it's his two young Sons the ancient Greek sculptures were truly great Craftsmen and artists yet Somehow in later centuries so much of their Artistry and technique would be [Music] forgotten just compare the realism of these artworks with the art of the Middle Ages in the centuries before the [Music] [Music] Renaissance medieval art has a power and

a certain charm of its own but since ancient times the draftsmanship sense of proportion and incredible technique have All seemed to have denigrated through the centuries why the Great Leap backwards rather than looking at these Styles as progression of one style and its decline we nowadays prefer to think of them as separate styles that should be judged on their own terms so in instead of comparing particular aspects from the ancient Greek or Roman style that they were using and then saying how good or bad medieval art is compared to these Standards of course in ancient

Greece much of the artwork depicted the Gods in contrast with Egypt the Greek gods reduced from thousands to a mere Baker's Dozen were only depicted in human forms and they all lived on Mount Olympus except Hades of the underworld who was the 13th though Greek gods were Immortal and had superhuman Powers they weren't necessarily great role [Music] models the Greek gods were anything but Well behaved they were one big unhappy family constantly squabbling and having ill-advised sex they could be childish vindictive and Petty probably the most impetuous and infantile of all the gods would be

the chief head of the Gods in Greek pantheon namely Zeus exhibiting probably the least virtuous traits that any human being could possess that of jealousy that of Rage that of allowing those kinds of passions to do harm to Others similar in nature to the Greek gods many of today's celebrities and their culture are notable for their Tantrums bad habits and messy personal lives too many are famous for being famous and not for legitimate achievements art has always conferred prestige on its big money patrons the art world of today is really big business people with very

Deep Pockets pay incredible sums for works by artists who at the time of creating that art Might have struggled just to feed themselves It is believed that van go was only able to sell one of his paintings while he lived and yet a century after he painted it van Go's portrait of Dr gase sold for $82 million what about the artists of the ancient world were they mere servants or glorified trades people did any of them get to be rich while they lived [Music] This is the Aphrodite of nidos a sculpture by the Greek artist

praxides one of the things that pra cites was particularly admired for in his depiction of Aphrodite was the flesh because female flesh is very soft and so to make the statue convincing of being a fully sexualized woman you would have to render that soft flesh and that's very very difficult to do in Marble male flesh for example in a marble statue you can make a male statue look muscular and Hard by polishing but to make such a hard substance look convincing as female flesh is very much more difficult artists like praxides who were freed from

the expected obedience to an emperor state were able to express themselves with impunity some times that meant breaking with the official line in order to make a statement it didn't matter if their work made people uncomfortable or not the Athenians were Rich enough to Sponsor great works of art and architecture what Rich means in the ancient world is not exactly what it means today because we live in a money economy and they did not they probably received the high honors of the community in the Greek World these people were honored very highly or their Tech

their art but not as art what they were doing is giving figuration and Life to Greek beliefs this was very Superior kind of Workmanship but that they did not consider it as quite as we did as art the Parthenon in Athens part of the Acropolis complex a temple to the goddess Athena built after the Athenian victory in the Persian Wars [Music] the statue of Athena has long since disappeared from the Parthenon it was removed by the Romans who probably melted it [Music] Down but a replica of Athena is house thousands of miles away in Nashville

Tennessee the footprints of civilization show up in all kinds of places [Music] it is as you can see very colorful with ruby red lips and sky blue eyes she's robed carrying a richly decorated shield and Spear and she wears a gold helmet what's going on here is it artistic license taken to an extreme the answer might surprise You one of the great shocks I think to a contemporary audience is the idea that these wonderful White marble statues and the temples were in fact painted in 2018 a traveling exhibition called gods in color polychromy in the

Ancient World created equal parts excitement and disbelief here were some of the most famous sculptures of antiquity in glorious [Music] color we are so used to seeing the Sculptures of the ancient world in cool White marble that's been the accepted view since the Renaissance when these Works were rediscovered but it turns out that after centuries of exposure to the elements the vast majority of the statues and sculptures lost their original paint the artists of the time copied what they saw leaving their Stone sculptures unpainted just think of Michelangelo's statue of David for instance White Marble

Perfection for many people actually it would be very shocking to see these sculptures the way ancient Greeks or Romans would see them in an everyday context so so they would be kind of ancient Greek or Roman versions of Photoshopped images they would actually use their paintings and their sculpture to produce images that would be visually appealing including those details that for many People would seem very strange sometimes you can see them also in museums people are shocked and I very often hear that also from my students that they call it [Music] K but if there

was one ancient civilization above all that would be best seen in glorious Technicolor it was ancient Rome from the earliest days of Hollywood there was always something cinematic about the Epic Grandeur of Rome Of course day-to-day life would have been a lot less colorful for the average citizen some of our viewers may remember this cultural moment do you remember when pop music lovers had to make a choice between the Rolling Stones or The Beetles you couldn't really be a fan of both everybody get up art historians can be similarly polarized when it comes to the

art of ancient Greece and Rome Greek art and sculpture have been revered for Centuries and considered an early Pinnacle of human artistic achievement Roman art on the other hand is often seen as a pale imitation though it's always been acknowledged that the Romans were exceptional Builders but then art is part design part craft and sometimes part technology as is the case with these Mighty works of architecture [Music] this is the pantheon in Rome it was Built to the design of Apollo Doris of Damascus and it's as magnificent as bruna's dome in Florence Built Well over

1,000 years later during the Renaissance the footprints of civilization have always reached for the sky it's something that really impresses us but I don't think in itself statistics make a building influential if the building doesn't work as a building we're not going to just be impressed by people telling us the width And the height Etc it's got to actually impact our senses and that's where the pantheon really comes into its own because every time you go into the pantheon it's like you're going into it for the first time it's different different every hour of the

day it's different with the weather it's different with the month of the year it's different with the light it's an extraordinary building the pantheon Greek word meaning To all the gods a Temple dedicated to all the gods was in fact never intended in its current form in the early 2nd Century to be dedicated to all the gods rather the pantheon constructed under the Roman emper hadri in the early 2nd Century was in intentionally designed to be dedicated to one God that God being the god of the sun because at the time Rome was already moving

towards monotheism why because monotheism borrowed from ancient Egypt in Rome Justified the consolidation of complete power into the hands of one namely the emperor in terms of its engineering and architecture a perfectly symmetrical 360° sphere or Circle again symbol of the Divine in itself it's also interestingly enough so wellb built it still has the whitest dome in the world it's never been exceeded although in height there have been many other domes that have been exceed that are much higher the Dome is So well constructed that has never cracked in a city that's had major earthquakes

but the pantheon has never come down the Dome has never cracked it has multiple engineering architectural features that I argued are still unique today to create cre a dome that size at any time in history without internal supports is an extraordinary achievement so all these building techniques its design the proportions the very careful mathematical calculations that enabled This architecture were very something that that fascinated uh people throughout the ages the influence cast by the Dome of the pantheon can be seen AC Ross the planet from Santa Sophia in Istanbul and throughout the Islamic world its

influence is seen in modern America and the iconic architectural World wonder the Taj Mahal [Music] [Music] The Grandeur of Rome is well known but the mighty temples parliaments and public spaces tell only one side of the story what about art on a smaller scale the art that well-to-do Merchants might have used to decorate their homes were the Roman house proud did the wealthy see their homes as Reflections and extensions of their good taste and place in society [Music] [Music] today's strata of those leading the lifestyle of the Rich and Famous have multi-million doll homes and

no end to their pride there was a time when famous rock and R&B musicians were considered part of the counterculture now however they're proud to show off their homes and possessions for the [Music] cameras the Romans reveled in luxury and conspicuous consumption they would Likely have loved lifestyle television show these are wall paintings in the house of lucrecias fronto of Pompei they depict morality tales and episodes from Roman mythology this was of course a wealthy man's villa which was attached to land it was a far reach from the everyday Roman citizen probably it was very

important for people like him to demonstrate to the world that he too had a good education Roman wanted everybody To understand position in society and their level of education and so they decorated their houses with stories from the myths in stories from the Trojan War in historical references and references to gods and goddesses one of the things that we realize is that even quite poor people or people quite far down the social ladder could afford to have their houses painted it was not just for the elite it Was a very visual Society in fact very

visual very polychrome highly colored we will probably never know precisely what all of these wall panels mean but it's reasonable to assume that this residence would have been considered at the time highly stylish and of course some of the best preserved Roman art was literally underfoot the footprints of civilization were laid down in mosaics these cubes of stone ceramic and Glass were arranged precisely to form vivid colorful and intricate designs mosaics were more than decoration for they told stories often packed with drama and violence no Emperor reflects drama and violence quite like the Roman Emperor

Augustus depicted in this statue with or without color it's everything that we expect of a Roman Emperor strong relatively youthful and all conquering there's a message here And not a particularly subtle one the Romans of course were masters of what is referred to today as the dark arts propaganda [Music] this particular image of Augustus was spread throughout the Roman Empire unchanged for the 40 or so years of his reign as Emperor Octavian came to power at a very crucial moment in Roman history there had been a republic the Republic was failing there was violence On

the streets and there was a civil War ultimately the person who gains power after that is Octavian who then becomes Augustus absent on Augustus are wrinkles around his eyes a receding hairline love handles or stoop shoulders he would always be depicted in top shape and form by the time he dies is in his late 70s nearly 80 but the image is still that image from before because the important thing is that everybody understood the image because the image is the image of Restoring the Republic whatever the reality was about how the government was run so

it's not personal vanity it's all political with him everything with him was political Augustus was undoubtedly a hard man who took power in the wake of the assassination of Julius Caesar but there's nothing to suggest he was insane some of his successors were a different Story the Roman Emperor Nero was obsessed with art he was also just plain obsessed Nero is well-versed in poetry And music painting and sculpture he sang and played the liar so it might even be argued that Nero was indeed the first true Renaissance Emperor it's difficult to speculate on Nero's personal

Talent as a performer in the dramatic art one because most of what we have in the written record is negative propaganda against Nero secondly however what we can see of what remains of Nero's Legacy is still visible in different areas Especially in the city of Rome and its surrounding areas his famous do musaa and if that is itself any testimony in Testament to Nero's Talent if you will as an artist maybe not so much a dramatic Performing Artist but certainly an artist with a mind for architecture with a mind for the aesthetic ideal though he

was a most cultured man Nero was also a bloodthirsty madman who had both his mother and his wife murdered he was famous for his many acts Of sickness and depravity it may be best to remember the cultivated Aristocrats of Rome who had an eye for the Finer Things in life but many of them would have also regularly attended the amphitheater to watch men battle each other to death or be fed to wild animals the difference between being cultured and or cultivated and civilized is perhaps being civilized is what any citizen of a civilization is expected

to do how they're expected to Behave and the idea being civilized is top down being cultured being cultivated it comes from something within that the human person may struggle with but nevertheless aspires to something loftier to something Beyond one's own limitations as a human I think we would all like to think that you can educate people in to behaving well but history shows as that isn't true some of the worst most bloodthirsty dictators have loved art and collected it have often Patronized the Arts it didn't mean anything unfortunately these things don't go together and in

fact often I'm told that one will find that people who've made a lot of money out of criminal Enterprises love to put their money into art there's no doubt that the Roman Empire was capable of great tyranny and cruelty it's also true that they left behind a treasure Trove of incredible Architecture dazzling wall paintings and stunning mosaics for that they deserve our unwavering appreciation to this day Treasures from the ancient societies around the Mediterranean are still being Unearthed happily they're more accessible to us than ever the roots of all that we have today are somehow

buried in the Antiquity somewhere the Greeks and Romans created these forms of Art and their content and Their sensibilities and Aesthetics for us if you've never experienced visiting the pyramids the Parthenon or Pompei you can go online to take a virtual tour of any of them in that sense you can easily experience the ancient world as never before we understand art as a very complex set of human activities that come out of some creative urge so trying to eliminate art from human history seems to me to be the same as trying to imagine human history

without human Beings anyone with an eye for today's Beauty drama color and lines can appreciate how the footprints of civilization show up in their everyday lives and what are we with without art art is the expression of of all sorts of things most especially leaving our if you will footprint for those who come after us to see that someone else has already been here has already done that it teaches us to be self-reflective it makes us think about ourselves and it Opens up our creativity it affects us emotionally it's makes us respond and we have

to listen to that in order to get the most out of it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]