All language subtitles for BBC.Civilisations.1of9.Second.Moment.of.Creation.1080p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org-eng

I've always felt at home
in the past.

For after all, what is the present
except an endless chain of memories?

Some of them are translated
into stone.

We are all the inheritors
of those memories,

and we look after
them as best we can.

All this so we can pass on
their revelation to the future.

But every so often
something comes along

to shake them from our grip.

In Mosul, in a matter of hours,

the forces of Isis destroyed
the work of centuries.

And when they took
the ancient trading city of Palmyra

where the cultures of Greeks,
Romans, Persians, Arabs and Jews

have mixed and merged,

it was feared
that exactly the same would happen.

Here in Geneva, a few Palmyrene
artefacts have been saved -

stolen before the violence began,

arrested at customs as
black marketeers tried to sell them.

Like this bust of a priest.

His eyes wide open,
he seems not dead at all,

just translated to a life elsewhere.

These lovingly carved likenesses
of the dead looted from their tombs

ended up in exile,
but safe for posterity.

Saving the art that remained
in Palmyra, however,

could come at a terrible price.

Khaled al-Asaad,
the chief curator of Palmyra,

was 81 when Isis took the town.

And when their soldiers demanded
he tell them

where the city's artworks
had been hidden, he refused.

They beheaded him
in the Roman theatre,

suspended his mutilated body
from a traffic light,

placed his head between his feet...

..and attached a placard identifying
him as director of idolatry.

Or we might say protector
of what needs to be saved,

cherished, passed on
as the work of civilisation.

A lot of us spend our days
talking about art.

I doubt very many of us are prepared
to lay down our lives for it,

but for Khaled al-Asaad, the stones
and statues and columns of Palmyra

were more than simply
an ensemble of antiquity.

He didn't need a Unesco certificate
to tell him

that the significance of Palmyra was
at once both local and universal.

It's there for believers
and unbelievers, for East and West,

and somehow it had fallen to him

to be the guardian
of that inheritance.

We can spend a lot of time debating
what civilisation is or isn't,

but when it's opposite shows up
in all its brutality and cruelty

and intolerance
and lust for destruction,

we know what civilisation is.

We know it from the shock
of its imminent loss

as a mutilation on the body
of our humanity.

The record of human history
brims over with the rage to destroy.

But it's also imprinted
with the opposite instinct -

to make things that go beyond
the demands of food and shelter,

things that make us see the world
and our place in it

in a different light.

We are the art-making animal,

and this is what we have made.

When did it begin,

that second moment of creation,

the dawning of human creativity?

Where did it begin?

It must have started in Africa

where Homo sapiens first evolved
about 200,000 years ago.

On South Africa's Cape Coast,

archaeologists have found evidence
of human habitation

stretching back
around 100,000 years.

In one of those caves,
this was discovered.

77,000 years old,

a piece of red ochre,
a mineral naturally rich in iron,

etched in a diamond pattern.

The oldest deliberately
decorative marks ever discovered.

The pattern may have been
a kind of language

or a kind of number scoring,

but it's hard to see them
as serving any functional need

connected with shelter
or sustenance.

They are a design,

and design announces
the beginning of culture.

Another 40,000 years pass
and in northern Spain

within a hill so uncannily conical
it seems man-made

that mineral, that red ochre,
has become paint.

Deep inside a cave,

rudimentary marks have bloomed
and multiplied, red circles.

There are no brushes,
no sticks to lay on this paint,

they are all applied orally -

colour swilled in the mouth
with saliva

and blown directly onto the rock.

And then these,

an eruption of design not blown
onto the surface, but painted.

Contours, outlines,
flowing streams of dots.

There's a meaning here,
but we don't know what it is.

The signs of a biological compulsion
to pattern,

it's what we humans do,

what we want to do,

what we can't stop ourselves doing.

And then you come across this.

And in an instant,
vast millennia of time just collapse

and you're in the midst
of fellow humans.

Their hands doing what hands do,

signalling from a very long way off,

37,000 years distant, in fact.

But this long-distance greeting
somehow makes us bond

with the makers of this
because they establish a presence

that is palpably alive.

Astonishingly, hand stencils
like these have been found in caves

as far apart as Indonesia
and Patagonia.

Wherever we went, it seems the urge
to signal a presence went with us.

And, undeniably,
these hand stencils do

what nearly all art
that would follow would aspire to.

First, they want to be seen
by others,

and then they want to endure
beyond the life of the maker.

Like the earliest photographs,

the images here are faded,
indistinct,

but something tantalising is
happening -

the realisation that we can,
however crudely, represent.

In another cave further west
in Asturias,

20 minutes walk away
from any daylight,

are images that are anything
but crude.

This was a doubling of the world,
a life copy,

and executed with startling
precision of drawing technique.

They even understood modelling,

anatomical features following
the rock wall surface of the cave.

And there were many colours,

not just the ubiquitous red ochre,
but violets and blacks.

And all those techniques seem to
have been there from the beginning,

tens of thousands of years ago.

When you think about this technique,
your head just spins

because it has to have been,
above all, a memory exercise.

They would have had to fix in
their mind exact anatomical details

and then transpose them here
on the surface of the cave.

And, yet, when all that was done,

they managed to preserve
miraculously this animal vitality.

This is truly one of
the great marvels

of the suddenly expanded human mind.

It was in the later years
of the 19th century

that images like these
began to be discovered.

The first, and for many years
the most famous,

were in the caves of Altamira,
also in northern Spain.

Extraordinary paintings of bison,
herds of them,

sleeping, lying, standing.

But as the number of painted caves
discovered grew,

it became clear that art and music
came into the world together,

for musical instruments were found.

BLOWS HORN

Animal horns...

FLUTE WHISTLES

..flutes made from
bones of vultures,

and even more hauntingly,
bullroarers,

a piece of wood tied to a rope
spun round the head

that makes
this strange whooping sound.

BULLROARERS WHOOSHES

Recent experiments with
these instruments have suggested

that the proximity of painting
and music was not accidental,

that they were connected elements
in sacred rituals.

I'm using software to test
the acoustics in the space.

So we generate this swept sine wave

and we use that to capture
the acoustic of the cave.

And we can look for relationships
between sound and paintings.

WHISTLING

So the earliest paintings seem to be
in these small little side areas

where maybe one person might be
there alone.

And then the later paintings seem
to be in more grand places,

a venue where a few people
would have gathered,

somewhere more dramatic
that sounds more dramatic.

BULLROARER WHIRS

You can compare these spaces
to a cathedral or a temple.

They're places where people came
for sacred moments

which were full of imagery
and ritual and music.

FLUTE WHISTLES

And it's like going into a place
that's kind of underground,

where you can stop time,

where you can pause
and have that special moment

where you're out of time,
where you're somewhere else.

Painting is the sound.

The sound making, the music-making,

whatever was happening
in this sacred ritual,

that is the painting.

The painting is what's left
of that activity.

Anthropologists
and archaeologists tell us

that almost all of ice-age painting

had some sort of
otherworldly ritual function,

and that, therefore, it ought not
to be seen as art.

Though, of course, religion has been
a primary purpose of art

for thousands of years.

In Africa, the animals that dominate
European cave paintings

are accompanied by humans.

They appear as
stylised, elongated figures.

Sometimes they're shown while
becoming transformed into beasts.

Men with the heads of antelopes,

creatures that could never have been
observed from life,

but which arose from the
trance-struck imagination
of the shamans.

In the rock art of Africa,
these hybrids were painted.

In Europe, where there were
far fewer of them,

they went three-dimensional.

In 1939, the fragments
of this lion-man,

carved from mammoth ivory,
were found in a German cave.

They remained an unsolved puzzle
for 30 years

before archaeologists realised
that they formed a single figure

made between 35,000
and 40,000 years ago.

This may be a shaman
in the middle of a transformation.

It may be the very first
of the beast gods,

around which Pagan religions
would build their mythologies.

Perhaps the making of such things
was itself a sacred calling.

To see how much work was
needed to make a lion-man,

archaeologist Wulf Hein embarked on
an experiment to carve a replica

using authentic tools and materials.

Without a mammoth tusk,

he used a piece of legally sourced
elephant ivory.

I started working from
the whole tusk

and then I took a big stone
and hammered away this piece,

and I was sweating like hell

because if I would have ruined it,
it would be a disaster.

And the most time-consuming part
of the work

was setting free the arms

because I had to take
a very tiny tool

and make grooves like this
underneath, into the ivory,

and just scratch and scratch
and days and days

and working and working.

I had blisters on my hands,
and every finger was aching.

It was very heavy work.

I started in April

and I stopped working
in the middle of July.

I worked about
four, five hours a day.

In the end, it was about 400 hours,
then I stopped counting.

I guess it was a real artist
who made this.

And he was set free by his community
only to do this piece of artwork.

If you do this a whole summer
or a whole winter through,

you can't go hunting, you can't
go fishing, you can't do nothing

because you work all day on it.

It must have had incredible meaning
for the people who made it.

And these must have been charged
with meaning too.

Small figurines embodying
the primal life events

of birth and procreation.

Gravid earth mothers
weighty with fertility,

enormous distended breasts
and buttocks.

So powerfully elemental
they seemed to speak directly

to modern artists
when they first saw them.

The most self-consciously
modern of them all, Picasso,

told a friend that no sculptor
had ever bettered

the Palaeolithic carvers.

He bought a copy of this one,
Venus of Lespugue,

and kept it in his studio
all his life.

Was he touched
by its archaic spirituality?

No.

He was earthly and worldly,

but he felt a deep communion
with the makers of a physical art.

And there were traces of that
communion elsewhere in his work.

Despite rumours,
there's no direct evidence

that Picasso ever visited
the painted caves of Altamira

or saw in person
the extraordinary painted bison

that those caves contained.

But he was obsessed with animals,

one animal in particular,

not the bison,
but it's cousin, the bull,

an animal to which he returned
again and again.

Do we think this is
mere coincidence?

He liked to call himself
a modern primitive,

and in those images,
glimmering images in the caves,

he found, he thought, a fountainhead

of everything that was
truly creative

about the artistic instinct.

So he paid cave art
the ultimate compliment

by doing something very similar.

He looked at a bull

and then he produced this beautiful,
dashing, impulsive picture of a bull

so close to the original
in Altamira,

it could even have been
a studious copy.

But then he produced
another ten prints,

bulls drawn from
his own enormous range of styles,

from meaty naturalism

through classical Cubism

to a lightly delineated bull
that's really just a pair of horns

and then that other thing
that bulls always need.

The entire sequence
expresses his admiration

for the genius of the cave painters,

his belief that ancient or modern,

the hand of the painter, the hand of
the artist, never really changes.

And I have to say,
I agree with Picasso.

We can walk into rooms like this one

which preserve the 19th century
style of museum presentation -

abundance.

And as we wander
through case after case,

not just of minute fashioning tools,
but ivory and bone,

decorated with startling images
of birds and horses,

we can't avoid pushing back
instinctively

against the received wisdom
of the scholars

that none of these things
should ever be thought of as art.

For me, the last word
in this entire debate

belongs to one tiny ancient piece
in particular...

..La Dame de Brassempouy.

The lady of Brassempouy,

found in a cave
in south-west France in 1892.

She's between 22,000
and 25,000 years old.

With this intensively carved
female head,

we have, for the first time,

something immensely
and movingly momentous.

We have the revelation
of the human face.

It's a tiny thing, it can just go
in the palm of your hand.

This is exquisite.

There are downward strokes
and sideward strokes

there is carving and gouging
and polishing and scraping.

Every kind of extraordinary craft
is applied

to give this face what we have to
say is its personality.

One example, a dig is made
below the forehead

to suggest the presence of eyes.

Those eyes are hauntingly vivid.

They only become eyes
when a shadow falls

over that passage in the head.

So this little piece would have been
turned into the light

and as it was turned into the light,
the shadow would have fallen

and suddenly we have eyes as well
as that beautiful nose

and this extraordinary hair
falling down the nape of the neck.

Now we are not supposed to say,
us amateurs in this field,

we're not supposed to
talk about art,

we're not supposed to talk about
things like

the birth of a refined sensibility.

I'm going to do that nonetheless.

I don't care
how anachronistic it is.

With this tiny piece
from Brassempouy,

it seems to me that we have,
right in front of us,

the dawn of the idea of beauty.

But beauty is hard to eat.

The slow growth of civilisations
depended, at first,

on practicalities -

the domestication of animals
and cereal crops.

The most ancient wheats
were harvested

on sites near the River Jordan
about 10,000 years ago.

Civilisations started small,

it depended on the invention
of needful things -

pottery vessels for cooking,
eating and storage.

Excavations in Iraq
in the 1920s and '30s

began to reveal how
intensive irrigation of the planes

between the rivers Tigris
and Euphrates had allowed

the world's first true cities
to arise.

By about 5,000 years ago,

cities with tens of thousands of
inhabitants, such as Ur and Uruk,

were producing art that reflected
the self-image of the powerful.

Here is the Standard of Ur

where mosaic inlaid in bitumen

showed the scenes
that mattered most.

Soldiers march,

war wagons roll,

and on the reverse,
a court convenes

with the king depicted larger
than his priests and courtiers,

ranged below the catering classes,
the toilers and hewers.

It's a complete social world,

and it came with writing.

These scripts usually recorded
administrative matters,

but sometimes told the stories
of heroes and deities.

And animals continue to provide
the models for gods and monsters.

This gorgeous goat, also from Ur,
drew materials from far and wide.

White shells were from the Red Sea,

the blue lapis lazuli
from far Afghanistan,

and the gold leaf was
the work of local goldsmiths.

Around 4,500 years ago,

in the islands
of the Eastern Mediterranean,

migrants from Western Asia seeded
Europe's first great civilisation,

the culture of the Minoans.

Its ruins are everywhere on Crete
and on the islands of the Aegean.

This must have been
a fishing village.

You can almost hear the bustle.

Protected by the sea on two sides,
but closely packed.

So even here people will have had to
learn the skills

that any fixed settlement requires -

how to be neighbourly.

But there's more to civilisation
than keeping neighbours happy.

On Crete itself,
we find the ruins of large towns

where the streets still
thread their way,

opening onto grandiose plazas,

spaces for ceremony and pomp,

for ritual and for politics.

Minoan cultural style spread
across the Aegean Sea

to islands like Santorini.

A volcanic eruption destroyed
the port city of Akrotiri

in around 1627 BCE,

but the ash preserved
the murals found here

in all their vivid realism.

They raised the ghost
of a seagoing civilisation,

a clear ancestor of our own

with its clamour and glamour,
its commercial pulse.

These passengers aren't going
to the afterlife,

they're on ferries
and festive excursions.

And on the land behind them,
there are streets

with multistorey houses,

and in the richer of them,
decorative paintings

of the kind consumers would want
for ever after.

This is the first truly social art
the world had seen.

Here are beautiful youths
duking it out.

Here are saffron gatherers.

Here are swallows.

A perpetual springtime
brought into the living room.

One contact sport dominated
Minoan culture - bull leaping.

Young men, possibly women too,
back flipping over charging bulls.

It's long been argued
that this was too dangerous

to have actually happened,

that the art captures a myth,
a fantasy.

And yet in the British Museum,

there's a little bronze sculpture

that's pulsing with a natural energy
that feels absolutely true to life.

What strikes me
as being physically real

is the fact that this is not
a stylised piece of work at all.

It has physical immediacy.

Even though our jumper
has lost his legs,

his back is braced,
his head is flung back.

And the bull, the bull is
indeed a bull in full charge -

front and back legs tensed.

The eyes, and you can actually see
the eyes, are blazing,

and the muzzle is snorting
with dangerous foam.

Around the 15th century BCE,

Minoan culture was producing
myriad tiny masterpieces.

Seal stones
to be pressed into soft wax

or worn as micro art.

Gold rings, sometimes decorated
with goddesses or their priestesses,

bare-breasted, wasp-waisted
with flaring skirts.

Minoan art was irresistibly
attractive to a raw rising power

on the Greek mainland.

Here was a culture that wanted
to clothe its belligerence

in sophistication that would play
a vital role in European history -

the Mycenaeans.

In 2015, American archaeologists
were digging in western Greece,

and here, far from Crete, they made
the most significant discovery

of Minoan artefacts
for many, many years.

They found the grave of a warrior
buried around the year 1450 BCE.

Here we are in the grave
to look at our body today.

It was the body of a Mycenaean.

Pretty amazing.

Yet almost all the objects found
with the body were clearly Minoan.

This is our third gold ring.

Four solid gold rings were
eventually found in the grave.

They're just exquisite, actually.

The craftsmanship on all of them
is stunning.

And they all have their own story
to tell.

They're very much like
the iconography

that you find in Minoan Crete.

I think that's a really important
lesson to learn

about how civilisations evolve.
Yeah.

That civilisations are constantly
borrowing and receiving inspirations

from their predecessors

and from those that surround them
as they evolve.

In total, the grave contained
over 1,500 separate objects.

There was a corroded bronze mirror
and ivory combs.

Vanity was part of
the warrior's job description.

Hair was ritually combed
before battle.

And, of course, there were swords.

The grave of the Griffin Warrior has
all of the artefacts

that you would expect a warrior
to have accumulated in his lifetime.

And this is the first time
that we can really understand

what the complete warrior kit
looked like.

One of the objects found
in the grave -

tiny, not quite 1.5 inches long -

was crusted in mud and minerals.

Once cleaned, it forces us
to rethink everything

we thought we knew
about this moment in history.

High resolution photographs show
the extraordinary achievement.

We see the long hair flowing free

that would have been combed
before battle.

We see a sword lying on the ground

exactly like the swords discovered
in the grave.

But that is just the beginning.

This is the first fight scene
in all of European art,

for all I know, in all of world art.

Yes, there are occasional moments of
combat and battle in other cultures,

but they're flat,
they're very stylised,

they don't feel like
the smash of bone and bronze

and metal and the spout of blood,
this does.

This goes straight from 1450 BC
to action movies.

Look at those rippling biceps.

Look at those muscles.

Look at those tense bodies.

This cross
of locked-together fighters.

A spear that's about to try
and impale the body of his enemy

before it's too late.

The sword that's about to
plunge down.

It's 3-D, folks.
It's coming at you.

And, inevitably, there is
already a dead body,

perfectly modelled,
an arm bent back.

Homer speaks of such bodies

with a hand or a face
writhing in the dust.

But, people, Homer is
700 years later.

700 years later,
the time between Chaucer and us.

Somebody out there with incredible
hawklike eyesight is drawing on

a body of combat literature

that goes all the way down to those
beautiful Homeric inventions.

It sets something running
in European culture.

This Mycenaean love of guts
and glory

and the Mycenaeans themselves,
along with the Minoans,

will pass into history.

But this doesn't pass into history,

it passes into poetry.

It passes for ever into the world.

Sometimes there are discoveries
that radically transform

existing knowledge.

But then there are other discoveries

that reveal a culture so far outside
the river of history

that we may never
truly understand them.

As Mycenae rose
about 3,000 years ago,

an extraordinary culture grew
in west central China -

Sanxingdui.

Its remains were unearthed in 1986
on a building site.

The revealed pits contained
hundreds of elephant tusks,

the remains of sacrificed animals,

and a vast and startling abundance
of masks.

There were scores of masks,

There were giant masks

which probably stood
in some sort of temple.

There were little itty-bitty masks,

There were masks that were
user-friendly,

that almost certainly could be worn
on the face.

They all have huge eyes.

This one, you can still see
a few traces of black paint.

They were painted black.

Dashing eyebrows.

Diamond-shaped eyes.

Nothing in the rest of ancient China
has ever been discovered

remotely like these faces,
like these heads.

The bronze is the same,
the figures and faces are not.

Nothing that can tell us anything
about the people

who made these objects has survived.

There are no writings, no other
histories to tell us who they were.

It's been suggested
that some of the masks

might have been used in rituals
by impersonators of the dead -

those enormous eyes
which see beyond the world,

the ears which might hear
what the departed say.

But this is all pure speculation.

The civilisation of Sanxingdui came,
it flourished,

and then it disappeared
off the face of the earth.

But civilisation is
always a balancing act.

There may be enemies at the gates,

there may be enemies
within the walls,

and sometimes
the very landscape and climate

in which a culture grows
must be conquered.

It may be too rocky, too arid,

but here canyons and gullies became
the streets and thoroughfares

for one of the most
spectacular civilisations

in all of human history.

This is Petra where the sheer
improbability of its location

was also the secret
of its spectacular flourishing.

The reason why this tomb endured
and survived armies and earthquakes

is that the Nabateans who built it

cut it into the sandstone
surface of the mountain,

rather than build some freestanding
marble monument.

The mountains shook
with earthquakes,

but these buildings stood intact.

The Nabateans had
what you might call

an instinct for cultural ecology.

They worked with the rock
of their desert home.

The columns are graceful.

The capitals are heavily decorated.

It's all part of an international
Hellenistic style,

and, yet, it seems to me
this place is very local,

untransferable.

This is Petra and only Petra,

these great palatial buildings
seem to say.

More amazing still, this place was
built by people who were nomads

when they first arrived here
in the fourth century before Christ.

The Nabataeans were goat herders,
camel riders, dwellers in tents.

But flocks and herds
weren't going to produce this.

Petra was built on trade in incense.

2,000 years ago,

aromatic frankincense and myrrh
were essential

for the ceremonies and rituals
which punctuated daily life.

The nondescript little chunks
and granules of dried tree resin

produced these clouds
of fragrant incense smoke,

and they became the hottest trade
between Africa and Persia.

And here's the thing,
the trees that produce the resin

only grow in a particular part
of Arabia,

and who knew that desert
mile by stony mile,

oasis by oasis,
better than the Nabataeans?

No-one.

So the Nabataeans started as
navigators and pilots, if you like,

for this precious cargo,

went on to be
full-service providers,

and then thought, "Well, why don't
we trade it ourselves directly?"

Pretty soon they were monopolists
of the incense trade,

the emperors of aromatics.

But a civilisation here
was inconceivable

without the one thing more precious
than frankincense -

water.

The Nabataeans engineered systems to
trap the rains which came in winter

and their desert hydraulics made
this place not so much rose red,

as bright green.

A garden city of fountains,
swimming pools,

groves and orchards.

And the water which made
all that possible

also made it possible to feed
a city of 30,000 people,

many of whom were immigrants
from all over the region.

There were Egyptians and Syrians
and Judeans and Greeks and Romans,

and they were all coming to Petra

to enjoy what the Persians called
a pairi daiza,

a pleasure resort,
a little bit of heaven on Earth.

And they all brought a flourish of
their own cultural styles with them.

Most of the art discovered
here has been taken to museums,

but what survives tells the story
of a cosmopolitan playground.

There are curious abstract
representations

of a Nabataean goddess...

..carved heads from the wine soaked
Hellenistic cult of Dionysus.

Recent excavations have brought
to light ritzy villas

carved into the living rock.

Inside them,
"here's to happiness" murals

from that same Dionysian cult,

cherubs, vine leaves,

the inevitable bunches of grapes.

And from the later years
of Petra's life, Byzantine mosaics

found beneath the sand and rubble
of a ruined church.

Petra had its day, or rather
its centuries, and then it ended.

Not because of conquest,

but because new trade routes simply
made Petra commercially irrelevant.

And without
that commercial lifeblood,

there was no longer any reason
to struggle against the desert.

The people left,

the systems for capturing water
fell into disrepair,

and the desert reclaimed the city.

BIRDS SING

On the other side of the world
in Central America,

another culture would face a set of
ecological conditions

that seemed far more hospitable.

The Mayans lived amidst
tropical forests.

It looks almost absurdly fertile.

And these great ruins are proof
that when the delicate balance

between prospering habitat
and vaulting ambition is maintained,

civilisations can bind rulers
and the ruled,

and a culture can burst
into riotously prolific bloom.

If you take away
all this magnificent vegetation

that's sprung up naturally
from the space,

you realise this is
an extraordinary plaza,

it's the centre of a city.

Wherever you look, there are
these huge stone staircases,

some temples, some tombs,

all the more amazing because
there are no draft animals,

there are no wheels,

so human labour only is responsible
for these great things.

This is a spectacular space.

The kind of space you would really
expect to see in Rome or Greece,

these great pyramids
with platforms for performances

because this, as much as anywhere
in the Western world of antiquity,

is essentially an urban theatre.

It's a theatre of political
and religious power.

A structure like this looks down
upon the citizens

and forces them to look back up.

And what they looked up to
was often gruesomely violent,

the mass sacrifice of captives.

And one God in particular
had a special thirst...

..the rain god, Chaac.

The power of the Mayan kings
rested on the promise

that every year they would persuade
Chaac to bring the rains

on which all life depended.

Mayan art and architecture
was a prayer

and appealed to the weather -

"Let us live,
let every year be fruitful."

Only the most damaged of the art

that used to adorn Calakmul
remains on-site.

In Mexico's anthropology museum,

we can see some of that art
and how Mayan society worked.

There were kings
made of flesh and blood

and kings made of stone,

and you had to obey both kinds.

But Mayan art wasn't all enormous
and formal, far from it.

It was hugely varied.

One of the most spectacular
flourishings of creativity

in human history.

Every human type got
his or her figurine,

like action characters and heroes
from a comic book or a play.

There were ceramic vessels
and there were murals too.

And out of the Mayan delight
in making pictures

developed a fully-fledged script.

Writing made up of glyphs
or word pictures.

They were brushed onto paper
made from wild fig tree bark,

painted onto
beautiful ceramic pottery

or, like this one,
carved into limestone.

They were everywhere
in Maya city states.

The Maya were the wordiest
of all ancient cultures.

So that this,

which looks like something purely
decorative, ornamental,

a bestiary with all these animals,

there's a monkey,

there's a magnificently
complacent frog,

there in the middle is
an extremely scary killer rabbit,

in fact, all these are words
which make a text.

Each glyph is not a single word,
but it's a syllable, in fact,

and you put them together and
you have a sentence, a paragraph.

But in this case,
it makes up a date.

We know exactly what that date was.

This is the 11th of February, 526.

In 526, Mayan civilisation
was at its height.

It's art and culture flourished

and many believe that the finest
Mayan art of all is to be found

in the city of Copan.

The city was home to a dynasty

that lasted from the fifth
to the ninth centuries,

16 successive kings ruled here.

An archaeological team,
led by Bill and Barbara Fash,

have been studying Copan
for over 30 years.

And they've found
that for most of its life,

the art of Copan is elegant,
refined, astonishing.

Single carved steles announce
the accession of new kings.

It's the work of a society
where that balance between habitat

and ambition is still in good order.

It's certainly hard to imagine
a more vivid realisation

of the rain god Chaac than this.

Complete with the bubbling streams
of water that his blessings brought.

In the seventh century,
the 12th ruler of Copan

commissioned a new grand structure.

This is the hieroglyphic
stairway of Copan.

It was built, originally,
in honour of ruler 12

who is portrayed here,

and then was finished by ruler 15

who added on
the uppermost section of it.

And it has 64 steps in total

and they told the history of
the dynasty

and the succession
of the different rulers.

The stairway itself is
a monumental statement.

Certainly ruler 15 was trying to
impress the population

so he was really trying to
cement in stone

what the history of Copan was
and what the dynasty was

and to make sure that it stayed
for the future.

The hieroglyphic stairway sought
to impress the people

and to persuade the gods
to continue to bring rain.

But by tunnelling beneath it,
the archaeologists have discovered

that this grand structure was,
in fact, badly built.

You can see all these gaps
in the fill itself

indicate that it was
just loose rubble.

This is a terrible way
to build a pyramid.

What this tells us is that,
at this point in time,

people were no longer
as enthusiastic

about supporting the rulers.

Even though a gorgeous and
very explicit hieroglyphic stairway
was built here,

it was built on poor fills,

so it was a castle built on sand,

and with time, eventually,
it did decay

and the stairway itself collapsed in
a heap at the bottom of the pyramid.

The stairway we see today
has been reconstructed,

but around it, we can see the chaos
of the collapse.

The stairway was built as
the Mayans were suffering a drought

that would last decades,

and the promise of rain had been
a central plank of royal authority.

Shortly afterwards, the kingdom of
Copan itself collapsed completely.

All across the Mayan territories,

art and authority were out of step
with reality.

There was nothing grand or stately
about starvation.

And the ordinary people of the Maya
saw that their civilisation

had become a death trap
and walked away,

left kings and cities
and art behind.

They went back to simpler lives
in the surrounding forest.

And their descendants are
still very much alive.

IN SPANISH:

The Maya and their language lived on

but far away from the stone
monuments of their ancestors.

All that remained to say
that beneath the forest canopy

there was the civilisation,

were the summits
of the platform pyramids,

but only the wheeling birds

and the howler monkeys
scrambling to the tops of trees

would have seen that.

All civilisations want
what they can't have -

the conquest of time.

They build higher and grander
to escape mortality.

It never works.

There's always an ending.

Cities with their markets,
temples, palaces and tombs

are simply abandoned

and that great leveller,
Mother Nature, closes in,

strangling the place
with vegetation,

covering it with desert sand.

It might seem, then, that it's
all for nothing,

but that's entirely wrong.

All these ruins,
all these remains are monuments

to human creativity,

human ambitions,

human hopes.

Monuments to shaping hands
and shaping minds.

Monuments to humanity itself.

The Open University has produced
a free poster

that explores the history of
different civilisations

through artefacts.

To order your free copy,
please call...

Or go to the address on-screen

and follow the links
for the Open University.