Original subtitles

(MIDDLE EASTERN MUSIC)

This is the untold story

of the making of the modern world.

A fresh perspective,

charting the spread of civilisation across the globe.

From the dawn of mankind

and the first cities and empires

to the belief in one God.

(Sings call to prayer)

We follow the flow of civilisation

from the Middle East,

an extraordinary place that has been a vital link

between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.

An economic, scientific and cultural centre of the world.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

It will be an epic journey of discovery,

from the East...

to the West.

(INSPIRING MUSIC)

(SOFT WOODWIND MUSIC)

Mount Nemrut in modern Turkey

overlooks the ancient river Euphrates.

From here is a spectacular view of Mesopotamia.

At the dawn of mankind this land

between the river Euphrates and Tigris

was the cradle of civilisation.

At the top of Nemrut, hidden beneath a huge man-made tumulus,

is the 2000-year-old tomb of a King - Antiochus.

Antiochus was of Greek and Persian descent.

In homage to this mixed ancestry,

he flanked his tomb with huge statues of Greek and Persian gods:

the Greek gods, Zeus and Heracles

facing west to Greece...

and the Persian gods Oromasdes and Vahagn

facing east to Persia.

Antiochus' great monument symbolises

the meeting of Eastern and Western culture.

Its position, overlooking Mesopotamia,

is a powerful reminder that civilisation, as we largely know it,

was born in this land between two rivers.

(PULSATING MUSIC)

Before the birth of civilisation,

humans were nomads.

Tribes, scouring the landscape for shelter and food.

(PULSING PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

They lived by foraging and hunting.

(MUSIC CRESTS)

But extraordinary new discoveries show

that something dramatic happened around 12,000 years ago.

Hunter-gatherers roaming what is now southern Turkey

did something remarkable.

Excavations in Turkey, at Gébekli Tepe

show they stopped their wandering.

For the first time ever

humans began to build

on a monumental scale.

Changing the landscape.

All these earth mounds we see here are artificial.

They're not done by nature

and they contain other monuments,

monuments like that one we excavated here.

And these earthen mounds are sitting on top of a huge limestone ridge

on its highest point, dominating the landscape here.

Inside these mounds, Professor Klaus Schmidt and his team

are excavating enormous carved stone pillars -

the first man-made monuments ever discovered.

Yeah, the pillars here in C are quite monumental ones.

Unfortunately the two central ones had been destroyed in ancient times.

The upper part is missing

but we know the original height had been about five metres.

The stone pillars reveal that Stone Age man

had a surprisingly high level of artistic sophistication

This one we have a very fine example

of the art of the Stone Age,

with a high relief depicting a predator,

maybe a leopard showing its teeth here,

and the body of the animal, and below, a flat relief of a wild boar.

So we have three levels of art here,

the cubic pillars, the T-shaped pillar,

the high relief and the flat relief.

All together in one stone.

(RHYTHMICAL BEAT)

The discoveries at Gébekli Tepe

have completely revolutionised our understanding of early man.

Long before they began to farm,

hunter-gatherers paused to make their mark on their landscape.

The people who did it still had been hunter-gatherers -

but they are meeting here, they are making festivals, feastings here,

and now they have the manpower

to produce the monolithic pillars,

to transport them and to erect them here in these stone circles.

The building of Gébekli Tepe,

the organisation of labour and resources,

the skilled workmanship involved,

are proof of an extremely complex society

2000 years before man settled permanently to farm.

It has radically changed our understanding

of the birth of civilisation.

This kind of work is not a work done by everyone,

it's a work for specialists.

Also to produce the pillars is a work for specialists,

tor transportation, they had engineers tor such works.

So it means the hunter-gatherer society

was much more developed than we expected before.

(LIVELY MUSIC)

This previously unknown first chapter in man's long journey to civilisation

was discovered here in the Middle East.

The next chapter of this story saw permanent settlements -

taking control of natural resources.

There's a key moment in the human experience

where mankind no longer is just living hand to mouth -

when men and women aren't just running after the natural world

and begging it for succour.

Instead when men and women settle down,

when they start to have fixed communities,

they are for the first time really

in charge of the world around them

and this gives them an extraordinary footing

from which civilisation itself can grow.

This next vital step in mankind's journey

also happened in this region.

Humans began to settle permanently

and build houses and communities -

starting over 10,000 years ago .

Evidence of this vital change

has also been discovered in Southern Turkey,

at Qatalhöyük.

Qatalhöyük was on a river.

It was a source oi water and another vital component of life here -

mud for building.

These ancient mud walls might look humble

but they represent a key stage in civilisation -

the ability to build settlements.

Over 9000 years ago

Qatalhöyük looked like this -

houses with ovens and rooftop entrances.

It's a story that's been pieced together by archaeology.

So what we've got here are a series of mud brick houses.

There's a house here and a house here,

there's another one behind and one behind me here.

The houses were built out of mud bricks

that was collected off-site

and they were generally sun-dried.

Here you can see a line of bricks -

they're very long bricks but here you can also see the mortar.

The river by Qatalhöyük didn't only provide mud for building.

It had another gift.

The rich soils proved very fertile.

People here had taken another revolutionary step -

farming.

In the storage areas we find a series of clay-walled bins

and here's the wall of one bin.

Within these bins we've found nuts,

we've found pistachio nuts, almond nuts,

we've found peas, wheat.

From there we can learn about

what they were growing out in their environment,

what they were farming.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

The evidence is that the earliest crops

and the domestication of animals

began in Southern Turkey over 10,000 years ago

and gradually spread through the Fertile Crescent

east to Mesopotamia

and west to the Mediterranean.

Farming and the settled communities that worked the land

expanded through Europe

and by 7000 years ago had arrived at its western edge.

The Eastern idea of agriculture transformed societies everywhere.

Agriculture produced a revolution in technology too.

This was the Neolithic Era,

the New Stone Age.

Archaeologists have discovered the tell-tale signs

of its highly effective technology.

On site we also find some of the tools

that they would have been using.

So we find stone grinding tools

that they may have crushed the wheat seeds up

to make a kind of flour

or crushed it up for a gruel.

And we also find obsidian tools -

obsidian is a volcanic glass -

which may have been part of a sickle.

And... something like this

may have been a hunting tool.

With agriculture and permanent settlement

came more sophisticated technology -

first pottery, tor storing and transporting produce,

then metal and metalworking tor tools and utensils.

Farming was responsible for a revolution in society too.

It saw the careful organisation of communal projects

like irrigation and harvesting,

and it needed rules for the division,

maintenance and inheritance of land.

The essence of the Neolithic is about domesticating environment

and settling down in one place.

The Neolithic is the beginnings of our journey

to where we are today.

An organised food supply could sustain a growing population.

People came together in ever-larger groups

and man began to form the beginnings

of what we now know as civilisation.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

And it was in the rich and fertile lands

along the great rivers of the East

where civilisation was born.

(SLOW ORIENTAL MUSIC)

Rivers were the lifeline of civilisation -

from the Indus and Ganges in India

to the Nile in Egypt.

Around 6000 years ago,

between the two great Middle Eastern rivers - the Tigris and Euphrates -

the world's first cities began to emerge.

One of the earliest cities

was built on the western edge of Mesopotamia.

Mari, in modern-day Syria,

was re-discovered in 1933.

Mari was a purpose-built city sited on the banks of the Euphrates.

The city was circular

and was supplied with water by a central channel.

Mari was strategically placed to profit from trade routes

between Mesopotamia and more distant sources of wealth.

Mari grew rich through trade and agriculture.

But the wealth wasn't shared equally.

Instead a social hierarchy developed

and at its head there was a king.

(WHISPERING VOICES)

In Mari, the past can speak directly to us.

(WHISPERING VOICES)

Archaeologists discovered evidence

of one of civilisation's greatest inventions...

writing.

Thousands of inscribed tablets were found

using text invented in Mesopotamia

around 5000 years ago.

It is perhaps in some ways

the most momentous achievement

which Homo Sapiens has come up with,

the idea that you can make a set of signs on a surface

which other people would recognise

and from that, get the words of their language.

It's a momentous and most wonderful invention,

the results of which are still crucial to us today.

Scribes used a cut reed

pressing it into the surface of wet clay.

The reed made a line with a wedge at the end.

The scholars who deciphered the Sumerian texts

gave it a Latin name - calling it cuneiform

after the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge...

it's fairly clear that the process of writing

first got off the ground for administrative reasons...

where there was too much to keep control of in any other way.

The very earliest signs are what we call pictographs

where you have a linear, rather infantile sketch

of a given thing like a bird

which looks like a bird and it means “bird...

But what happened in Mesopotamia and uniquely there,

is that the early people who were experimenting with writing

had the idea in their minds that you could draw a symbol -

not for what it looked like but for what it sounded like.

And once this crucial step had taken place

they very rapidly developed a whole range of signs

which they could use to spell out the sound of their language.

It's impossible to overestimate the impact

of the invention of writing.

It soon spread across the Middle East,

quickly replacing pictograms and hieroglyphs.

And then it spread beyond to much of the rest of the world.

My Lord must pay close attention to this tablet.

The cuneiform tablets discovered at Mari

reveal the scope of organisation required

in the first cities of civilisation.

How to lay siege to...

These administrative tablets show us

that the society was really organised,

it was not just a simple village.

It has to handle a whole city

and the hinterland also.

So we know a lot about this society

and specifically about those who were on top of this society,

so the king, the priests and all this administration.

The tablets give us a great insight into their world.

But it isn't only writing that allows us to look back at this civilisation.

One of the greatest treasures of Sumerian civilisation

is housed today in the British Museum -

it's known as The Standard of Ur.

This object from Southern Iraq

is just astonishingly beautiful.

It was made over 4500 years ago

and although we don't know exactly what it was used for

there is no doubting how precious it was.

Because if you just look at the materials that were used -

there is lapis lazuli stone here,

and red limestone and precious shells.

It clearly tells us a story.

And what I think this is, is this is a society that is working,

everything is very ordered.

You have the men labouring in the fields at the bottom,

then you have a procession oi fat animals being brought in -

probably for some kind of religious sacrifice -

there are goats and handfuls of fish and even cattle.

And then up at the top here is the court -

there are men sitting toasting the king

and clearly he is in control of the people beneath him.

It's actually a very peaceful and cultured scene.

But ii you go round the other side of this

you find that reality is a little different.

Because here we have a terrible scene of war.

Here at the bottom you have men who are being trampled by charging horses

as they pull their chariots.

You have naked men being brought in grovelling to the king

who is standing with his staff.

So it's a cogent and visceral reminder

that when you create a great civilisation,

this is a jewel that attracts thieves

and there are always going to be others who want what you've got.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Civilisation brought rivalry and competition

to the city kingdoms of Mesopotamia...

and that would lead to war and conquest.

A new age of Empire was beginning.

Mari was a rich target

and was destroyed twice by rival powers.

First, over 4000 years ago, by the Akkadians,

who created the world's first empire in Mesopotamia.

Then finally the Akkadians' imperial successors, the Babylonians,

put Mari to the flame.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Mari and Sumerian civilisation were destroyed...

but civilisation itself survived

and spread from its Mesopotamian beginnings.

(DRUMBEAT)

From their mountain home in Anatolia,

the Hittites created a 600-year-long civilisation

in a hostile landscape that had none of the natural advantages

of the rich and fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia.

Here they built one of the largest empires of the ancient world.

Their historical achievement is

that they were able to out-balance

natural geographical obstacles

by an enormous amount of control,

social organisation and discipline.

They were able to build up an empire,

controlling the majority of Anatolia,

present-day Turkey,

but also large regions of Syria,

the Lebanon, the northern part of Lebanon -

so in that time they were one of the global players

in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The huge Hittite capital Hattusa

housed a population oi 50,000 people.

It was surrounded by massive outer walls

with elaborately decorated lion gateways.

On the highest point in the landscape,

the Hittites built an enormous monument to their achievement.

(THUNDER)

Visible from 2O kilometres away,

it wasn't a defensive rampart

but was built simply to house a ceremonial route.

The 3500-year-old structure

is a testament to how far the people of the ancient world had come

in their journey from hunter-gatherer to civilisation.

This enormous artificial structure of Yerkapi

is one of the most impressive buildings in Hattusa.

The whole building is, at the end, a massive statement,

a stony statement of Hittite...

power, influence, civilisation of

what they are think they are themselves.

At its peak, the Hittite Empire

rivalled Egypt for control of the Middle East.

But in the West a new power was emerging.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

At the end of the second millennium,

traders from Greece began to establish colonies

along the coast of Asia Minor.

One place where these ancient Greeks ventured

was the city of Troy.

The city rising above these plains was mythologised as a place

where East met West in brutal conflict.

The Greek poet Homer immortalised it

in the epic stories the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Although we may think of the stories of the Trojan Wars

as just a legend or a myth,

archaeologists have found Troy.

This is one of the most ancient entrances into the city.

We know that the Greeks really thought

the Trojan War did happen here.

Homer's tale of the Trojan War reflects the real moment in history

when the ancient Greeks began to expand

to the older, more established civilisations to the east.

In the next centuries the city-states of ancient Greece

grew in power and cultural influence.

Today, in the West, Ancient Greece is usually considered

to be the home of civilisation -

where classical ideas and ideals of natural philosophy,

literature and art were born.

(SOARING MUSIC)

But the place accorded to Greece in the history of civilisation

has obscured the East's contribution

to the making of the modern world.

Although they share a long history of civilisation,

East and West are more often characterised as rivals.

When you look at the history of the relationship between East and West,

it could seem just like a catalogue

of retribution and counter-retribution.

But actually the whole time

these civilisations were learning from one another

and their fates were inextricably linked.

Someone who rediscovered this Eastern legacy

was a leader who was to change history...

Alexander the Great.

He came to Troy in 334 BC

at the head of a Greek Army, heading east.

When Alexander the Great lands at Troy

we're told that he slept with a dagger

and a copy of Homer's Iliad under his pillow.

This was a man who was a new Greek

going to conquer Eastern lands

just as the heroes of the Trojan wars had before.

According to the Greek historians,

Alexander made a special visit to Troy's temple of Athena.

(UPLIFTING MUSIC)

When Alexander came here there would have been a temple to Athena here.

We have to use our imaginations a little bit

because only some foundations remain.

The stories tell us that one of the things that he found in the temple

were objects and relics that

were said to date back to the Trojan war.

So one of the things that Alexander does

in a symbolic gesture,

is he takes off his own armour,

takes some of this old Trojan war armour - possibly of Achilles -

and puts it on instead.

And in doing so he's making a connection to the people

that he thought were his ancestors.

Inspired by his visit to Troy,

Alexander began his campaign of conquest in earnest.

He was intent on conquering the Persian Empire.

Forged 200 years before Alexander's time,

it had grown to be the largest empire in the ancient world,

spanning Asia, Africa and Europe.

Alexander won his first encounter with the Persians

at the Battle of the Granicus River.

But the further he went

the more he was to encounter the legacy owed to the East.

Miletus was typical of the mixed Eastern and Western influences

Alexander discovered.

Miletus was in the Persian empire,

but it was populated by Greeks

who had lived on the coast of Asia Minor for centuries.

Extraordinary new discoveries here

have thrown sharp new light on how East and West mixed.

Excavations are showing how Eastern ideas influenced the West.

Aphrodite was one of the greatest Greek goddesses.

In her sanctuary here

archaeologists have discovered beautiful figurines

given as offerings to the goddess.

From these, they have pieced together evidence

showing the remarkable degree to which the Greeks in Miletus

absorbed Eastern ideas...

even in their gods.

This is a very early piece,

showing Aphrodite as a mighty goddess of vegetation.

And this is another one showing her

as the mistress of animals.

These are all old, Near Eastern symbols.

The Aphrodite figurines discovered in Miletus

are nearly all Eastern rather than Greek in style.

It seems clear that the Miletians' idea of Aphrodite came from the East.

The Aphrodite is of oriental origin

and she came in this naked shape to the Greeks.

So they were taking up

all these oriental influences.

Careful examination has shown

that the Greeks of Miletus also learnt

how to make their goddess figurines

from Eastern teachers.

These figurines are flat on the back.

These come from a mould, a negative,

put the clay into it and wait until it dried.

They took it out and worked it over with a stick like this,

doing the details of which we are... it didn't come from the mould

and then it was fired and it came out like this.

Making figurines in a mould is an Eastern technique.

The Greeks of Miletus combined it with their own technique

of making figurines on a potter's wheel.

So we have a very neat idea

of influences coming from the East

and how they were adapted to their own,

to their own tradition of the Greeks.

Greek colonies in Asia Minor like Miletus

had a crucial role in transporting Eastern ideas to the West via Greece.

Alexander himself would find in his campaign against the Persian Empire,

that East and West were inextricably mixed

and what Alexander proudly took to be his own Greek civilisation

in reality sprang from an Eastern source.

After capturing the Greek cities of western Asia Minor

Alexander struck East-

defeating the Persians once more at the Battle of lssus.

Then he turned south, capturing Syria and Egypt,

before venturing to Mesopotamia

and finally defeating the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela.

Now Alexander readied himself to capture the ancient city of Babylon...

the jewel in the Eastern crown.

Taking Babylon was key to Alexander's dream of a world empire.

(PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

Once in a fertile landscape,

Babylon lies 85 kilometres south of Baghdad in Iraq.

(HAUNTING FLUTE MUSIC)

Some reconstruction of Babylon began in 1983.

The ancient city had an illustrious history.

One of the first cities of civilisation,

it had been a dominant power in Mesopotamia

and had been the capital of the great Babylonian Empire.

The largest city on earth with a population of nearly 200,000 people,

Babylon was a place of great wealth and architectural splendour.

Stories circulated throughout the ancient world

about the glory of ancient Babylon

but the reality must have been five times as impressive.

This was a city that was surrounded by a high wall,

glazed with beautiful blue tiles.

Alexander entered Babylon through a ceremonial gate

decorated with reliefs of aurochs and dragons,

dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.

(BRIGHT ORIENTAL MUSIC)

From here a 180-metre ceremonial processional way,

adorned with lions sacred to Ishtar,

led into the city.

Nothing in Alexander's experience

could have prepared him for the wonder of Babylon.

Reassembled from hundreds of thousands of fragments

excavated at Babylon,

the Ishtar Gate and processional way

now stand in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.

(MUSIC SWELLS)

Ishtar would have been familiar to Alexander.

He would have recognised in her the characteristics

of his Greek goddess of love and war, Aphrodite.

Well, Ishtar was the most important goddess of the Babylonians.

We can get a feeling for her from the ancient sources in Mesopotamia.

And you look at the goddess Aphrodite,

you might put them in the same category, they have the same status,

they're always shown to be beautiful themselves

and you could say that Aphrodite was as it were,

the counterpart in Greek culture

to Ishtar in Babylonian culture.

Ishtar had a starring role

in one of the first and greatest stories of Mesopotamian literature -

the Epic of Gilgamesh.

This piece of clay from the Library of Assyria

is one of the bits of the story of the Epic' of Gilgamesh

and the Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic example

of what you might call a Hollywood story.

You have a hero, he has his adventures,

there are monsters, there are beautiful women,

there's treachery, there's friendship,

there's adventure, there's the flood

and everything all mixed up in one great narrative.

Ishtar decides she wants to seduce Gilgamesh

and in this rather lively and funny description,

Gilgamesh spurns her.

And here he lists in a wholes series of incriminating paragraphs

the disastrous fate of her earlier lovers.

(MAN HEADS IN SUMERIAN)

Gilgamesh's point is “If I give in what are you going to turn me into?

“I'll have nothing to do with it." She gets very angry.

And you have to imagine Ishtar slamming the door

at the end of this conversation and walking out in a huff,

exactly like in a movie.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature -

dating back 1400 years before Homer.

The idea of a real person like Gilgamesh,

mythologised in a cycle of stories,

would have been very familiar to Alexander the Great.

The whole idea of the Homeric sources that people know so well

measure up in a very intriguing way

with this Babylonian example behind them.

You can see it's the same kind of literature in the same function.

They set us on the road of literacy and literature

from really a very remote...

5000 years ago it was already on the way.

People stopped writing in cuneiform script 2000 years ago

and knowledge of it was lost to the world.

(VOCAL MUSIC)

It was only in the 19th century, after the rediscovery of cuneiform tablets,

that scholars deciphered the ancient texts.

As soon as we started to translate these cuneiform texts, we realised

this was a rich and wonderful and sophisticated world -

a world where there were great cultures,

where belief systems were incredibly nuanced and various.

And in a way it's our fault

that we don't understand the riches of the Eastern past.

It is all there for the taking -

but for years we didn't know how to access it.

This was at a period in which the origins of Western civilisation

were thought to begin with the Greeks and Romans.

And the thought of having to rethink ancient history

and really double the length of human civilisation

from beginning in about 500 BC with the Greeks,

to beginning in 3000 BC,

was just too much to contemplate.

And it's taken us 150 years or more

really just to assimilate the doubling of human history

into our own self identities.

Once cuneiform was translated,

a whole new world of ancient Mesopotamian culture

was opened up to Western scholars.

The fact is, of course, that Greek ideas did not come out of nowhere,

and we can show nowadays, there's much more understanding of it,

that certain portions of Greek, mathematics, astronomy,

medicine and other disciplines,

in fact embody traditions which were current in Babylonia.

(FAST-PACED PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)

Discoveries in Babylon also reveal

that the ancient Greeks knew how to read cuneiform

and had no difficulties in appreciating and assimilating

the ancient learning of the East.

A cuneiform tablet found in the ruins of Babylon

is remarkable evidence of the efforts of one Greek scholar

to learn Babylonian.

What you have is your Babylonian school exercise on the one side,

and then on the back you have a transcription into Greek letters

of those signs.

So for example, we've got one which has words for “canal“,

“big canal", “small canal", “ditch", “irrigation" -

Babylonian words in cuneiform writing.

And on the back the Greek person

who probably can never remember these signs

and got fed up with trying to remember them

has transliterated them to Greek letters on the back.

The very words in Sumerian and Babylonian

are spelled out in Greek letters on the back as a crib.

(LIVELY LYRICAL MUSIC)

It wasn't just Babylonian literature that the Greeks studied.

One of the East's greatest contributions to civilisation

was in the study of science.

One Greek familiar with Babylonian learning

was Thales of Miletus.

Thales accurately predicted a solar eclipse.

It occurred on May 28, 585 BC.

Thales could only have calculated this eclipse

by relying on the records of Babylonian astronomers.

Babylonian astronomers kept precise lists

of eclipses, equinoxes and solstices

from 747 BC...

200 years before Thales predicted an eclipse.

They were driven by a compulsion to understand portents and omens

and assuage their gods.

So all of these get recorded systematically

night after night, month after month,

year after year for over 600 years.

By Alexander's time all the omens had been collected together

into an enormous series of observations and predictions.

And this tablet, which is the 21st chapter

of the 70-chapter series,

is all about solar eclipses.

And it was gradually through very long periods of observing the skies

that scholars noticed that these events were not random at all

and were not just the whims of the gods

but were very sophisticated mathematical patterns,

often very complex and often very long in duration.

And so by about the sixth or fifth century BC

the Babylonians had changed their understanding

of how the heavens worked.

It wasn't just the arbitrary messages from the gods

but it really was a signal that gods had created

a very deeply mathematical world.

Babylon's astronomers systematically observed their world,

recorded their data and applied logic to what they found.

Their spirit of enquiry had already enthused Greek thinkers

like Thales of Miletus

but Alexanders arrival in Babylon

accelerated the process of Greek absorption

of ancient Eastern learning.

Alexander was fascinated by Babylonian astronomy.

And he had his historian, his reporter on the ground,

translate as much of the Babylonian astronomical observations

into Greek as he could, and to send them back to Macedon.

So, from the 4th century onwards we can point

to many, many, very specific examples

where we can be absolutely confident

that individual Greek scholars had access

to the writings of individual, named, Babylonian scholars,

and that's really very exciting.

Babylonian enquiry and Greek logic formed a scientific method

that transformed the world.

Greeks like Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy

are commemorated for their role in this process

but the astronomers of Babylon also deserve their place

amongst the forefathers of science.

Every time we look at our watches we're doing something Babylonian,

every time you read the horoscopes in the newspapers

we're doing something Babylonian,

every time we measure an angle we're doing something Babylonian.

There are some very fundamental everyday practices that we all do

which are, we owe to ancient Middle-Eastern civilisations

that we really just don't think about.

The Babylonians were brilliant mathematicians -

they were the first to use angles, degrees, fractions, and equations.

They didn't count in our decimal system using 10 as a base -

but used 60 instead -

a method known as the sexagesimal system.

When you're a child and someone teaches you how to read the time,

if you're an inquisitive kind oi person you ask yourself

why on earth is there 60 seconds and 60 minutes,

where does this 60 come from?

This 60 comes from Babylonia.

From very early on in the third millennium,

all calculations in ancient Mesopotamia

were done on a sexagesimal system.

They never, like us, took ten fingers

and used that tor their mathematical basis,

they used the sexagesimal system.

(CLOCKS TICK AND RING)

60 is a more versatile number than 10 to base a numeric system on -

as it is divisible by 2 and 5, but also by 3.

It's more flexible for complex astronomical calculations.

The 60-base system gave the Babylonians

60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour,

360 days in a year, and 360 degrees in a circle.

One brilliant Babylonian idea

was that the sky was a sphere

that could be measured in 360 degrees.

The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, was founded in 1675.

Astronomers here tracked the movement of the stars

and collected data to allow ships' navigators

to calculate their position at sea

Well, I think you can see traces of what was done way back then

in the kinds of astronomy that was done at the observatory

when it was first founded in the 17th century.

Like in Babylon thousands of years before,

astronomers here divided the world into 360 degrees

but put the Royal Observatory on the line of zero degrees.

It's known as the prime meridian.

Astronomers still use, and were using then, 360 degrees,

dividing that into minutes and seconds

to get more and more precise divisions in the sky.

And then also taking time measurements

as the stars cross round the heavens

to get a position of where they are.

The first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, John Flamsteed,

mapped the skies and catalogued the stars

just like the Babylonians, 3500 years before him.

And we can see inside this book, which is his Historia Coelestis,

this is his life's work essentially

from all the observations that he did.

We can see the list of the stars, the planets, the moon,

and their positions as he observed them over many years.

Flamsteed inherited a tradition of observation

that goes back through his predecessors,

through the Renaissance, through Arabic scholars,

back through the Romans, the Greeks,

ultimately going back to the Babylonians as well.

The Babylonian numerical system

also created the 12 signs of the zodiac.

They sub-divided those 360 degrees

into 12 sections of 30 degrees

and this chart here shows it very clearly.

Here we can see the triangles into those 30-degree segments,

and each of the 30-degree segments is associated

with a particular constellation that's appears near its middle.

So we have Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo

Cancer and so on around here.

Extraordinarily, the symbols and names we still use for the stars

go all the way back to the Babylonian astronomers

of ancient times.

We have them, the names of the zodiacal signs

written on hundreds and if not thousands of tablets

but this little one here is particularly interesting to us.

Each line has a different zodiacal sign, all the way down here.

So this is the eighth, this is “Scorpio” written along here,

there's scorpion,

and then on the other side, here are the last tour

and then a line underneath to show that's the end of the series,

there are no more than 12.

So all the names of the zodiac are originally Babylonian.

Taurus the bull, it's called “the bull of heaven" in Babylonian.

Leo is the lion.

The Babylonian zodiac was one of mankind's first attempts

to find order and meaning

in our apparently incomprehensible world.

And still now, everyone knows their star sign

and we pretend we don't believe it

but we all read our horoscopes sneakily anyway.

So the very idea that our fate is determined by the skies

is something that has very, very deep roots in Babylonian thought.

Alexander the Great died at the age of 32.

By the time of his death

he had become enthralled by his Eastern lands

and his dying wish was for the people of his new empire -

East and West - to unite and live as one.

Alexander's empire didn't last

but the flow of knowledge continued.

One of Alexander's successors was King Antiochus,

who built the tomb at the summit of Mt Nemrut,

looking both east and west.

Hidden away being conserved

is an extraordinary reminder of ancient Eastern knowledge.

Well, you know, something very special

that was found on Nemrut

which is the oldest

astrological calendar in the world.

And when we look at it

we can see a relief of a lion

and some stars on it.

And we estimated that the exact date from the stars

was 17 of July,

62 BC,

and the time, the exact time is 16.48.

And this is very special...

The Greek and Persian gods that flank the tomb

are a symbol of Antiochus' mixed Greek and Persian ancestry.

Once again - it is a remarkable reminder

of the synthesis of East and West

achieved after the conquest of Alexander.

And how in the centuries after his death

the West soaked up the rich and ancient cultures

that flowed like a river from the East.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Subtitles © SBS Australia 2012