Original subtitles

[Corey] What made this machine one of the most

dangerous weapons in the world?

The Germans were convinced that they had created

the holy grail of cryptography.

[Corey] How could there be a carving

of a modern helicopter

on an ancient Egyptian inscription?

[Rebecca] These shapes, they're instantly recognizable

but they are ancient,

they are thousands of years old.

[Corey] And can this 800-year-old device

covered in strange sayings really predict the future?

[Kevin] "In me are strange and hidden things,

I am the revealer of secrets."

[Corey] These are the most remarkable

and mysterious objects on Earth,

hidden away in museums,

laboratories and storage rooms.

Now, new research and technology

can get under their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them,

pull them apart, and zoom in

to reveal the unbelievable,

the ancient,

and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's Strangest Things.

This unassuming 80-year-old device

looks like a typewriter

fitted into a plain wooden box.

But it is one of the greatest secret weapons in history.

[Sascha] What we are looking at

is one of the most successful

and most powerful codemaking machines.

[Corey] Now using cutting edge digital technology,

we can bring it to life.

[dramatic music playing]

[Corey] And reveal its mystifying inner workings

like never before.

This is the Enigma machine.

Measuring just six inches tall by eleven inches wide.

Inside is a complex network of wires

connecting switches and rotors.

Each rotor and plug can be set in a vast number

of different combinations.

It's a revolutionary technology

built on thousands of years

of codemaking and codebreaking.

An encryption machine considered uncrackable.

[Andrew] There are over 150 million,

million, million combinations.

What that means is that if you could check one

every second, it would take over 300 times

the age of the universe to crack the code.

[Corey] How does it work?

What is its fatal flaw?

What is the Enigma machine?

At first glance, it may not look like much.

[Sascha] But looks can be deceiving.

This humble little device was the Nazi secret weapon.

[Corey] It's the end result of an arms race

that has been going on for thousands of years.

[Philip] The Enigma machine uses a cipher

and ciphers are a very ancient device

for encoding and hiding information

that you don't want someone else to read.

[Corey] Two and a half thousands years ago,

ciphers are already common.

The scytale is a device believed to have been used

by the Spartans as early as 400 BCE.

[Tamar] They would wrap a piece of fabric

around the rod and then write their message

across the fabric so that when the fabric was unrolled,

it would just look like a series of letters.

[Corey] But it's got a fatal flaw.

If you had a rod of the same size,

you could then wrap the fabric around

and you'd be able to read the coded message.

[Corey] Keeping messages secret

becomes a never ending battle.

[Sascha] You really get the kind of arms race

where one side or both sides really are trying to develop

increasingly sophisticated codes,

while their rivals are trying to develop

increasingly sophisticated and effective forms

of breaking those codes.

[Corey] Five hundred years later,

Julius Caesar is using a substitution cipher.

[Philip] All the letters throughout the message

are just shifted by the same amount through the alphabet.

Let's say they'd go five letters on,

so all the A's become E's

or B's become the F's, and so forth.

[Corey] But it also has a weakness.

The letter substitution rule is fixed.

Once Caesar's enemies figure out the rule,

they can break every message.

For 2000 years, the battle rages

between codemakers and codebreakers,

until the 1920s,

when this strange and complex device appears.

[Sascha] The Germans were convinced

that they had created

the holy grail of cryptography,

an unbreakable code.

[Corey] The key to its success is its simple operation.

[Andrew] You type a letter on the keyboard,

and then above it there's a panel of lights

also with every letter of the alphabet on them.

And when you press a letter on the keyboard,

a different letter lights up on that panel of lights.

[Corey] Inside Enigma, each letter on the keyboard

is connected electronically to the lightboard

via three rotors.

Within the rotors are a jumble of tiny wires

that transpose one letter into another.

This circuit passes through every rotor

on the way to the lightboard.

What makes Enigma unique

is that every time a letter is pressed,

the first rotor advances by one space.

When it has been all the way around,

the next rotor advances by one and the process begins again.

[Andrew] As those rotors keep on moving,

it changes, randomizes the code.

If I pressed A, I might get a Q.

If I pressed A again, I might get an S.

Press A again, I might get a T.

And that pattern of apparently random letters

makes it very, very hard to decode.

[Corey] An electrical plugboard on the front

adds more ways to scramble the connections.

Yet despite this complexity,

decoding messages is child's play.

All you need is another Enigma machine

set up the same way.

[Andrew] All you have to do is type it

into your Enigma machine configured appropriately

and then the plaintext should appear

flashing on those lights.

You can decode it one letter at a time.

And you can tell your superior officer

the coded message that's been sent.

[Corey] It's the greatest encryption device

the world has ever seen.

The Germans are convinced it's uncrackable.

Why have they gone to so much trouble?

Using weak codes had pretty much

cost the Germans the First World War.

In January 1917, German Secretary of State,

Arthur Zimmerman, sends an encrypted telegram

to the German Embassy in Mexico.

[Sascha] The content of the telegram

was basically an offer to Mexico

to get on the right side of the war

while they had the chance and as a reward,

after the inevitable German victory,

Mexico would be given New Mexico

and other territorial parts of the United States.

[Corey] But British codebreakers

intercept the message.

Unknown to the Germans,

they have already broken the old code

used in the telegram.

They pass the message to the Americans.

Outraged, the US joins the fight

and the war turns against Germany.

[explosion]

[Sascha] It's a huge intelligence failure

and a diplomatic disaster for the Germans.

So as the war ends,

the Germans felt highly motivated

to develop a new coding system

and that's where the Enigma machine comes in.

[Corey] The first people to spot the arrival of Enigma

are Polish intelligence.

They've been keeping a close eye on Germany

with very good reason.

[Sascha] The Treaty of Versailles

that had recreated the nation of Poland,

part of that was built on former territory

of the German Empire.

So they were literally sitting

on what many Germans considered German land.

[Corey] But eight years after the end of the war,

Polish eavesdropping runs into trouble.

[Sascha] All of a sudden, in 1926,

it's like a wall comes down.

They simply can't decipher the codes

that the Germans are using anymore.

[Corey] Enigma has arrived.

For two years, the Polish are deaf

to everything the German military is saying.

In 1928, they finally catch a break.

The Warsaw customs office

receives a package labeled radio parts.

They get an urgent phone call from the Germans saying,

"Oh, this was sent to you by accident,

we need it back immediately."

It was really the urgency of the calls

that alerted them to the fact that they had something

much more important than merely radio parts.

[Corey] The package contains a civilian version of Enigma.

[Sascha] This finally gives them the opportunity

to look at the interior workings

of this codemaking device

that has been confounding their best efforts

at decryption for so long.

[Corey] The question is, can they break the code?

[Corey] The Enigma machine,

Germany believes it's unbreakable.

That doesn't stop Polish intelligence from trying.

In 1932, using a captured civilian Enigma

and other scavenged data,

mathematician Marian Rejewski figures out

how the military versions are wired.

The Poles can once again listen in

on everything the Germans say.

But they are chasing a moving target.

Enigma is evolving.

[Sascha] The Germans continue

to adapt their Enigma machines.

They add new rotors, they wire it differently.

They basically make the code more and more complex,

more and more difficult to break.

[Corey] In response, Rejewski devises his own machine

to fight Enigma.

He calls it the cryptological bomb

or bomba in Polish.

[Sascha] It's assembled from bits

of the Enigma machine as they understand it.

And it's a device that is able to over time

run through the different possible permutations

that the Enigma machine is spitting out.

[Corey] But in September 1939,

Rejewski's attack on Enigma is cut short.

Hitler invades Poland.

[explosion]

[Sascha] The Polish codebreakers do manage

to escape the invasion and they turn over

a lot of the notes they had collected

as well as much of their equipment

to Bletchley Park, which is now gonna become

the center of the British codebreaking efforts.

[Corey] The Germans continue to evolve Enigma.

It grows increasingly complex.

British efforts failed to break it fast enough

to be useful.

Meanwhile, German U-boats are decimating allied ships

carrying vital supplies from America.

[explosion]

The Germans really have the advantage.

They have the perfect weapon for stopping those convoys

and for choking off this vital supply line.

The Unterseeboot, the U-boat,

an invisible, implacable, deadly enemy.

[Corey] They have to break the Enigma messages

sent to the U-boats

before the Atlantic supply line is cut off

and the war is lost.

One man thinks he knows how.

[dramatic music playing]

[Sascha] Alan Turing is really one of the great

mathematical geniuses of the age.

He is a Cambridge graduate.

Absolutely brilliant guy, very eccentric,

and it is into his hands

that this all important mission

of cracking the Enigma code falls.

[Corey] Turing supersizes as the Polish ideas

and builds a mega bomba.

[Andrew] This was an absolutely

incredible computing machine,

rotating drums, miles of wire,

and able to crunch through far more combinations

of Enigma codes than any individual human

could possibly manage.

[Corey] Turing knows that even his huge bombs

can't crack Enigma fast enough.

His genius is to combine them

with the crucial flaw he spotted.

Not in the machine but in the operators.

[Andrew] The human flaw was that

humans sent predictable messages.

For example, one of the most common types of message

was a weather report.

And that means if you get a message

you think might be a weather report,

you've got a word that you can look for inside it,

at a very minimum "wetter", the German word for weather.

[Corey] These known or probable words

are called cribs.

Turing combines them with a second flaw,

and this one is in the supposedly

unbreakable Enigma machine itself.

A letter can never be encrypted to itself.

So I press the letter A,

it goes through this whole tangle of wires

because the A has to be connected to something,

it can never actually come back

and become a letter A in the ciphertext.

[Corey] Turing can now narrow the search for solutions,

using the cribs as a guide.

[Andrew] So you're looking for the word wetter,

you can slide through your text.

And if you find any of the letters

in the right place, you know that isn't your word

and so you can keep on looking.

And once you found this tiny little chink in the armor,

you can use this to decode the rest of the message.

[intense music playing]

[Corey] Now that Turing's bombs

don't have to test every possible solution,

they quickly churn through the remaining possibilities.

Enigma is broken.

Some experts claim that cracking Enigma

shortens the war by up to two years.

[intense music playing]

[Corey] Germany fails to produce

an unbreakable code.

But Enigma starts something big.

[Sascha] In many ways, the Enigma contest,

the contest between the codemakers

and the codebreakers

is the beginning of the information age.

It's the first time that intelligence

and access to intelligence have become the absolute focus

of a major military effort.

[Corey] Even 80 years later,

the lessons of Enigma still apply.

The German military added more rotors

to multiply the complexity in Enigma.

Technology today still does the same thing.

[Andrew] The modern analog of that is the 128

or 256 bit encryption.

Every time you add an extra bit,

you add twice as many patterns

that have to be searched through.

[Corey] But as Turing shows with Enigma,

there's still one flaw no one can avoid...

humans.

[Andrew] All it takes is one person in your company

to click on a dodgy link or open a dodgy attachment

and enter their password and suddenly

hackers can now have access to your network.

It's the human beings who are an inescapable part

of the equation that mean the codes get cracked.

[Corey] So the incredible Enigma machine

and the battle to break it is still teaching us

vital lessons in the modern world.

Even if the computers have gotten a tiny bit faster.

[intense music playing]

[Corey] This is the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos,

almost 300 miles south of Cairo.

Here in the ruins of a 3,000-year-old temple

to the god Osiris stands a stone door lintel,

carved into its surface is an impossible image.

A helicopter.

What's going on?

Now using the latest imaging technology,

we're reconstructing this bizarre artifact

in minute detail.

[intense music playing]

[Corey] The lintel is around six feet long

and two feet high.

Its sandstone surface is carved

with cryptic hieroglyphs,

celebrating the reign of the mighty Pharaoh Seti I.

But amongst them is what clearly

looks like a modern attack helicopter,

with rotor blades, a slick body, and a tail boom.

And even stranger, it's not unique.

Sixty miles away in the Temple of Hathor

at Dendera is a carving that looks strikingly similar

to an electric light bulb.

It has a glass globe, a filament,

and even a set of electrical cables.

There are no shortage of extraordinary theories

which believe that these really represent

advanced technology.

Ancient Egypt is, uh, often a magnet for fringe ideas

and people who, uh, attribute the origin

of these ancient objects to someone else.

[Corey] Aliens and time travel feature prominently

in such wild theories.

But despite appearances, experts are certain

these do not represent modern technologies.

[Rebecca] These shapes look instantly recognizable to us

as modern viewers.

But in fact, they are ancient,

they are thousands of years older.

So the question really becomes what could they be?

[Corey] What do these bizarre carvings mean?

Who made them?

Why is there a modern aircraft

on a 3,000-year-old temple wall?

[Corey] An image carved in the wall

of an ancient Egyptian temple

appears to show a modern helicopter.

This temple was the mortuary temple

of the pharaoh Seti I.

Seti I may not be a household name

in the same way that Tutankhamun is,

nevertheless he achieved a huge amount.

He really stabilized the country after a period

of fragmentation and difficulty.

He achieved a number of military victories

which he then carved on his amazing temples

up and down Egypt.

[Corey] Despite the apparent evidence in the carving,

experts are confident that helicopters

are not one of his tools of war.

The problem for them is that

you can't simply conjure up a helicopter out of thin air.

[Tim] A helicopter requires a number of innovations

in order to literally get off the ground,

understanding the aerodynamics for building the rotor.

You need to have an energy source

that can provide enough power.

You also need some notion of control.

[Corey] And evidence of other essential technologies

from precision metal engineering to lubricants,

gears and engines are notable in Egyptian archeology

only by their absence.

A light bulb is no easier.

You need to generate electricity,

you need cables.

And to make the bulb, you require a key skill,

glass blowing, which is a problem.

[Anna] The ancient Egyptians didn't do glass blowing,

that was a technology that was invented

by the Romans.

[Corey] But if this isn't a light bulb

and this isn't a helicopter,

then what on Earth are they?

[upbeat music playing]

[Corey] Solving the mystery means

diving into the dog-eat-dog world

of the ancient pharaohs.

The so called helicopter inscription

appears at the temple of Osiris in Abydos.

This temple was the mortuary temple

of the pharaoh called Seti I,

that's where everything about this pharaoh

was meant to be immortalized, written for the ages

in the most perfect way possible.

[Corey] The carvings in the temple

tell a story of Seti as a mighty

all conquering king.

The helicopter carving starts life

as one of these gushing inscriptions.

[Rebecca] It reads, he who renews the births,

strong with the sword who subjugates the nine bows,

and the nine bows was a sort of shorthand

to refer to Egypt's enemies.

[Corey] The inscription celebrates

Seti's great achievements for eternity.

At least it does until he dies.

And then his son Ramesses II comes along.

Ramesses II is known as Ramesses the Great.

He's a huge deal when it comes to new kingdom pharaohs.

And certainly at this point in time,

he is second to none.

[Corey] But along with Ramesses' undoubted ability

comes a sizeable ego.

He decides that all the dedications

to his father's greatness will look much better

with his name on them instead.

[Rebecca] So what Ramesses II does is that he comes in,

he fills in the name of his father Seti I

with plaster and then carves in his own name.

[Corey] On the helicopter lintel, it no longer proclaims

Seti as the great leader that crushes Egypt's enemies

but Ramesses.

But the 3,000 years since then

has taken its toll on Ramesses' updates.

Some plaster has fallen out

of one of the pieces of writing.

[Corey] What we see today is a combination

of one hieroglyph carved on top of another.

[Rebecca] So together, they look like a helicopter,

when apart, actually they look quite distinct.

[Corey] So this astonishing carving

has a very human origin.

[Rebecca] These symbols are not in fact evidence

of advanced technologies years before we realized

or alien cultures coming down and building the pyramids.

If anything these symbols

are evidence of the ego of pharaoh.

[Corey] That's one mystery solved.

But the carving at Dendera is in its original state

with no alterations after it is first carved.

So if it's not a light bulb, what exactly is it?

[suspenseful music playing]

[Corey] Despite appearances, Egyptologists are confident

this incredible carving in the Temple of Hathor

is not an electric light.

Because they've seen it before.

[Rebecca] Ancient Egyptian people

of the upper classes certainly would have been able

to look at these images and understand instantly

what they were about.

This is actually a very traditional

and, um, central motif to ancient Egyptian religion.

The filament is actually a snake

which we think represents the god Atum.

The socket is actually a lotus flower

which stands for rebirth.

The glass bulb itself seems to be representative

of the air bubble that is the sky.

And finally at the bottom,

there is actually something that looks like a cable

but it's actually a barque

and this is representative of the barque

that would have carried the sun across the sky.

So you put all of these elements together,

surprise, surprise, the set of carvings

is not actually a light bulb

but it actually tells us a huge amount

about ancient Egyptian theology.

[Corey] So why is it that we can convince ourselves

we see things in these carvings

that just aren't there?

It's not even limited to monumental Egyptian works.

We see strange things everywhere.

We see Jesus in a slice of toast,

faces on rocks,

ducks in clouds.

Even faces on the surface of Mars.

We just keep seeing stuff that isn't there.

What's going on?

[intense music playing]

[Corey] To find out, scientists have used

Magnetoencephalography to directly measure

electrical activity in our brains.

They've discovered that we often

identify these images before we're even conscious

of what we're looking at.

So we recognize the face before the slice of toast

or the helicopter before the ancient carving.

The technical term for this ability

to conjure up images that aren't there

is pareidolia.

[Tim] Pareidolia is a way our brain operates

to efficiently come up with patterns

and recognize patterns.

But at the same time,

it can end up creating flaws, and we'll see patterns

where they don't necessarily exist.

[Corey] But this strange effect

actually keeps us alive.

[Dr. Boll] Part of this is about sheer survival.

Because if we see some ambiguous shape

or shadow amongst the leaves

and we think that's the head of a tiger,

then we run.

If we're wrong in that interpretation,

we haven't really lost anything.

But if we didn't make it

and it really was a tiger then we're done for.

[Corey] Pareidolia relies on spotting things

that are familiar to us, which explains a lot.

Nobody bats an eyelid over the carvings at Dendera

until after the invention

of the electrical light in 1878.

Only then do visitors spot the similarities.

Which also explains why no one notices the helicopter

until the 1980s.

Someday we may see something even more extraordinary

in these hieroglyphs.

We just haven't invented it yet.

Locked away in a glass cabinet in the British Museum

is a mysterious metal mechanism

covered in strange sayings.

[Kevin] "I am the revealer of secrets,

in me are marvels of wisdom

and strange and hidden things."

[Corey] This is a machine from the past

created to tell the future.

Now using cutting edge technology...

we can examine this mysterious device

with forensic precision...

the Geomancy machine.

In all of human civilization,

there is nothing even vaguely similar to this.

There isn't a single reference to it

in any book or manuscript.

It's roughly twice the size of an iPad

and strikingly beautiful.

[Mark] It has this intricate metalwork

with inlays of gold and silver.

[Kevin] This complex item features a range of sliders

and dials and Arabic writing.

[Corey] This extraordinary object

is nearly 800 years old.

It holds the key to mysteries lost to the ages.

What secrets is it hiding?

How does it work?

What exactly is it?

[dramatic music playing]

[Corey] This strange medieval device

is 800 years old.

But what is it?

Written on its front is an Arabic inscription

describing it, but it reads like a riddle.

[Kevin] "The possessor of eloquence

and the silent speaker

and through my speech arise desires and fears.

The judicious one hides their secret thoughts,

but I reveal them."

[Corey] What does it all mean?

The inscriptions may be obscure,

but there are other markings on the face of the machine

that do offer clues.

[Kevin] On the sliders and dials,

we find matrices of dots,

which correspond to similar matrices of dots,

which we see in books about divination.

[Corey] These patterns of dots appear in texts

from Spain, Africa, and England

as far back as the 12th century.

All of them are about an ancient practice

called geomancy.

[Kevin] The practice of geomancy

is the prediction of fate or the future

from the study of the casting of objects

onto the ground and looking at how they fall.

[Corey] So this is a geomancy device

for telling the future.

But how on Earth does it all work?

[Kevin] If we look at the origins

of the term geomancy,

it comes from the Greek.

Gaia for Earth, Manteia for prophecy.

[Corey] Geomancy is a form of divination,

that's fortune telling or prophecy derived

from natural phenomena or objects.

[Kevin] There is pyromancy,

the study of the patterns of flames

to foretell the future, or hydromancy,

looking at patterns on still bodies of water,

or even crystalmancy, the looking into crystal balls

to tell the future.

[dramatic music playing]

[Corey] Geomancy uses sand or soil for the same purpose.

[Mark] Geomancy was practiced throughout the Islamic world.

They had a name for it, which was ilm al-raml,

basically literally the science of sand

or the knowledge of sand to tell the future.

[Kevin] With the expansion of Islam,

this form of geomancy reaches into the European world.

Richard II had a text on geomancy.

[Corey] And he isn't alone.

Several European monarchs

have books on geomancy in their libraries.

[Mark] European politics in the medieval period

was quite volatile, so they certainly wanted

to read the future and determine

what their fate might be including their kingdom.

[Corey] It probably makes sense

to the rulers of the land to incorporate the land itself

in predicting the future.

But the basic method of geomancy

can be practiced by anyone,

from a prince to a pauper.

[Andrew] You start by casting,

you draw a seemingly random collection of dots

whilst holding an idea in your mind

the question that you want to ask.

You eventually come up with all these dots.

[Corey] After each cast,

you add up the total number of dots produced.

[Andrew] And if it comes out as an odd number,

you just draw one dot,

and if it's an even number, you draw two dots.

[Corey] It takes four casts to produce

one geomantic column, called a mother.

Each row contains either one or two dots.

Then you repeat this entire process three times.

You end up with four mother patterns.

[Andrew] It's a lot like binary mathematics,

but instead of one and zero, you're using odd and even,

and you just carry on through those calculations

using those two different states

to generate a whole load of new states.

[Corey] Next, you take the pattern of dots

from the top row of mothers

and from this, you generate a daughter.

Each row of mother dots produces another daughter

for a total of four patterns.

Then from each pair of mothers and daughters,

you create nieces.

[Andrew] You move across those rows

and if you got an even number, you put a two-dot symbol.

If you got an odd number, you just put a single dot.

[Corey] You end up with 16 characters.

This is called a geomantic tableau.

It's the job of the geomancer

to read the future by interpreting it.

Generating the tableau is simple math

that looks much more complex than it actually is,

perhaps intentionally.

[Andrew] Sixteen times sixteen times sixteen times sixteen,

means you've got sixty-five thousand

five hundred and thirty-six combinations in total.

[Corey] It seems like an enormously complex task

for a device built almost 700 years

before the first computer.

So how does the Geomancy machine work?

[dramatic music playing]

[Corey] This bizarre object is the Geomancy machine.

How does it work?

The answer lies behind its highly decorated back cover.

Now, all the individual knobs

and sliders of the mechanism are visible.

And one thing is immediately clear,

none of them are connected to each other.

Turning one setting has no effect

on any of the others.

[Kevin] The Geomancy machine is in some senses,

not a machine at all.

What it is is a set of disconnected dials

and levers which are there to act as a kind of

object of reference or aide memoire.

[Corey] The Geomancy machine

doesn't calculate your fortune.

It's just a fancy upgrade

to scratching marks in the ground

based on your casts.

Not that it matters because it's how you interpret

the tableau that really counts.

[Andrew] It's not as though they have a really standard interpretation,

you go away, and there are literally books

and books of information about how to interpret

every possible outcome.

[Corey] It's the geomancer's job

to produce a prediction from the calculated symbols.

[Andrew] The problem with this process is although

it seems very mathematical and rigorous,

it's actually just a very elaborate way

of generating one of 65,536 random numbers

and then assigning some kind of deeper meaning to it.

[Mark] The whole combination allows you

to have a wide range of interpretations.

The actual interpretation effectively seems made up.

It seems that it could be anything.

[Corey] So, the machine is just geomancy

without getting your hands dirty.

It says as much in its own inscriptions.

[Kevin] "I have spread out the surface of my face

out of humility, and have prepared it

as a substitute for earth."

[Corey] Making this the ultimate deluxe accessory

for an A-list geomancer,

the only one of its kind in the world.

So where does such a unique

and extraordinary device come from

and who made it?

[Mark] The creator of the Geomancy machine

is actually inscribed. His name is given,

Muhammad Khutlukh al-Mawsili.

So, this is a person actually telling us

where he comes from.

[Corey] That name translates as Muhammad

son of Khutlukh from al-Mawsili

or to use its modern name, Mosul in what is now Iraq.

[Kevin] In the 13th century, Mosul was one

of the great Islamic cities of the world.

It was a great commercial center

connected to the Silk Road,

rich in its commercial resources

and also an intellectual center.

[Mark] So, it's a place that we would expect craftsmen

like Muhammad ibn Khutlukh to have been located.

[Corey] One of medieval Mosul's signature trades

is the skillful crafting of one metal into another,

exactly the techniques visible on the Geomancy machine.

[Mark] It's a very highly developed piece

with multiple metals mixed together

and worked in high detail.

So, clearly whoever made it

had a lot of expertise and Mosul was a perfect place

where such a device could have been made.

[Corey] But what inspires them to produce a Geomancy machine

instead of more decorative vases?

The device is really trying to be showy.

It's trying to elevate geomancy practice

to effectively take it from a, kind of,

back alley practice to a, kind of,

scientific professional practice.

[Corey] And that makes perfect sense

because 1,200 years ago,

science is flourishing in the Arabic world.

[Kevin] The 8th through the 13th centuries

were the Islamic Golden Age,

we see the invention of the syringe,

of forceps, of surgery to remove cataracts,

we see an enhancement of knowledge in astronomy.

We see mathematic advances including things like

the decimal point and more complex fractions,

as well as algebraic innovations.

Algebra in fact is an Arabic word.

The word algorithm is another word

that we use today that is also an Arabic word.

And all these developed

during the time of the Islamic Golden Age.

[Kevin] This is the world that gives birth

to the Geomancy machine.

[Corey] But given the popularity of geomancy

in the Arabic world,

why has just one machine ever been found?

The clue may be in the date of the machine's manufacture,

engraved on it is the Muslim years 639

or 1241 to 1242 in the Christian calendar.

Just 16 years later in 1258,

the Golden Age of Islam is snuffed out.

[Mark] The real big blow occurred with the invasion

of the Mongols to the East.

[Kevin] The Mongol Hordes led by the grandson

of the great Genghis Khan

destroyed the accumulated knowledge of Baghdad.

Mosques are destroyed, hospitals are destroyed.

They cast so many books into the river.

It was said to run black with ink.

[Corey] So, this device is produced

during the last hurrah

of the great Islamic Golden Age.

Everything about it is extraordinary,

from its craftsmanship

to its function and its history.

It's a window into the incredible creativity

and energy of the medieval Islamic world.

It's just a shame it completely fails to predict

the coming of the Mongols that ends it all.

[dramatic music playing]