Original subtitles

Throughout my life,

I've been fascinated by the Greek myths.

By the tales of those tragic heroes.

By the loves and personalities of the gods.

And their battles with monsters,

or even with one another.

Myths are stories without known authors.

And I've always wondered, where do they come from?

The search for their origins will

take me on a journey of discovery.

Over two films, I'm going

east and west across the Mediterranean.

I will travel from a mountain in Turkey

where a god was castrated to the peak in Greece

where the young king of the gods was brought up to power.

I'll look upon vast ruins of

the capital city of an ancient empire

whose influence on myths is only now

beginning to become clear.

And the most important religious site

in the Ancient Greek world, where people believed

they had evidence of the power of their ancient gods.

In these films, I'm going to reveal

how Greek's myths of their battling gods

were shaped by the minds of people

from a particular place.

Living at a time which has been described as a dark age.

(pleasant instrumental music)

I teach ancient history here at New College Oxford

where Classical Greek has been

studied for so many centuries.

It really is the place to think about the ancient world.

And not only think about it, but look at it too.

Nearby, the Ashmolean Museum

is built on classical Greek principles.

Recently it's been excitingly redesigned.

The cultural links between

ancient civilizations are at its heart.

Here I always reflect how Greek art, philosophy, politics,

are at the roots of our western world.

And at the heart of their legacy lie the Greek myths.

These are stories that have inspired art.

Great beauty and great horror

from the Renaissance to the modern.

And influenced philosophers and thinkers

for thousands of years.

Even today, the tales of the Greek mythical heroes

Odysseus, Adeudos, Achillies, are still alive for us.

But grander still are the myths

which made the Greek gods what they were.

Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo, and ruling over them,

Zeus himself, the father of gods and men.

The most fascinating of these myths

are the stories of the wars of the gods in heaven.

I believe we can understand their roots

and understand the world in which they developed.

Our knowledge of these myths comes

from ancient hymns to the gods and epic poetry.

Above all the great poetry of Homer.

In the very first book of his Illiad,

Homer actually describes the singing

of just such a hymn with myths to the god Apollo.

Homer probably composed

in the mid to late eighth century BC.

After 400 years of what historians

used to call the Greek dark ages.

They were dark in one respect.

Greeks on the mainland had lost the art of writing.

But during this preliterate age, myths proliferated.

They were not fantasies of the human unconscious mind.

They were born through contact with real places

by a particular people whom I will trace for the first time.

Theirs is an extraordinary story

of exploration and imagination.

And it begins for me with a journey to the Greek island

from which they came more than 3000 years ago.

The island of Euboea was known to the Greeks as Long Island.

It's not on many tourists' trail,

but at the Europa strait, the island lies

so close to mainland Greece,

you can actually walk across using a short bridge.

Towards the end of the Greek dark ages,

between the tenth and eighth centuries BC,

there were a number of relatively

sophisticated settlements on Euboea.

I believe that their residence played the crucial role

in development of the Greek myths about the gods in heaven.

The contemporary evidence for them

comes from archaeological finds.

In Euboea, the most telling excavation

has been on a hill near the town of Lefkandi.

Where the excavation is led by Irene Lemos.

My colleague from University of Oxford.

So this is the deposit where you put

everything you find on the hill, mainly pottery.

Yes, this is where we keep all our pottery.

Oh my God, it looks as though you're

clearing up after the party that April 4th.

So much so that you can't make any sense of it.

All you've got is a mass of undecorated pieces,

none of which match is what I can see.

Pretty much, yeah.

This is a normal bag really.

And that is the contents

of about half a crate under there

and you've got how many hundreds of crates?

I dread to think.

We have 1000 crates.

1000?

Yes, in here.

Well you're going to be here

until you're old and gray.

They're never going to let you out.

You'll be locked in, it's the end of your life.

(laughter)

Pottery is so important for historians,

because it leaves an indestructible human trail.

And it's exciting when fragments

can be assembled into one object.

How many pieces are there in that one for instance?

Around 20.

20?

Yes.

Are you sure you've got them in the right order?

Yes, definitely.

And that's all held together with little bits of glue.

And then I see a beautifully faded graft.

I think in an airy way that it's a perfect piece.

Yes.

All the pottery in the world

is waiting to be found here isn't it?

The most significant of Irene's finds

are brought to the Eretria Museum

a few kilometers from Lefkandi.

Here there are objects which reveal

the prominence of myths in Euboean society

and hint at how they developed.

Here Robin you will see some of our complete finds

And some of the best,

mostly from the cemeteries of Lefkandi.

What have we got here?

This is a figurine of a centaur.

A man on a horse.

Wonderful, so this really is evidence of a figure of myth.

And that must mean that the myths were known

and being told in Lefkandi in the tenth, ninth century.

I don't think I recall a centaur any earlier than this.

Is this one of the first?

It is actually the first three dimensional

representation we have of the mythical centaur.

Heavens.

This particular one has six fingers and a gash on his leg

so it might be a particular one, Cheiron

It could by Cheiron, the teacher of Achillies.

Absolutely.

What this really means

is that the myths we talk about

must have been known and circulating at Lefkandis.

Possibly told in poetry.

So when we're thinking of what did they talk about,

an object like this gives you a real idea

of the surrounding culture and understanding of the people.

This looks like some kind of a ship.

Yes, it is a boat.

And it's most probably galley.

Right.

And what sort of date are we talking about?

Well it is early nine century BC.

What nine century BC boat on a pot?

I don't believe you.

It is the earliest one.

Right.

Actually when we found it,

I excavated this part and no one believed me

but we have the, you know, the bit of a boat.

And then we got the rest of it.

And proved you right.

Yes.

It's very sophisticated.

We've got the oars.

We've got one steer by.

We've got the mast.

And with that they could set out onto the Aegean,

steering by the stars we have to remember,

pulling on their oars for quite really a long journey.

So with ships of that sophistication,

there's every reason why the Euboeans should

be able to look outwards from Lefkandi,

and that's clearer evidence that Euboeans

would be great travelers at a time

when the rest of Greece is not capable of it.

It's extraordinary to think

how the Euboeans would have sailed.

They had no maps, no compasses.

They didn't have our cardinal points like east and west.

Their worldview was shaped by local landmarks.

Especially distinctive cliffs.

Undaunted, they would set out from these shores

with them traveled a mental cargo

of the oral stories which they called muthot.

These muthi were not fixed, but were open

to new influences and insights.

And in their travels, I believe,

the Euboeans encountered landscapes

and stories which inspired new myths.

Their trail takes me first

to the very eastern limit of settlement

for dark age Greek travelers.

Out on the coast of modern Turkey.

From the tenth century BC onwards,

Euboeans came east in search of metals.

Especially copper and tin which was needed

for their newly acquired skill of bronze working.

It's here, just by this shore,

that I'm going to find the crucial Euboean link

which helps to explain the trail of myths

surrounding the Greek gods and their wars in heaven.

What Euboeans learned here was nothing less

than stories of a violent struggle among the early gods.

Stories of castration and baby eating,

and of how their ruling god Zeus came to power.

My belief stems from the remarkable discoveries

made by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1936.

Woolley's excavations lay on the outskirts

of the coastal town of Samandağ

near the Syrian border with Turkey.

Today, even to rediscover Woolley's site is not easy.

It's been covered over, and there have been

no more excavations for years.

So I've begun from a landmark he mentioned.

The shrine of a local Muslim saint.

We know Woolley excavated

just to the northeast of the shrine.

This place is about a mile inland from the sea,

but believe it or not, in antiquity,

it was actually on the coast.

Just beside a river, which has silted it up.

And that was why Woolley named it Al Mina,

Arabic word for the port or harborage

by which it's still known.

Now I'm going to try to get in

and see the site that Woolley excavated,

which is down there among what are now orange growths.

There are no traces here of Woolley's trenches.

Oranges are ripening in the fields.

Most of his finds have been shipped off abroad.

Woolley found nothing so exciting

as gold and sculpture here but for historians,

he found something every bit as important.

He dug and dug down through nine lairs of time.

Then on virgin soil at the very bottom,

he found a lair of predominantly Greek pottery.

Most of which has turned out to be Euboean.

My natural conclusion then is that Euboeans

were the first settlers right out here at Al Mina.

Fascinating bit, the pottery fragments

from eighth century BC which Woolley found

were mainly from simple drinking vessels.

They were functional, and they're not

desirable items for foreign trade.

So I believe Euboeans brought them to these shores

for their own personal use in the settlement.

Experts still argue over Al Mina's pottery,

which is scattered nowadays all the way

from the British museum to Australia.

But if you actually come to the site,

you realize there was something

much more important in the Euboeans' minds.

Every day, every night, they looked up

to the great beacon of a mountain,

which rises steeply from the sea.

It affected the clouds, the rain, the sea itself.

And around it swirled some of the worlds'

oldest myths about the gods.

Today this mountain is known as Jabel Aqra.

Bold mountain.

It had many names in the past.

Mount Hazzi was one.

And to the Greeks, it became known as Mount Casius.

Mount Casius rises nearly 2000 meters

directly up from the sea shore, often wreathed in clouds.

It is a focal point for thunder and lightning.

Nowadays, we sometimes think of a landscape like this

as a mass of rock and soil which

exists independently of an observer's eye.

But landscapes are also given character by human concepts.

And in antiquity, they inspired myths.

When Euboeans arrived here,

they needed to understand the element

of power of the mountain peak.

And they found that near eastern cultures

already could explain it.

For more than a thousand years,

long before any Euboean Greeks settled below,

this mountain peak was the center

for prayers, hymns, and animal sacrifices.

Mount Cassius was a holy mountain for the Hittites.

The Hittites old empire had fallen around 1200 BC,

four centuries before Euboeans settled here.

At its peak, it had ruled over a vast swathe of land,

from modern Turkey right into Syria.

And its cultural influence had survived the empire's fall.

When Euboeans arrived, that influence

was still present in local myths and religion.

On the summit of this mountain,

the Hittites believed lived the god Teshub,

who they later called Tarhunta the Conqueror.

He was a god of weather, and of storms and thunder.

And when the rainclouds break on this mountain,

everyone for miles around is only too aware of his power.

Religious ceremonies were offered to the mountain too.

And we've recently learned something very important.

From fragmentary Hittite tablets,

we know that the ceremonies included

the song of kingship and the song of the sea.

And this is crucial because they are the stories

we know from other Hittite texts

about the many battles and fights

of the Hittite gods for control in heaven.

Most remarkably, these Hittite myths

share many details with Greek myths

of how their ruling gods came to power.

The myths are so similar.

Did the Hittite one influence the Greeks?

To answer this question, I need first

to travel northwards to the ancient center of Hittite power.

Down this 71 meter cobalt tunnel

lies a spectacular sight from the preclassical world.

This is Hattusha.

Its remains cover an astonishing area.

It was the capital of Hittite kings

until their empire fell more than 3000 years ago.

These scattered limestone foundations

can only hint at the city's true grandeur.

The Hittite empire was so mighty that at its peak,

down in the south, even the Egyptian Pharaoh

was force to retreat before its army.

The kings of Hattusha honored their gods

with a shrine created out of a natural ravine.

Along its walls ran carved reliefs

which show the gods in procession.

And at the center, the Hittite weather god Tarhunta.

He's visible here in outline,

though nowadays the carving is rather faint.

He's holding out his hand to Hepat,

the goddess who has come up

from Syria and is standing on a panther.

He himself is standing on these two

bended figures who symbolize mountains.

This one is Mount Nanu and this one is Mount Hazzi.

That is really very neat.

Mount Hazzi is exactly Mount Casius of the Greeks.

And Mount Nanu is the second peak on Mount Hazzi's ridge.

The importance of that mountain in Hittite religion

could hardly be clearer.

The song of Tarhunta's rise to power

performed on that very mountain,

is known to us from texts found here in Hattusha.

From them, we learn that Tarhunta

was not the first king of the Hittite gods.

He overthrew his own father Kumarbi

and Kumarbi himself had usurped the kingship

from the older god Anu in a myth with a gruesome climax.

As Anu was losing the battle, he flew up to heaven.

But Kumarbi caught him and sank his teeth

into Anu's sexual parts, bit them off,

and swallowed a mouthful of sperm.

In defeat, Anu warned him that he'd now become pregnant.

Sure enough, Kumarbi conceived a son.

The storm god Tarhunta.

So back here in the shadow of Mount Cassius

the actual scene of those heavenly battles,

it's no wonder that Euboeans nearby

were impressed by the ancient Hittite

stories of kingship and castration.

As always, myths were never fixed.

They evolved and mutated.

So Euboeans adapted what they heard,

and worked its bloody details

into what they already suspected of their own early gods.

The Greek myths tell how deep darkness

would fall at night near the beginning of the world.

Father Heaven would come down and stretch himself out

above the goddess Mother Earth,

thrust into her, and have sex with her

so tightly that no light could come between the pair.

After a while, Mother Earth could bare it no longer.

She called together her sons and asked for a volunteer,

and young Cronus agreed to go and hide.

The next night came.

Father Heaven approached, lay on top of Mother Earth,

thrust into her, and out from behind the bushes

came young Cronus armed with the curved sickle.

With a sharp tithe made of adimantine metal.

And with one sweep, a right handed sweep we're told,

he mowed off his father's private parts.

In agony, Heaven flew up to the sky.

Light then dawned between them.

The private parts, they were enormous,

fell full of blood and sperm through the air

and the sickle, dripping with blood, was thrown away.

(intense instrumental music)

Parallels between the Greek and Hittite

stories of castration are obvious.

In due course, Greeks even located

their version of the event here on Mount Cassius.

The mountain was therefore a place of such pagan power.

Indeed it was so potent, that even much later

Christians believed they needed a way of counteracting it.

This sixth century church complex

is a witness to that concern.

At its center stood literally a Christian stormtrooper.

Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger.

Saint Simeon perched on a 50 foot

high pillar, only its base survives.

And during 32 years, he never came off it.

Around him clustered pilgrims

who would sit and gaze upwards in awe.

Now these are the really special seats for the VIPs.

Even the Roman Emperor consulted the saint.

But on a few days, ordinary questioners

could sometimes send written requests up to him,

and they would bring them to

the bottom of this stone staircase

and they would climb as I am,

and give them to his attendant

who would then take them up a wooden ladder

for the saint's blessing at the top.

And I think we see why he stood

particularly here at such a height.

He's facing directly across to the pagan gods

who swarmed on Mount Cassius,

and he's there as a Christian challenge

fighting with them in his view, demons.

These demons were the gods whom Euboean settlers

had honored long before in the myths of this very mountain.

The place where the gods had established their rule.

They knew the myths orally.

Especially from local women with whom they lived.

They did not read them from Hittite texts.

They took those stories fresh in their mind across the seas

to the lands of the Greeks and beyond.

When Euboeans traveled on their boats

to and from Al Mina and along its coastline,

they journey by island hopping.

The nearest island to Al Mina is hardly 80 kilometers away.

In the tenth to eighth centuries BC,

it was a place of differing kingdoms

and a varied population.

A place where many cultures came together

and myths floated across the sea.

The island of Cyprus.

One of the most important ancient stop overs

on the island was the coastal settlement

of Amathus near modern Limassol.

At Amathus, I believe, an important

encounter occurred for the Euboeans.

The result of it eventually allowed Greeks

to record their myths for posterity.

In recently excavated graves here,

Euboean pottery was found buried

alongside objects belonging to Phoenicians.

The Phoenicians were a near eastern people.

And unlike mainland Greeks of this time, they were literate.

I think it was possibly here that

a really important lesson was learned.

Somewhere, one day, an inquisitive Euboean

sat with a Phoenician and looked and listened

while the Phoenician wrote out the letters

of his script and described them.

And the Greek adapted them and copied them down

as letters still in use in the modern Greek alphabet.

Alpha, beta, gamma.

Exactly the order which we know

Phoenicians used for their own letters

aleph, bet, gimel.

The Greek thought he needed signs

for the vowel sounds he was hearing, so he added them.

Epsilon, iota, and so forth, making the fullest alphabet.

The one that is most easy to read.

And it's that Greek alphabet that is the ancestor

of all the alphabets that we still use in the modern west.

As the alphabet developed, myths could eventually

become more fixed as they were written down.

But during the Greek dark ages,

they were still told orally and open to influence.

On Cyprus, we can follow this happening

to the story of a local fertility goddess.

Like other visitors to Amathus,

Euboeans encountered her shrine.

Her worship here dates as far back as the 2000s BC.

Through contact with visitors from the near east,

she then took on a wilder sexual identity.

And then when the Greeks arrived, she became Aphrodite.

Jacqueline Karageorghis has spent her whole life

studying the transformations of the goddess of love.

So goddess of love and sex is in fact for the Greeks,

an introduction in the early dark ages.

You're making this Greek Aphrodite

sound as though she lived in Paris.

She's sexy and all the rest of it,

but Jacqueline, there were said to have been

prostitutes here serving the cult of the goddess.

At least by Christian sources, do you believe that?

And then they kept the money as their dowry?

But nowadays their fathers build them a house.

To the west of Amathus is another place

now associated with Aphrodite.

It is known as the Rock of Aphrodite.

The local story is that if you swim

all the way around this rock,

you are blessed with eternal beauty.

The beach alongside is now considered

the location of Aphrodite's literal emergence.

Of course the story of Aphrodite

is connected to much grander stories in heaven Jacqueline.

When Father Heaven is castrated of course,

blood and white sperm flies everywhere.

And according to the Greeks,

when the sperm falls down into the sea,

somebody very significant is born from it.

Your goddess Aphordíta.

And the Greeks, when they later though about it,

tried to connect that name Aphordíta

with their own Greek word aphrós

meaning foam or foaming white sperm.

Do you think there was any historical truth in that?

Like a word play?

That was a pretty good way to be born.

But there is the local story.

When she was born, she was washed to this very beach.

This is what the Cyprus tourist board

still tells you nowadays Jacqueline.

Do you think there's any history in that?

When was the first stake, do you think?

But it shows beautifully how what will be a myth, I'm sure,

continued in modern cycles begins

and starts from a beautiful landscape,

and then acquires a force of its own

exactly as it did in the ancient world.

This is how myths are made.

The vision of Aphrodite emerging from the sea

is so compelling that it has inspired

great artists through the centuries.

The most famous image is by

the Renaissance master Botticelli.

Aphrodite being blown ashore in a shower of roses.

She seems far removed from Heaven's castration.

Without that act though, she would have never been born.

Adult, erotic, and dangerously desirable.

Here in Cyprus, the myths were being

reimagined under the constant influence of new ideas.

The goddess had been worshiped for millennia beforehand.

But her water-born origin became a new,

then an accepted detail.

The same adaptability is at work when our myths

of kingship in heaven reach another nearby island, Crete.

The myth I've come to find continues the story

of the god Cronus after he'd castrated his father Heaven.

In the story, Cronus would in turn

be overthrown by his own son Zeus

and Crete is where Zeus was raised to his destiny.

Every year on the 12th of September

on the summit of the highest mountain in Crete, Mount Ida,

local shepherds gather for a religious ceremony.

It's a difficult ascent for the pilgrims

as the mountain rises three and a half thousand meters.

The winds on its upper slopes,

as I found out, are fearsome and freezing.

At the summit, villagers maintain

a simple windowless church.

Like Mount Casius in Turkey,

this Cretan mountain peak has seen a long continuity

of worship from pagan to Christian.

(speaking in a foreign language)

Nowadays the priest reads a written liturgy

and passages of scripture.

He reminds worshipers that Christ

died for their sins on a cross.

Whose very fragments are said

to be sheltered in this church.

He calls on God to show mercy.

The pagan Greeks had no scriptures.

They had many gods who never died

they never expected mercy from.

They prayed to them as if

they were great aristocrats in heaven.

Unpredictable in their favors to mortals

and unpredictable in their quarrels.

It's so moving that the mountain

is still a sacred place for Cretan pilgrims.

Long before Christ, Mount Ida was a sort of pagan Bethlehem

because of its role in the myth

of the Greeks' supreme god Zeus.

That myth begins with Zeus' father Cronus

who had castrated his own father Heaven,

but it was prophecized that Cronus himself

would be overthrown by a son.

So he swallowed his babies at birth.

It is this nightmare image which the 19th century

Spanish master Goya shows in this painting.

When Cronus' wife Rhea bore yet another son,

she handed Cronus a rock wrapped in swaddling clothes.

He was tricked and swallowed it instead of the baby.

And the baby Zeus was flown away to Crete, to Mount Ida.

The Greek's story is remarkably like that old Hittite story

of the struggles of their gods

and the succession in heaven.

Kumarbi, the surviving god, had taken a huge bite

out of Anu's private parts and swallowed it,

sperm, DNA, and all.

And wondrously inside his stomach, it mixes together,

we're told like the metals that make bronze,

and he finds he's pregnant.

And in due course, he expels

or excretes in some way his firstborn son.

Then we can follow tattered texts that amazingly say

"I will eat my son.

"I will crush him, Tarhunta."

Instead, he's given a very sharp rock on which he bites.

And in agony, throws the rock away

where it is to become an item of cult forever.

Like his Hittite counterpart Tarhunta,

the young Zeus too would eventually defeat his father.

But first he had to be raised secretly to maturity.

The myth tells how the baby Zeus was hidden in a cave.

This one I believe, about 1000 meters

below the summit of Mount Ida.

During the Greek dark ages,

Euboeans were among many pilgrims who came here.

The cave had had long sacred history.

People of Crete had been worshiping here

for at least 1000 years before it became

associated with stories of Zeus.

Nobody yet knows how deep this cave his,

the nursery of Zeus, or how far back it runs.

It's been excavated and the covers

have concealed what was recently found.

But it's still never been fully excavated.

Before Zeus, this cave was sacred

to a young Cretan fertility god Invotus Curos.

His worshippers, the Curetors would honor him

by dancing and clashing shields in the cave.

By the eighth century BC, this Curos

had been merged with Zeus,

so the noisy ritual worship had to be brought

into the myth of the baby Zeus too.

The dancing is explained as the Curetors attempt

to make the baby inaudible so that

Cronus wouldn't realize, his abusive father.

Well of course you can see there's a slight inconsistency.

They're trying to hide the baby deep in this cave.

At the same time, they're making a noise

that you would think would alert anyone to his presence.

That is the way the story grew and developed.

Like the goddess Aphrodite of Cyprus,

the early god of the Cretans, Curos, Zeus,

was evolving and adapting to

the multicultural exchanges of the time.

The myths go on to tell how when Zeus had reached manhood,

he emerged from his cave and defeated his father.

First, father Cronus had been forced

to vomit up all his children

and the very stone that had replaced Zeus.

This myth was to become central

at the most famous sanctuary in antiquity.

One in which the sea voyage was also to play a major role.

To understand how, we have to turn

to a hymn in honor of one of Zeus' many children.

Apollo, god of the light and the sun, poetry, and prophecy.

In fine hexameter verses, the poet describes

how Apollo chose his first priests.

On the wine dark sea he tells us,

the gods spied a swift dark ship

with a crew of traveling Cretans

who were going on business to Sandy Pylos.

Miraculously, the god jumped in

in the shape of a large and fearsome dolphin

and redirected the ship.

He prevented it from landing at Pylos

and guided along the Gulf of Corunth

to Krisa near modern Itea.

Apollo then revealed himself to the terrified Cretans

and told them to follow him up Mount Parnasis

to a site on its flank where he would found a rich temple.

Today, that route takes us through

the finest olive grave in Greece,

up a winding mountain road.

When the Cretans arrived at their destination,

their hearts, the hymn tells us, were stirred within them.

In the early morning light,

Delphi remains one of the most magical places in the world.

Apollo's first shrine here dates from the Greek dark ages.

Probably from around 825 BC.

At Delphi, a prophetess would

predict the future as an oracle.

Her prophecies were made

here at the temple of Apollo itself.

In response to parishioners questions,

she would enter a trance and her garbled words

were later translated into elegant hexameter verse.

But the ambiguity of her predictions

sometimes led to unexpected outcomes.

The most famous example?

It has to be Croesus.

The richest man in world, the king of Lydia

who was planning in Asia to invade Eastwoods.

So famous was Delphi that he already

sent messengers to ask the Greek god

Apollo whether he would succeed.

And the prophetess gave the answer

"If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire."

So Croesus did invade, cross the river,

and yes, he destroyed a great empire.

But the empire was his own.

Today Delphi is still a place of great pilgrimage.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors every year

wind up the sacred way past the remains

of the great treasuries once full of gifts to the temple.

(tour guide speaking in background)

For me, all the treasures they contained

pale beside on ordinary looking object now lost to us.

It's an object that had been set up at Delphi

as a sign of wonder to the future.

The very stone that Cronus had swallowed,

believing it to be his son Zeus.

And it would have been seen by our eighth century Euboeans.

For they'd come then seeking

the oracle's advice on their settlements abroad.

That wondrous stone at Delphi

is the west's first holy relic.

It fitted beautifully with the Euboeans insights

into the origins and battles of the gods.

Gathered in their travels around Al Mina, Cyprus, and Crete.

On the mountain slopes above Al Mina,

they had heard the ancient

Hittite stories of Heaven's castration.

On Cyprus, they understood how

Aphrodite was born from that act.

In Crete, they heard about the cave

in which the ruling god was raised in secret,

eventually to overthrow his father.

And at Delphi, they found their final piece

in their lateral thinking across the world.

The very stone which Cronus swallowed instead of Zeus.

These myths were not the fantasies

of unconscious Euboean minds.

They were rooted in their experiences of real places

and meetings with real people.

But their journey did not end here.

In the next film, I will discover

how Euboean experiences on their farflown travels

have given us the details of yet more extraordinary myths.

I'll trace the fragile beginnings of

our western alphabet and literature.

This is huge, this is really the beginning

of literate western civilization for us

and we're witnessing it in the palm of your hand.

I will uncover a hidden inscription

which tells a remarkable story.

This really is the life of ancient history.

And we're finding it straight in front of us.

I will enter the underground lair

of a once terrifying snakey monster.

And look upon his final explosive resting place.

He's really steaming this morning.

He's hotting up.

He's been blazing away for about

5000 years, still not exhausted.

And I will discover a place where amazingly

the Greek past is still mirrored in our world.