Original subtitles

No one knows why 15,000 years ago

human beings painted the walls of caves in Spain and France

with designs like these.

Whatever reason they had to crawl into the inky blackness,

lit only by tiny, flickering lamps,

it surely could not have been just a trivial one.

Almost all the animals represented are those that were hunted for food.

So an obvious explanation is

that painting was part of magic designed to bring success in hunting

or to maintain the fertility of the herds.

One thing is certain...

the animal that dominates this cave in Lascaux

is not the reindeer or the ibex or even the horse

but the great wild boar.

In life, it stood over six feet at the shoulder

and weighed about a ton.

But these astonishing images

are even bigger than life... size.

Confronted by them, it's difficult not to believe

that the artist regarded this animal

with deep, almost religious awe.

It must have been the most formidable and dangerous animal in the forest,

the very embodiment of fertility and strength.

These bulls, running wild in the Camargue in southern France,

are descended from domesticated stock,

but they give some idea of the formidable character

of their truly wild ancestors,

which were even bigger and surely just as aggressive.

(Men shouting and whooping)

(Cowbells clanking)

Around 10,000 years ago, somehow or another,

men managed to tame the bull.

The process started, doubtless, by rearing the calves of cows killed in the hunt,

but even so, controlling animals of such strength and ferocity

and keeping them penned in an enclosure in order not to lose them

must have been very difficult and hazardous

for people who had not yet tamed horses to help them do so.

In the forest... covered mountains, they also found another animal they could tame.

A wild sheep.

This is the mouflon, probably the best living approximation

that we have to that wild ancestor,

which today lives in the remoter parts of the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.

It's a very shy creature with extremely acute eyesight,

so it's very difficult to approach.

In spite of its timidity, it may have been relatively simple to tame.

For one thing, it's a mountain animal,

adapted to picking its way through difficult country,

so it's built for agility rather than speed.

0nce caught, therefore, it's relatively easy to control.

Easier than, say, an antelope.

Furthermore, pasture in this kind of country is scattered and difficult to find,

so the animals do not have small, permanent territories which they mark and defend,

but wander about over a wide range.

In consequence, they were ready to accept being moved

if their human owners wanted to drive them to new pastures.

And they have one further characteristic

that must have helped early man to control them.

The females and their young live together in a small permanent herd.

The male is a solitary animal,

and only visits the herd during the breeding season,

when he leads or drives them and defends them against other rivals.

Men simply took over his position of authority,

and by 8,000 years ago,

people were herding groups of tame sheep

in many parts of the eastern Mediterranean.

Wild pig also lived in the prehistoric forests of Europe,

rootling around for acorns, nuts and roots, just as they do today.

They were one of the favourite targets for the early hunters.

Their young are striped, presumably for camouflage

when for the week or so after they are born

the mother leaves them in a nest in the undergrowth,

and they must be virtually invisible if they're not to be taken by predators...

wolves or bears... or men.

They soon learn to follow their mother around as she searches for food,

as they have to if they themselves are to get a meal.

After about three months, they will stop suckling

and then their stripes will fade.

Pigs are far from being fussy feeders.

They will tackle almost anything, animal or vegetable.

These are seeing what they can find in the shrinking waters of a drying pond.

Wild pigs must have scavenged for scraps around the hunting camps of early man,

and doubtless they soon became accepted

and were thrown regular food to induce them to stay,

so that they could be killed and eaten when needed.

9,000 years ago,

the shores of the western Mediterranean were covered with forest,

and the people lived in settlements of flimsy huts built in clearings.

But at the eastern end of the sea,

some cattle... owning tribes were developing a much more elaborate way of life

in the grasslands of the Nile delta.

Nonetheless, they still worshipped the bull.

(Thunder crashing)

The bull god was sent to earth, they believed, into the womb of a mortal cow.

He had a triangular mark on his forehead, double hairs on his tail,

and the shape of a vulture with outstretched wings clasping his shoulders.

The priests were responsible for finding this holy calf

as soon as his predecessor died.

0nly one bull god could rule at a time.

His name was Apis

and his discovery was the cause for national rejoicing.

Children born on that auspicious day

might be given the name "Apis Is Found"

to mark such a happy coincidence.

Once he was identified,

he was brought to the great temple at Memphis

and kept in a stall quite near here.

He was fed on special foods and regularly anointed,

and on all great festivals and occasions

he was led forth in front of the people

with garlands around his neck and golden regalia between his horns.

The people consulted him as an oracle.

They would recite questions to him and interpret his answers

as to whether he advanced or retreated.

They would write questions on pieces of pottery and put them beside his path

to see whether he veered towards them or away from them.

And when he died, his great body was brought here

to this immense mortuary table.

It weighs about 50 tons,

it was brought here from 250 miles upriver,

and on each side it carries a lion,

the guardian of the dead and the symbol of the resurrection.

The body was then mummified, using exactly the same embalming techniques

as were used for the bodies of the god kings, the pharaohs.

After the removal of the viscera,

scented embalming fluid was poured over the corpse,

which drained through this runnel here, and were collected in this basin.

For, having passed over the body of a god,

they were very magical and precious.

Then the body was wrapped in bandages

and carried in procession to its last resting place.

For over a thousand years, the mummified bodies of the bulls

were brought down here in these limestone galleries

cut deep below ground.

Once their walls were covered with tablets, like this one,

erected by the priests or devotees or workers,

as acts of devotion to the spirits of the bull gods.

Preparations to receive the body of the bull

had been going on for some time, perhaps as much as a year,

perhaps even before the bull itself had died.

A huge granite sarcophagus had been quarried upriver

and brought down here on barges.

This is just the lid of one

that for some reason, had been abandoned here.

The main part of it lies deeper in these galleries.

This huge block,

although it's hollowed out inside and is without its lid,

must weigh, nonetheless, between 60 and 70 tons.

It was dragged here by the dozen or so masons who made it,

and it would have taken them about four days

to pull it all the way to its appointed vault.

When the sarcophagus reached this position,

this vault was full of sand.

The sarcophagus was hauled across on top of it

and then the sand removed from either side

so that this huge block sank slowly to its final position.

On its side are inscribed in hieroglyphs,

Apis, beloved of Osiris...

given...

all... life...

stability...

power...

and all joy...

forever.

Then the bull, in its wrappings and adornments, was placed inside,

and this immense lid hauled across to seal it.

But not forever.

For, a century or so later, in Christian or Roman times,

thieves came and pulled back this lid,

and stripped the bull of all its golden finery.

The falcon was also worshipped.

Hovering aloft in the sky, ceaselessly scanning the earth beneath,

and on occasion flying so high that it disappeared from sight,

the people identified it with the sun

and worshipped it as Horus, lord of the sky.

It too had temples dedicated to it,

where priests kept captive falcons and revered them as gods.

As the centuries passed, these cults changed in character.

Instead of choosing one representative bird,

all birds of a particular species

were believed to contain something of the god's spirit.

So all falcons, for example, merited mummification.

They lie here in Saqqara in immense stacks,

each eviscerated, embalmed, and sealed in its own pottery sarcophagus.

There are estimated to be 800,000 falcons here,

and they're not only falcons, they're birds of prey of all kinds.

Some of the bigger pots contain vultures,

a bird that was sacred to the kingdom of Upper Egypt.

But, above all, there are ibis.

There are so many that it's impossible to believe

that they all met a natural death,

yet Herodotus the Greek historian was absolutely clear...

even the accidental killing of a sacred ibis in ancient Egypt

was a crime punishable by death.

But the devotees of the ibis cult

flocked to this temple in huge numbers,

and each wanted to gain merit with the ibis god

by presenting an embalmed bird

and depositing it in these vaults.

So it seems that the priests

maintained a kind of ibis breeding station,

a sort of sacred zoo on a lake near here.

And then, when devotees came, they were able to supply

a bird ready... mummified and sealed,

for a price.

These galleries have not yet been fully explored,

but it's estimated that, at very least,

there are four million mummified ibis here,

and the true number may be twice that.

The ibis uses its long, curved bill

to probe in mud and find its food.

The Egyptians watching it do so in their fields

interpreted its action as a continuous search for the truth,

and so they regarded the bird as the incarnation of Thoth, the god of wisdom.

We still call this handsome black... and... white species the sacred ibis,

but it no longer lives in Egypt and has retreated to more southerly parts of Africa.

The papyrus swamps that existed throughout the Nile delta

were rich in wildlife of all kinds,

and the Egyptians found in them a great source of delight and wonder.

Certainly, they deified and worshipped

many of the animals that they saw here.

The hippopotamus with its swollen belly was Tawaret,

the protector of pregnant women, who, if suitably propitiated,

could make the trial of childbirth less difficult.

The crocodile, not surprisingly, was the god of evil, Sobek.

The cat, which had come to live alongside people in their houses,

was also a suitable subject for mummification.

It was an associate of the goddess of war, Pasht.

There were lion gods and ram gods, hawk gods and goat gods.

The images of them that stood in temples were given human bodies

to show that they represented not ordinary animals but divine beings.

But though the people saw divinity in all the creatures around them,

that didn't stop them from handling and exploiting animals.

Indeed, they were expert farmers.

They handled wild animals with equal skill.

Judging from carvings such as these,

they kept several kinds of antelope in captivity,

even though they never succeeded in domesticating them.

And here they appear to be force... feeding hyenas.

0ne of their favourite pastimes was to go hunting in the swamps of the delta.

They used throwing... sticks to bring down flying ducks.

And they caught fish with harpoons.

As well as abundant wildlife, the Nile brought other treasure.

Every year, hundreds of miles away upstream to the south,

abundant rains fell.

And so, every year, in a way that must have seemed almost magical

to these people living here where there is no rain,

the river rose between its banks,

here and the upper part of its valley, by as much as 20 feet or so.

And every year, a high official of the state would come

and ceremonially break the banks

to allow the waters to flow over the fields.

They lay there for two months or so,

and when the river began to fall again and the waters to retreat,

they left behind what was perhaps the Nile's greatest treasure of all...

a thick layer of rich, fertile mud.

And so the people here were able to grow the plants

that now are being domesticated all round the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Wheat and barley grew abundantly,

and the people were able to plough and sow not only once

but twice in a year.

We know how they worked in the fields

from the way in which they chose to be buried in their tombs.

They believe that scenes painted on the tomb walls

would be repeated in the afterlife.

So the nobleman who once lay here

chose to be surrounded in death

by pictures of some of the most important and delightful times

that he spent on earth,

and that included cultivating the crops.

The heads of grain were cut with sickles

that initially were made of flint.

Cattle, yoked together, pulled the wooden ploughs,

and they too trod the grain to loosen the kernels from the seed heads.

Winnowing, to get rid of the chaff,

was done exactly as it is now.

Away to the northwest, 400 miles across the Mediterranean,

lay a scatter of islands.

The nearest and biggest of them was Crete,

itself 200 miles long.

Tribes of people from the mainland on the other side of the sea, from Greece and Turkey,

had reached Crete about 9,000 years ago,

even before the Egyptians had begun building their cities.

For a long time after their arrival here, however,

the Cretans had lived simple lives in small hamlets of wooden huts,

for their land was far less kind to them

than the valley of the Nile was to the Egyptians.

Here, there was no annual flood of fertile mud.

The land was stony, the soil was thin,

and when people first began to build the cities here,

some 4,000 years ago,

all this land was covered with forest,

and in that forest grew trees like these.

They are amongst the longest living of Mediterranean trees,

living for as long as 1,000 or 1500 years.

And they bear great wealth...

their olives.

The people, then as now,

harvested them by beating the branches with sticks

to knock down the ripened fruit.

The olives were then crushed in mills,

using not horses as they use today, but oxen.

(People chatting in Greek)

The final squeezing of the pulp is done in a press,

which extracts the last drops of this clear, precious oil.

In ancient times, this oil was the main form of wealth on the island.

By now, there were many cities in Crete,

and people paid their taxes to the king in this oil.

The most important of these cities

stood near the north coast, at Knossos.

The oil was stored in gigantic pots like these.

420 of them stood in 18 long, narrow chambers like this one.

So this, in effect, was the treasury

of the palace and the state.

It was used, of course, for cooking,

just as it is today in this part of the world.

But it was also used for lighting, being burnt in small, pottery lamps,

of which hundreds have been found in ruins such as this one.

And it had another use...

purified and scented with crushed herbs,

the people used it to anoint their bodies.

That not only gave them a pleasant perfume,

but it also helped in keeping themselves clean.

After heavy exercise, they would take an instrument such as this

and scrape away the oil,

so carrying away the perspiration and the dirt.

Not all these pots had oil in them.

0thers contained that other very precious liquid, wine.

(Animated chatter)

In Crete today, as almost everywhere else

that grapes are grown and wine made,

happy parties are held to celebrate the harvest.

While some drink, others, fortified and encouraged by the taste of last year's crop,

tread the grapes to produce the juice for this year's vintage.

(Animated chatter)

The wild vine grew originally as a creeper

in the forests around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

Somehow, people discovered very early

that it could be propagated with cuttings grafted onto root... stocks.

So if a man happened to find in the forest a vine

that produced particularly abundant, big or sweet grapes,

he could cut the stem and graft it onto a plant

that grew beside his house.

0ver the years, this steady collection of selected vines

produced crops which had a high proportion

of large, elongated pips,

and from finding such evidence as that,

archaeologists deduce that the domestication of the vines

started around 8,000 years ago.

(Men chatting and laughing)

There are many palaces in Crete,

some say over a hundred.

This one is at Phaestos on the southern coast,

and it was only a little less magnificent than that at Knossos.

They had upper storeys supported by long lines of wooden columns.

Inside, they were magnificently decorated with frescoes.

And all those that have been excavated so far

have one thing in common in their layout...

they are centred around one large, paved arena.

Here, many archaeologists believe,

was held the great ritual which dominated the lives of the people.

It was a blend of religious devotion,

athletic prowess and great bravery.

For these people, like the Egyptians before them,

worshipped the bull.

Young men would seize a charging bull by its horns,

somersault over its back and then land on their feet behind it.

(Crowd chattering, bugle plays fanfare)

(Crowd jeering and whistling)

4,000 years later, in southern France,

men still taunt bulls.

(Crowd jeering and whistling)

The bull carries a red rosette on its forehead

and white tassels on the points of its horns.

If the men, skilled athletes who specialise in this sport,

manage to snatch off a tassel or a rosette

they win considerable prizes,

and the crowd lays bets on who will do so.

There's real danger.

If the men are caught, they may be severely gored

and even tossed and killed.

(Crowd cheering)

(Bugle playing fanfare)

After a carefully timed period of 15 minutes,

the bull is let out of the ring

and goes back to its pen, uninjured.

But it will return several times later in the season

to fight again in this extraordinary tournament.

The ancient Cretans were skilled fishermen.

They probably copied their ships from those of the Egyptians,

who had developed a technique of sailing in the calm waters of the Nile.

But the Cretans ventured out into the rough and unpredictable open sea

and were greatly rewarded.

From deep water around their coasts,

they occasionally hauled up red coral.

They used it for jewellery and for trade.

Eventually, people as far away as central Asia

came to prize this extraordinary substance,

so like a stone, yet so unlike anything dug from the earth.

Cretan pots carried pictures of the products the people specially valued.

At the bottom of this one, among the twigs of coral,

is a particularly precious sea snail.

This is murex.

At first sight, it looks very similar

to many other kinds of whelk... like molluscs

that crawl about on the sea floor.

But in its mantle it has a special gland

from which comes a substance that will dye fabric a rich purple.

Royal purple, it was called,

and for the next thousand years or so,

the murex was regarded throughout the Mediterranean lands

as one of the most valuable things to come from the sea.

Another creature they collected still entices men

to dive deep at the risk of their lives.

Holding a lead weight in one hand to keep him down,

with bursting lungs and seeing only blearily without goggles,

he's searching for sponges.

That's one.

Divers in Tunisia still work without face masks,

let alone any breathing equipment, just as they once did in ancient times.

The length of time they can manage to stay below is quite extraordinary.

He takes his breath...

now.

And only now can he breathe again.

0ctopus appear again and again on Cretan pots.

And they were, then as now, one of the most favoured foods that the sea had to offer.

The method used for catching them has also not changed

since ancient times, nor does it need to.

It's simplicity itself

and requires nothing more than an earthenware pot.

The octopus likes to hide inside small dens on the sea floor,

and these pots, apparently, suit it so well, they are irresistible.

All the fisherman has to do is to return after a few hours

and haul up the pots.

The way to get an octopus out of the pot is also easy.

Pour in a little extra... salty water through a hole in the bottom

and out it comes.

The most valuable fish in the sea, then as now, is the tunny.

Every year in the early the summer, they swim in from the Atlantic to spawn.

They are immense, some as much as 12 feet long.

Because of the shape of the coastline and the topography of the sea floor,

in some places they have to swim along a restricted and predictable route,

and there, the people wait for them.

Nets hanging from floats are stretched diagonally across the migration path

for as much as three miles.

The fish swim along the face of them, seeking a way past,

until they enter a corridor that not only has an end wall,

but a floor of netting.

0nce they have started down it, the fishermen pull up the end of the floor

and the tunny are trapped.

(Men shouting)

(Shouting)

The net is pulled in, forcing the fish closer to the surface.

As they thrash about in panic, the fish so exhaust themselves

that some are already close to death.

0ne single chamber may have trapped a hundred of these giant fish,

30 tons of prime... quality meat.

When the last have been collected, the netting floor is dropped again

to wait for the next shoal, which may well arrive within a few hours.

The harvest of the Mediterranean has always been rich.

The Romans were particularly fond of fishing scenes

for the mosaics with which they decorated the floors of their sumptuous villas.

And these give a good idea of the range of sea creatures

that they knew and relished.

Hunting, too, was a Roman passion.

Many of the animals they caught alive.

By the beginning of the first century AD,

the Romans had become the dominant nation in the Mediterranean,

ruling all the lands right round the sea.

And they ransacked their vast empire for animals,

the stranger and the more ferocious the better.

The fate of these creatures was to be transported to huge cities

that now stood in all parts of the empire,

and there to be taken to the arenas

that were the centres of mass entertainment.

This, one of the most perfectly preserved, is at El Jem in Tunisia.

The Roman public's thirst for blood

and pleasure in witnessing pain

seems to have been unquenchable and without limit.

The caged animals were kept in dungeons below the main arena.

When this place was in use, timbers were laid across to roof this underground passage.

And when the day of the spectacle came,

30,000 people were packed into the terraces.

And then, to the sound of blaring trumpets and roars from the crowd,

the terrified animals in their cages were hoisted up from this pit.

And not only animals. Human beings too.

Criminals, slaves and prisoners of war.

And here in this arena, they were set one upon the other,

to provide the crowd with spectacles of the most appalling carnage.

(Crowd cheering)

(Animals roaring)

(Applause)

It still continues in Spain.

Even sometimes in the very arenas built by the Romans.

(Crowd roaring)

The Romans built huge cities all around the shores of the Mediterranean.

Here, at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey,

they took over a Greek town around a great religious centre,

sacred to the goddess of fertility and nature, Artemis.

Her temple here was so rich and splendid,

it was listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Roman copies in marble of the wooden statue

that once stood in her temple still survive.

And very strange they are too.

Heads of bulls are clustered around her ankles.

Above them are lionesses,

mythical winged creatures like griffins,

and then the heads of lions.

For she had all nature, tame and wild, in her charge.

The strange objects above them

were for a long time thought to be multiple breasts,

a kind of expression of her huge fertility,

in spite of the fact that they aren't shaped like breasts,

they don't have nipples, they are so low down on her body

and there are so many of them.

But recently we've learnt more about the cult of Artemis.

Excavations at Ephesus in her shrine

have revealed a great number of skeletons of bulls.

It seems that they were not only sacrificed in her honour, but castrated.

And, as part of the ritual, her image was hung

with the parts of their body that were the very source of their power and fertility,

their testicles.

People were now travelling widely around the sea,

protected by the peace imposed by Roman rule,

and religious ideas were spreading.

Visitors to Ephesus might well have carried bull worship back to western Europe,

if indeed the practice of it, once so strong in earlier times,

had ever ceased.

During the first century BC,

a bull cult appeared in Rome itself

and was soon spreading all over the empire.

In underground temples like this one near Rome,

devotees gathered to worship this god, Mithras.

The legend of Mithras originated, like that of Artemis,

in the eastern Mediterranean, and it told how the god fought a great bull,

stabbing it in the throat

so that its blood gushed onto the earth, giving life to the animals,

here represented by the snake and the dog

which are lapping up the blood.

So the bull is still seen as the source of all life,

but now it requires a god in human form to release its fertility.

At this time, Rome was at the height of her power,

her empire extending across the Mediterranean

to the North African shore.

And here there were some 600 great cities,

the biggest of all being this, Leptis Magna,

with a population of around 100,000 people.

And in the first year of the Christian era, AD 1,

one of the wealthiest of them, a man by the name of Annobal Rufus,

built for the benefit of the citizens, and doubtless for his own greater glory,

this splendid theatre which could accommodate 7,000 spectators.

Here, pantomimes and ballets were performed.

Elaborate scenery was set on the stage,

and screens of canvas stretched between sticks

were raised in front of the stage to allow settings to be changed.

There was a magnificent basilica

and huge municipal baths.

In the city centre stood a splendid marketplace

with marble colonnades adorned with statues of distinguished citizens.

This city, in Libya in fact,

was one of the wealthiest in the whole of the empire.

That wealth was based directly on the land.

Into this marketplace flooded produce of all kinds,

figs and pomegranates, chicken and sheep,

and this stone was used for measuring olive oil...

pouring the oil in at the top

and collecting it by removing the bung at the bottom,

so forming a standard unit.

But above all there was grain.

Pliny, the Roman historian, said that the land here was so rich

that if you planted one grain of wheat,

from it would sprout a stem carrying 150 grains.

By the end of the first century AD,

North Africa was producing half a million tons of grain every year

and supplying the densely populated city of Rome,

which had long since outstripped its own resources, with two thirds of its wheat.

The southern shores of the Mediterranean, in fact,

were among the most fertile territories in the whole of the Roman Empire.

Their produce was brought to the great ports like this one at Leptis.

Then, the sea lapped this jetty,

and alongside it were moored the great ships.

Onto to them were loaded hundreds of tons of wheat,

thousands of gallons of olive oil,

ivory for the craftsmen of the imperial city,

caged wild beasts such as lions and leopards and rhinoceroses

to be tormented and put to death in the arenas of the empire.

And yet, today the harbour is silted up,

most of the city lies buried beneath sand dunes

and the land has become a desert.

As the population had grown and more people wanted more fields,

so more of the forest that once stood around the city was cut down

until, eventually, it was all gone.

With no roots to hold the soil and no attempt to conserve it,

it was carried away by the wind and the rain.

And this is where it went.

In bays all around the eastern Mediterranean

the sea is separated from the hills inland

by strips of flat marshy land like this,

made up of the soil that once clothed the rocks of the hills beyond.

All this was deposited during the last 2,000 years,

for this is the marsh that now separates the sea from the city of Ephesus.

These ruined buildings mark the edge of the quay

where once merchant ships lay moored.

As the harbour died, so did the trade on which the city's wealth was based,

and so, ultimately, did Ephesus itself.

What was once one of the most splendid cities of the Roman Empire

fell into decay and was abandoned.

The city was approaching the height of its wealth and prosperity

when, in the year 53 AD,

St Paul settled here.

Not only was there great wealth coming from the port,

even though the harbour was rapidly silting up,

but every year thousands of devotees came here

to worship at the ancient shrine of Artemis of Ephesus,

the goddess of fertility.

But St Paul's message of Christianity

began to strike at that trade.

The silversmiths who made images of the goddess for sale to the pilgrims,

complained that it was ruining their trade,

and eventually they organised a riot right here in this very theatre.

Two of Paul's companions were badly beaten up,

and although the authorities eventually managed to restore order,

the situation remained so tense that Paul had to leave.

But, in truth, it was the Ephesians themselves

who were flouting the principles of fertility

by what they were doing to the land around their city.

It used to be said that in places like this,

nature eventually failed to support man.

The truth is exactly the reverse...

here, man failed to support nature.

10,000 years ago, man regarded the natural world as divine.

But, as he domesticated animals and plants,

so nature lost something of its mystery

and seemed to be little more than a larder that could be raided with impunity.

The bull, once the most important of the gods, was dethroned.

So today, castrated and subdued,

it works out its days in harness

as man's patient slave.

But at the other end of the Mediterranean,

the sun was just a little less harsh,

the rainfall a little more generous,

and so, there, nature is able a little better to withstand man's assaults.

And so, over the next few centuries,

the centres of human power and population

slowly moved to the other end of the sea.