Original subtitles

July 8th, 1853.

A fleet of ships is bearing down on

the peaceful harbour of Edo Bay.

For the people of Japan,

change is coming.

For over 200 years, the country has closed itself off from the West,

but now it faces a violent confrontation...

LOUD EXPLOSION

..with American aggressors.

Japan's future is on a knife-edge.

Some believe they must fight to preserve their unique way of life.

Others will sacrifice everything

to avoid war.

EXPLOSION, CRIES

This is like the most steampunk

clash of cultures you've ever seen.

Suddenly, the threat of the West has become real.

This is a true emergency of the sort that

for generations, people haven't known in Japan.

The Japanese were aware of Western aggression,

but they probably had never thought it would come to their doorstep.

Three men hold the future of Japan in their hands.

A rigidly controlling ruler...

..an ambitious American naval commander...

..and a proud Samurai,

caught between Japan's glittering

past and uncertain future.

The worst mistake that any civilisation can make

is to suppose that by walling itself in,

that it can survive.

Ancient Egypt.

The Roman Empire.

The Aztecs of Mexico.

And the Samurai of Japan.

Four great civilisations,

each a pinnacle of human

ingenuity and achievement.

Each lasted for centuries.

Their people thought they would endure forever...

..until, suddenly...

CANNON BLASTS

..everything changed.

These civilisations faced challenges

that are all too familiar today.

THUNDERCLAP

Climate catastrophe.

SIREN WAILS

Pandemic.

War.

Challenges for which ancient societies

had few solutions.

But what if there was a place

that had the answers to what went wrong?

A place full of secrets and stories.

A repository of memory,

stretching back through time.

The British Museum -

home to more than

eight million artefacts,

is a record of how and why

the greatest civilisations

rose to power

and then spectacularly fell.

Its treasures are the human traces

that survived disaster...

..but might they also hold lessons

for our own future?

Every civilisation, throughout

history, has had an expiry date.

With great societies,

the seeds of their destruction

are sown within the society.

They're already there.

No civilisation ever thinks it's going to fall...

..but the question is,

what can WE learn from the past?

In the Pacific Ocean,

off the eastern shores of Asia...

..lie the islands of Japan.

A country like no other.

Japan, in the middle of the 19th century,

is entirely unique. It's different from anywhere else in the world.

It is several islands,

there's a huge population,

a very educated and literate population.

The city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo,

is home to over a million people...

..and one of the largest cities in the world.

Japan is a place

of elaborate temples...

..wooden houses...

..and immaculately manicured gardens.

People dress in fine silks,

admire exquisite wood-block prints...

..and eat the latest fast food, sushi.

Japan's distinctive culture

is a product of a deliberate policy

of isolation.

120 miles from the coast of

mainland Asia, Japan has

closed its borders to much of

the outside world

for over 200 years.

Japanese are forbidden to travel abroad, on pain of death,

so it's developed this phenomenal culture, which is of its own.

At peace for the last two centuries,

the Japanese have developed

a highly stylised set of rituals

for everyday life -

from the way to drink tea,

to how to wear a kimono.

Any society that has peace,

instead of warfare, instead of putting all the money into making

weapons, you can put your money into things like

culture and arts.

The intricate craftsmanship

that has emerged reveals the lengths

the Japanese will go to in pursuit of perfection.

What you have in Japan

is this culture of creating these

small and beautiful sculptures,

which are barely there.

It's an extraordinary thing,

because they're very, very small.

What's special about netsuke

is that they are basically

miniature sculptures for the hand.

They're made for you to feel during the day,

to run your hands over and discover.

Here's a netsuke of a rat.

It's eating a beanstalk.

Two very beady eyes,

made out of buffalo horn.

Turn it round,

and there is its tail,

curled all the way round

under one of its paws, you can just see, there, beautifully.

Intricately carved

from ivory or hardwood...

..these are miniature snapshots

of Japanese life.

What you have within netsuke

is a whole raft of subject matter,

which comes out of Japanese mythology,

folkloric traditions,

food, storytelling,

eroticism,

fashion.

All these things become amplified.

They're fascinating for the level of craftsmanship

and the miniaturisation

of whole worlds,

and the degree to which they incorporate symbolism

and fine materials,

and are beautiful, but also,

in a very clear way, functional.

So you have to imagine wearing a wonderful kimono

and you've got no pockets.

So how are you going to carry around

all the things you might need for your daily life?

So you have an external pocket.

It's called a sagemono,

a hanging pocket.

This one is made from boxwood.

And up here is the netsuke,

and this is the way that you would

hold your hanging pocket

from the belt of your obi.

There is no way that netsuke can happen elsewhere.

It's one of these extraordinary sort of

efflorescences in a culture.

They're not looking outwards.

They're looking inwards.

But beyond Japan's shores,

the world is changing fast.

Isolationism is usually madness

for any except the most powerful societies.

You're not only isolating yourself

from foreign culture, but you're in danger of isolating yourself

from all the developments of science, of technology,

and then you become vulnerable to external enemies.

By the 1850s,

Europe is being powered

by an Industrial Revolution.

New technology is transforming

everything, from steam-powered

transport to the mass production

of ever-more-powerful weapons...

LOUD BANG

TRAIN HORN BLARES

..and it's fuelling an appetite for conquest.

Industrialisation has driven this need for colonisation.

The raw materials of iron,

coal, cotton, tea,

all of this is driving Europeans

to try and carve out empires.

They are trying to get as many colonies as possible

to give them not only wealth, but stability across the globe.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of technology

as a driving force.

European powers found themselves able, because of their superior

weapons technology, to march into other people's country

and to achieve devastating victories, at relatively low cost.

CANNON BLASTS

And now, there's a dynamic

new player on the world stage.

The United States is a growing power.

They have ships that are trading around the Pacific.

And what they want is for their ships

to be able to take on food and other supplies.

So they begin to consider Japan

as a place that no-one else

has yet "opened" to the West.

Japan becomes the target.

The man in charge of this mission

is US Commodore Matthew Perry.

Perry is from a naval family.

He is pretty proud of his own rightness.

He fought in the war with Mexico.

He's also chased pirates in the Caribbean.

He's a big Navy guy.

Perry is a technological visionary.

This is a man who is dreaming of

not only the US as a Pacific power,

but the US as a naval power,

driven by steam ships.

Steam ships are amazing,

but they require regular refuelling,

and that means that the US has to be

absolutely certain that its ships

can regularly refuel all across the Pacific.

The Americans want very much

to be able to coal up their ships at Japanese ports.

Perry is a man who likes to do his homework,

so he's read up in the New York Public Library

a little bit about the Japanese,

and I think he's come to the view that the Japanese

will really only respond to a show of power.

On November 24th, 1852,

Perry set sail for Japan.

His squadron of four warships -

two of them, steam-powered -

is designed to intimidate the Japanese into submission.

Perry carries a letter,

spelling out American demands,

but he has no idea

who he will be dealing with.

Perry doesn't understand very much

about the political situation in Japan.

Not very many people do.

He mistakenly addresses his letter,

demanding the opening of ports and trade, to the Emperor,

not realising that the Emperor is not in control.

Japan has had an Emperor

for more than a thousand years,

but he is little more than a symbolic figurehead.

The real power lies elsewhere.

These are THE shoguns.

And shogun is a supreme warlord

over all the other 200-plus

warlords in the country.

Shogun is a word that Westerners

are quite familiar with.

What it actually means is, like, foreigner-crushing generalissimo.

We see in the centre the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate,

and around him are arrayed his 14 successors.

For 250 years,

the Tokugawa family has ruled Japan.

There are no significant

rivals to their power.

So it's a reign of exceptional duration

and exceptional success, in many ways.

It's a bit like a Mafia power family.

What you get is a warlord

who doesn't rule with just an iron fist,

it's sort of an iron fist in a silk glove.

The shogun's job is to placate,

is to manipulate

and is to convince everybody to keep the peace.

It is the Tokugawa clan

who have tried to eliminate

contact with the West.

In the 17th century,

they implemented a policy of seclusion called Sakoku.

Closing the country off

from what they see

as dangerous outside influence.

The foreigners were referred to as nanbanjin,

meaning southern barbarian.

Back in the late-1500s,

the Portuguese, and also, the Spanish,

made their way into Japan, traders and missionaries,

and they started to meddle in Japanese politics.

They made quite a few converts to Christianity.

And some of these converts were regarded as a bit suspect,

because it's not really clear where their loyalties lie.

And so when this policy of more-or-less complete isolation

was put in place, it made a great deal of sense.

It was border control.

The Tokugawa shoguns allowed trade

with their immediate neighbours,

China and Korea, but limit European

imports to the Dutch alone...

..and restrict them

to the harbour of Nagasaki.

Here, 20 or so Dutch merchants

are confined to a tiny

artificial island,

just 600 feet long, called Dejima.

They are the only Westerners allowed

to do business with the shogun.

They were trading with the Dutch, but only because the Dutch said,

"We're not going to do anything other than trade with you.

"We're not going to introduce European ideas

"or, particularly, Christianity."

If you don't allow trading partners,

you don't allow the importation of new ideas,

new competing philosophies and technologies.

It is simply an easier landscape to control.

It's often an illusion of control because you can't control

what exactly happens beyond your borders.

The Tokugawa family's power base

is the thriving city of Edo.

The latest shogun to inherit the title

knows his control of the country

also depends on enforcing

a rigid social hierarchy.

Everybody knows their place, and it's this sense of cultural unity

which really binds Japan together

and creates this unique tradition,

this unique society.

At the top of the ladder are around

300 warlords - the daimyo.

Beneath them are Japan's enforcers,

an elite class of warriors and bureaucrats,

known as the samurai.

What defines you as a samurai is carrying out whatever duty

you've been given by your lord,

doing it exactly as you've been asked

and sacrificing whatever you need to sacrifice to get it done.

Of 30 million Japanese,

around two million are samurai.

They're absolutely at the top.

They're almost a different species,

I think, from other Japanese.

That's certainly how they regard themselves, anyway.

BIRDS TWEET

Among the many samurai,

one is destined to lead the fight against Western influence.

His name is Saigo Takamori.

Saigo Takamori is sort of

the ultimate samurai.

He has a very stern samurai education.

He learns all the martial arts and he is very interested in

the moral systems that are behind the samurai world.

Saigo is a man with

a really deep ethical code.

He has a lovely slogan he often uses,

"Revere heaven and love one another".

He takes the status and the duties

of a Samurai very seriously.

Saigo is a traditionalist.

And by that, I mean he thinks the old ways should be preserved.

In Japan,

nothing embodies the status of

a samurai more than his sword...

..in all its extraordinary detail.

If you're samurai,

these swords that you carry is basically, it's your soul.

It's part of yourself.

It's not just an object, it's not just a weapon,

it's a symbol of loyalty,

duty, honour and pride.

Called a katana,

this is one of the most lethal

and effective swords ever created.

It can slice through skin

and bone.

The result of generations of

craftsmen perfecting their skills.

It is made in a way that no other sword is made.

There's two pieces of metal melded together.

It is also the sharpest sword in the world.

On the thinner cutting edge of the blade

is this beautiful crystalline structure that's called the hamon.

And there's a whole vocabulary

to describe the shape and the qualities of the hamon.

It can be likened to the night sky,

or to mist, or dew.

Handles are covered in

stingray skin, for extra grip,

and wrapped in silken cords...

..all decorated with intricate

symbols from Japanese folklore.

Every single katana, or sword,

are different and it has different story.

It becomes part of you, it becomes who you are.

Traditionally, sword skills

are important for every samurai.

The sword is also a reminder

of the samurai's status

as authority figures in Japan.

Only the samurai, at this point, are allowed weapons of any kind.

So to walk around town carrying those swords

is to tell everybody else

who you are and what your standing is in Japan.

Commoners in the street are going to back away from you,

they might bow as you go past.

So you've got a really strong sense that the country

is really built around you and your values.

It's the samurai and their sense of honour

that holds the rest of Japan together.

As the sun dips low over the coastal city of Edo,

the harbour of Kurihama,

south of Edo Bay,

is settling down for the evening

when, out of the haze,

four hulking ships appear,

bristling with cannon.

CANNON BLASTS

American naval commander

Matthew Perry has arrived.

Perry's idea is shock and awe.

That's what he wants to achieve.

There's a great deal of menace

to the way Perry approaches Japan.

He has the cannon fire from offshore.

He really wants to awe the Japanese with a sense of his power,

with a sense of the technology that he's bringing.

A group of senior samurai invites Perry

to a meeting inside a hastily-built pavilion on the shore.

The Japanese officers realise that this small squadron of ships

can completely outgun all the naval fortifications that Japan

has set up around Edo harbour.

For Perry, these samurai looked a bit unimpressive.

He saw that the weapons they were holding, in the United States,

would be back in a museum, they'd be in someone's attic.

These things are not credible modern weapons at all.

Perry gives them an ultimatum.

He says, either you sign this trade deal with us,

you've got a year to do it, we're being reasonable here,

you have a whole year to sign this treaty,

or your other alternative is, we come back in a year and we attack.

He gives the Japanese a little white piece of cloth.

He says, if I don't get what I've asked for,

there's going to be a war, and when you've had enough,

you can wave this little piece of white cloth and surrender.

Gunboat diplomacy meant making your will stick,

whether you were right or wrong,

whether what you were doing was just or unjust,

because you had the firepower to make your will stick.

As Perry steams away from Edo Bay,

Japan faces a momentous choice -

to agree to American terms

or go to war.

Across the country, some samurai,

like Saigo Takamori,

fear for the survival of the traditional order

they love and uphold.

Saigo, like many of his contemporaries,

in 1853, thinks these Westerners

are largely monstrous,

they're coming from halfway around

the world to bother a country that has done nothing to them.

Saigo fears a collapse of Japan as he knows it,

and he believes that they need to be

driven away decisively and quickly.

All eyes now turn to the great

Tokugawa leader, the shogun,

as the nation waits

for his decision.

The shogun is trying to square

his job, which is to crush

the barbarians, keep the foreigners

out of Japan, on the one hand,

with the brute fact of overwhelming American power on the other.

But it's a very difficult one,

and he spends months agonising, really, over what to do.

But can the shogun really count on his samurai to defend Japan?

The answer is found in a stunning artefact,

handed down through generations

of a samurai family.

Armour is embedded in a samurai

family's history, its lineage.

It's valuable not only in a material sense,

but in a heritage sense, as part of

what being a samurai was.

Armour in Japan

is formed from

plates that are sewn together.

The main part of the armour covers

the chest, so there's two plates

of iron in this suit.

And then attached to that

are lacquered plates

that compose the shoulder guards,

and there are sleeves that often

have chainmail within them,

and shin guards.

Its mask is built to scare you.

It's meant to be intimidating,

as well as functional.

Helmets might incorporate

an interesting motif.

And in this particular case,

it's a dragon.

This is part of the fearsome aspect

that you want to present on the battlefield.

Samurai armour may once have proved

effective against sword and arrow...

..but it is now purely ceremonial.

No match for the latest guns

and cannon fire.

After the shocking revelation

of American technology,

being a samurai is no longer a defence.

His armour - the thing that,

for generations, has protected him,

has protected his family, has protected his country -

is now the thing which makes him weak.

The whole thrust of history

shows that the old, old cliche,

the best guide to peace is to prepare for war,

it's all still true. It always has been.

In the end, there'll always be enemies, there'll always be

aggressors out there, who see things through a different prism.

Eight months after the Americans' first landing in Japan,

Commodore Perry returns to Edo Bay

with a larger fleet,

to demand an immediate answer from the shogun.

It's time for the shogun

to make his decision.

He's got a choice, in a way,

but in another way, he's got no choice,

because if he doesn't sign that treaty, he is basically saying,

you know, America can invade and colonise.

By signing the treaty,

he has a sliver of control left, maybe.

The best way for the shogun

to deal with this is to give them a little bit of what they want

and hope that they don't ask for anything else.

That's the least worst thing that the shogun can do at this point.

The shogun agrees a deal with Perry.

What the treaty does is it basically

opens up trade in the sea ports

along Japan's coast.

The agreement is the first of

what's become known as

the unequal treaties.

The treaties are extremely

disadvantageous to Japan.

Economically, they put tariffs,

import-export duties,

not under Japanese control, but under international control.

They are unable to protect their own markets.

These are deemed to be infringements on Japan's national sovereignty.

The shogun has been forced to make a humiliating climb-down.

Now he needs to cast his actions in a positive light.

One remarkable work of art

captures how his supporters

tried to record this defeat as a victory.

The Perry Scroll is this

long scroll, which you unfurl

and you read from right to left.

You get scene after scene,

little moments picked up from

this return of Perry in 1854.

16 images, across 50 feet,

show the encounter between

Perry's American delegation

and the shogun's officials,

and the efforts made by

each side to impress the other.

From the Japanese side, you have

a display of Sumo wrestling.

From the American side, one of the things they offer

is a demonstration of steam technology.

So they have a little miniature railway track

and a little locomotive on it.

But the artist also tries to spin the occasion

as evidence of Japanese superiority.

What you see here are these sumo wrestlers

who are physically larger

than the American soldiers.

And you see the Americans admiring

the physiques of the sumo wrestlers,

stroking their arms,

in a way that suggests

a kind of admiration, adoration.

A banquet scene

shows the Japanese as dignified,

while one American sneaks food

into his hat,

and others examine the maker's marks

on the porcelain bowls.

A dedication claims that this scroll

is evidence of the shogun's prowess

in defending Japan against the Americans.

Some may have believed this version of events,

but not the samurai Saigo Takamori.

Approaching Edo just two days

after the treaty is signed,

he sees, with his own eyes,

Perry's fleet of

monstrous gunboats...

..and understands that Japan's

unique way of life and traditions

are now under threat.

This is the first time

Saigo has seen tangible evidence,

with his own eyes, of Westerners,

and they, for him, are this strange,

outrageous imposition.

For Saigo, what's so damaging about

the treaties is that the shogunate

has reneged on its own promises

to keep foreigners out of Japan,

and backed out of it without a fight.

For now, Saigo and his fellow

samurai must submit to American

humiliation, and to a shogun

many feel has betrayed them.

13 years later, and Saigo's

worst fears are coming true.

As well as signing deals with the Americans...

..the shogun has opened up Japanese markets

to Britain, Russia and France.

Western goods start to flood in...

..and many Japanese

start to embrace Western ways.

Even the shogun himself.

If you look at the depiction of

the shogun in the lower-left corner,

it's immediately apparent

that he is different.

He is dressed in a Western military uniform,

he is seated in a chair,

and unlike his predecessors, without a sword,

which had typically been the symbol of the samurai class.

He's still a samurai,

but he's a different kind of military man now.

Along with foreign goods

come foreign people.

It's fair to say that a lot of the foreigners are drinking heavily,

behaving badly, getting into fights,

generally disrespecting Japanese culture.

You've got a sense, I think,

that the world isn't really as it should be any more.

Imagine you're a samurai,

you're at the top of your society and, suddenly, all the things

that you've been told about foreigners, it's suddenly

not a story any more. It is real,

it's in front of your eyes,

and you realise how precarious your position really is.

The process of opening a society,

creating new trade relationships,

has, of course, both winners and losers.

We see this in the modern world.

There have been both winners and losers of globalisation.

People, whether it be individuals or groups,

who feel like they've lost status,

are far more likely to turn to rebellion or to violence.

Saigo Takamori is one of a number

of samurai who are reluctantly

reaching the conclusion

that the shogun's time is up.

He's clearly failed to deal with foreigners effectively,

and something radical needs to change in Japan.

Saigo forms an alliance

with other disaffected samurai.

Together, they are prepared to take

action that was once unthinkable.

The shogunate, by letting foreigners come in,

has betrayed the essence of Japan

and is therefore actually illegitimate.

Even though, on paper, the shogun is the supreme military commander,

he can't be, that's impossible.

Saigo and his fellow rebels

head north, through the winter snow,

to the city of Kyoto.

Their hope is to win the backing of the one person

whose support could change everything -

Japan's spiritual figurehead,

the Emperor.

This is a monarchy that can

trace itself back to the 600s.

It's a very old institution, but it actually has not ruled,

rather than reigned, for centuries.

In theory, the Emperor, who's in Kyoto,

is right at the top of the country's

politics, but in reality,

he's hidden away in an Imperial Palace,

performing rituals, writing poetry,

has no real day-to-day say at all

in the control of Japan.

But nevertheless, he has an extraordinary mystique

around him, and so I think people like Saigo Takamori

really want the shogun to be toppled and, instead,

for the Emperor to come back

to the front line of politics.

This movement calls itself

Sonno Joi, which means, literally,

"Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians".

And they are absolutely willing to kill

and be killed, in pursuit of that idea.

Saigo and his fellow samurai

persuade the Emperor to declare

the shogun's rule over...

..and put himself in charge.

Saigo's absolutely

at the centre of this epoch-making moment in Japanese history.

Must just be an extraordinary sense of the moment

having finally turned in his favour.

THUNDERCLAP

Three months later,

the shogun faces a growing

rebel army of samurai, backed by the Emperor.

Finally, the shogun agrees

to leave Edo, for good.

After more than 250 years,

the Tokugawa family's rule

is at an end.

The victorious samurai form a new government, under the Emperor.

They base themselves in Edo,

now renamed Tokyo.

Saigo believes he's secured his country's future...

..but his fight for the soul of

Japan is not yet at an end.

Eight years after the shogun was deposed,

the new government has promised to preserve ancient traditions,

while embarking on a crash course of dizzying modernisation.

Once the shogun is got rid of,

the new government takes power,

but almost immediately, they realise the situation they are in.

This wasn't just a weak shogun,

they realise there is no standing up to these foreign powers.

The only way Japan is going to survive is if they modernise,

and they modernise radically fast.

The imperial government believes

that only an industrialised nation

can defend itself against Western powers.

But modernising forces,

once unleashed, are hard to control.

The pace of change is breathtaking,

and is captured in a high-tech

new art form, imported from

the West - photography.

Within a few years,

you have railways coming in,

you have new buildings going up.

For centuries, people have walked,

or they've gone in palanquins, or they've gone by water.

All of a sudden, there are rickshaws

all over the place.

People start wearing Western

clothes, bustles and bonnets.

Even the Emperor is photographed wearing a Western uniform.

At first, Saigo believes that some modernisation

might strengthen Japan,

but over time, he worries that the changes are sweeping away

his country's traditional values.

Saigo's having to ask himself,

"Is this what I signed up for?

"Is this what I was fighting for just a few years ago?"

In 1876,

the government issues an edict

that enrages many samurai...

..banning them from carrying

their swords in public.

The new government decides that in order to survive,

it needs a modern army,

and that means conscription.

That means that any peasants can fight,

any merchant can pick up a gun and go and fight.

Not only that, they're all going to wear a military uniform.

So what's the point of a samurai?

Where do they fit in this new system?

And of course, they don't.

Saigo has risked everything to put the Emperor in charge...

..but now, even his government seems to have reneged on its promise

to defend Japanese tradition.

The whole point of rising up

was to reestablish samurai values,

put the country on a strong footing

against this influx of foreign ideas and foreign pressures.

It just feels like an extraordinary betrayal.

Saigo joins a growing movement of samurai

prepared to fight for the survival of their identity.

For six months,

Saigo has been leading a rebel army

against the Emperor,

but it's a war they're not winning.

They started off as 20,000 men

and they're getting picked off one by one,

each battle at a time,

and they know that this is their last final stand.

Now Saigo must prepare for the decisive battle,

to protect all that he holds dear in Japan.

Saigo knows perfectly well

that the end is coming,

and so they party, and they exchange

poems, and they drink, and they dance, and they sing, and they wait.

And meanwhile, the government's troops assemble.

These samurai are the last 500 samurai left.

They're the ones who refused to convert to the new system,

the ones who refused to put down their swords,

the ones who kept the tradition alive.

They're on the hillside, they've been shelled,

and now they've no choice, they have to fight.

They walk out into a hail of gunfire.

LOUD EXPLOSION

Saigo is felled

by a gunshot wound to the hip.

There's no point in surrendering

because they are nothing without their identity as samurai...

..and so they decide to die.

According to one story,

Saigo turns to his very good friend and second,

whose name is Beppu Shinsuke, and says,

"Shin, my good friend, here is as good a place as any, let's do it."

Beppu cuts off his head.

The world of the samurai,

its culture, tradition and values,

dies with him.

The fall of the samurai

comes as the world is being

transformed by the forces

of globalisation and Western expansion...

LOUD BLAST

..turning Japan's policy

of strong border control,

effective for generations,

into a weakness.

Throughout human history,

if you're buffered away from other ideas and other cultures,

you're more likely to become vulnerable.

This is a culture that is allowed

to sort of fold in on itself,

to intensify its own traditions.

It's fantastically dangerous

for any civilisation

that values its own society

to fall behind, technologically.

We have to work and live with others, and if we try

to shut ourselves away - as the Japanese did for a long period,

as other societies have done - then I think we are doomed.

Failed leadership...

..climate catastrophe...

..war,

disease,

social breakdown -

each one, destructive on its own,

but when the great forces of history come together,

they can create a perfect storm,

one that will come for

every civilisation in the end.

What remains is this -

the human traces of lost worlds...

..and the soul of history's

great civilisations.

Precious treasures,

passed down the generations,

brimming with ingenuity,

creativity...

..and beauty.

Within them lie clues to the fate,

and folly,

of the greatest empires

of the past...

..and warnings about the perils

of our own time.

The story that is being told to us

through those artefacts

gives us a much more rounded history.

And there is a lot that history teaches us

about what we are doing in the present.

As our own world order

feels increasingly precarious,

will we heed the lessons?

History is, in many ways,

a story of societal evolution...

..and change is necessary

for any society to survive.

The question is, how do you do so

in such a way that keeps a society stable?

SHOUTING

GUNS BLAST

What can these ancient civilisations

tell us about our own societies

and our own vulnerabilities?

And what can we do to prevent

a similar collapse?