Original subtitles

One day, long ago in the Mediterranean...

men entered a cave.

They painted pictures of their lives on the walls.

Of the animals they hunted.

Of the natural world, which was all they knew.

They left their mark...

and then they went away.

That was 27,000 years ago.

The cave was the Cosquer Cave, deep inside a limestone cliff

near Marseille, in the South of France.

Today, it is almost inaccessible.

Its entrance is deep beneath the sea...

and the sea is the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean is much more than a stretch of water.

It is the sea that saw the rise of a range of civilisations.

On its shores, humanity made an immense journey.

The peoples of the Mediterranean discovered agriculture.

They invented trade, geometry, writing.

They founded empires and imagined great cities.

They made it the home of philosophy and of the first democracy.

And the home of the Religions of the Book...

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, now the faiths of half the world.

The Mediterranean is home to 427 million people

and 24 countries.

And yet...

And yet today, this common legacy has been eclipsed

by fratricidal wars and bitter tensions between neighbours.

We hear only of religious conflict, economic crisis, and division.

Has the universal heritage of the Mediterranean been forgotten?

Do its peoples no longer remember

how integral the Mediterranean has been to their own history?

Look at these children playing

in a Palestinian neighbourhood of Beirut.

They are a reminder that it was by the Mediterranean

that people learned to live in a community.

Look at these flocks grazing on the plains of Algeria.

They are a reminder of what climate change may bring

to the rest of the world.

Look at Venice, and you may conclude that the modern world

has lost its sense of proportion and perspective.

In a word, take a broader view,

and see the Mediterranean as the centre of a bigger picture.

That is the story we will tell in this journey around the sea

that the Romans called Mare Nostrum, 'our sea'...

a sea for all that we call the Mediterranean.

In the beginning, there was a sea.

The Mediterranean.

The name means 'the sea in the middle of the land'.

It was born out of the collision between three continents

Europe, Asia, and Africa some 20 million years ago.

The land rose up, folding like a concertina

and enclosing a vast expanse of saltwater.

That was the origin of jagged mountain peaks such as the Alps,

or the eroded summits of the Pyrenees.

The Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria,

the Pyrenees in Spain, the Alps in France and Italy,

the Pindus in Greece, the Taurus in Turkey,

and the Lebanon Mountains...

As if in a natural cradle,

the Mediterranean is surrounded by mountains.

But in some places, there are no mountains.

The sides of the cradle are lowered

as they are between Libya and Egypt.

It was through this opening

that the first humans arrived in the Mediterranean.

And it is here that our journey begins.

This is an arid region.

It's the Libyan desert, part of the vast Sahara.

Only a sparse line of trees can resist the heat.

Like the sentinels of an army in retreat,

they mark the line of the watercourse

beneath the burning sands.

The only people who venture into this region

are the Toubous from Chad, and Tuaregs,

including the Tamasheqs from Mauritania.

They continue to trade in salt and wheat

across the biggest arid zone in the world.

Many of these men are Berbers

descendants of the first Mediterranean people.

They are following a trail blazed thousands of years ago

by the first humans to come out of Africa's Great Rift Valley.

They approached the Mediterranean by this very route,

in between Libya and Egypt.

Since then, much has changed.

Because today, the Mediterranean is more like this...

TRAFFIC NOISE, SIRENS

North of the desert is the Egyptian capital, Cairo.

Home to 16 million people,

it is the Mediterranean's biggest city by far.

In an influx from the countryside,

100,000 more people arrive in Cairo every year.

The oldest quarter is the home of the Copts, Egypt's Christians.

But Cairo is also an Arab and a Muslim capital.

Cairo has one of the world's oldest universities, Al-Azhar.

It teaches Islamic law, theology and wisdom,

as well as medicine and general subjects.

Cairo has been called both 'the mother of the world'

and 'a human ant-hill'.

But it owes its existence to a river...

the Nile.

The Nile is the longest river in Africa.

Its waters flow from the heart of the continent.

Like Egypt itself, Cairo owes everything to the Nile,

the source of both life and civilisation.

The first people here were nomadic hunter-gatherers.

The reeds and wild seeds of the Nile Delta changed their lives.

Its fertile banks encouraged them to settle

more than 6000 years ago.

90 per cent of Egypt's population still lives close to the river.

Water was everywhere, as the Nile constantly flooded.

When the floodwaters receded, they left behind a fertile black silt

that gave Egypt its ancient name... Kemet - 'black earth'.

The river and its alluvial soil gave birth to agriculture,

and so to ancient Egypt.

Agriculture began with the domestication of wild Nile plants

that became barley, lentils, flax and peas.

Today, it is an industry

that feeds seven billion people around the world.

And it all began here, beside the Mediterranean.

The Nile Valley is Egypt's only agricultural area.

Space is at a premium,

obliging peasants to store fodder on their roofs.

These peasants are the heirs to a rural knowhow

that has been perfected over time.

Basic calculations were invented to estimate harvests.

Early writing was used to record agricultural inventories.

This was the basis for the rise of civilisation.

THUNDER RUMBLES

The rule of the pharaohs arose

out of the worship of these same natural forces.

The people of Egypt all felt the same holy fears.

At Giza, south of Cairo, the Egyptians built the pyramids.

The early ones took the form of stairways

to allow the deceased ruler to take his place

between the river and the sun.

80 such pyramids still exist today,

all of them built in less than 1000 years

on the left bank of the Nile.

Their size makes them visible from space,

a majestic mark left by the Mediterranean's first civilisation.

And yet, Egypt's real legacy to the region

is not these monuments, but a tiny grain...

wheat.

Egypt's cereals transformed the southern Mediterranean lands

into a granary.

Wheat was grown in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco...

as it still is around Rabat.

The knowledge and culture of wheat

was a precious gift handed down the generations.

It meant bread and the end of hunger.

DONKEY BRAYS

Born on the banks of the Nile,

agriculture has spread far beyond the Mediterranean.

Every year, more than 700 million tonnes of wheat

are produced around the world.

Plains are the natural home of agriculture.

Or the gentle slopes of the Siliana region, in Tunisia,

where cultivated fields stretch further than the eye can see.

The undulating wheat is ultimately the true signature of a civilisation.

From North Africa to the plains of southern Europe

and the plateaus of Turkey,

the Mediterranean world is one of agriculture.

Wheat hasn't meant only bread it has meant wealth.

And it gave birth to trade,

which was pioneered in ancient Lebanon.

Lebanon is a land of mountains.

The Lebanon Mountains soar more than 3000 metres,

and the snow is everlasting.

The very name 'Lebanon', meaning 'white',

comes from these snow-capped summits.

Apart from the Bekqaa Valley,

the country has no significant agricultural land.

So Lebanon has always relied on its location

at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and the East.

It was in Lebanon that Persian traders and goods

first came into contact with those of the Mediterranean.

CONSTRUCTION SOUNDS

Beirut, the capital, is virtually a city-state.

It is thought to have two million people,

a third of the country's population,

and it is always growing.

People from all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East

cross paths in Beirut.

Every race and every creed.

CALL TO PRAYER FROM MOSQUE

There are also many native ethno-religious communities.

The largest groups are Muslims Sunni and Shia

and Christians.

Lebanon is a refuge for Syrians and Palestinians.

The Syrians have fled civil war, the Palestinians are in exile.

Over time, the temporary has become permanent.

Refugee camps have become suburbs.

Lebanon has a million refugees, almost a quarter of the population.

Between 1975 and 1990,

Beirut was ravaged by Lebanon's own civil war.

It was fought between the Christians,

the PLO 'state-within-a-state'

and many others, including the Syrian and Israeli armies.

Apartment towers became vantage points in urban warfare.

There was heavy fighting in this scarred monolith,

nicknamed Burj el Murr, 'the Tower of Bitterness'.

Since the war, the country has rapidly rebuilt.

It draws strength from the 4 million Lebanese who live abroad,

and from its ancient vocation, commerce.

In Beirut, everything can be bought and sold.

It was here that international trade was born

more than 6000 years ago.

And what made the difference here was not a river, as in Egypt,

but a sea - the Mediterranean.

It was here that the first merchants learned how to sail the seas

in ships laden with spices, textiles and oil.

Lebanon was known then as Phoenicia.

Today, it is hard to imagine the courage of those early sailors.

Byblos is one of the oldest trading ports in the world.

Its history dates back to fishermen 7000 years ago.

Today, part of the resort town of Jbeil,

it was the Mediterranean's first commercial centre.

From these beginnings,

the sea would become the high road of ancient commerce.

Phoenician ships were highly regarded.

Their hulls were made of a very solid wood that grew nowhere else...

Lebanese cedar.

Today, the cedars of Lebanon are rare and protected.

To see them, we have to go up to Bsharri in the Lebanon Mountains.

Some of these giants are more than 2000 years old.

They're the last of the dense forests that once covered Lebanon.

The timber had many uses,

not least in helping the Phoenicians open up

the new world of the Mediterranean.

They could never have ranged so far by land.

The sea allowed the first eastern civilisations

to expand all around the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians settled in Cyprus

then in Crete and on the eastern coast of Greece.

They sailed along the coast of Libya

and further on to the northwest of Africa.

Their biggest commercial centre was ultimately Carthage,

close to modern-day Tunis.

Their empire established links

between all these Mediterranean peoples.

It was the first form of globalisation.

Their empire was also one of islands.

The Mediterranean has over 15,000 of them,

each one a port-of-call for the Phoenicians.

They might be wild and isolated, or densely populated,

like the Kornati Islands off the Dalmatian coast.

The Kornati Archipelago alone has 140 islands.

This was once dry land.

The end of the Ice Age raised the sea level,

leaving only the hilltops above the surface.

The terrain is rough because the Mediterranean is a volcanic zone,

one of the most active in the world...

something that left its mark on Mediterranean civilisations.

RUMBLING

Stromboli, one of the Aeolian Islands,

has a volcano over 900 metres high.

Every hour, it spits out chunks of lava and ash.

The constant minor eruptions prevent a major blast.

Living with a volcano isn't all bad.

The lava is rich in minerals and fertilises the land.

People have always lived on this island.

But living here also means accepting the mountain's anger.

This strange mix of fascination and wariness

is as old as the human presence in the Mediterranean.

It dates back to an ancient legend.

Between Italy and Greece, there are 60 active volcanoes,

such as Sicily's Mount Etna.

But one of them changed the course of history.

It was Santorini, in the Aegean Sea, off Greece.

It looks like an island, but it's actually a huge volcano.

What we see now is only what was left

after the crater collapsed in on itself.

It exploded around 1600 BC.

The blast is said to have wiped out an entire civilisation -

the Minoans.

Based in Crete, they were very advanced for their time.

They had their own writing, agriculture and ships.

Overnight, this flourishing civilisation disappeared.

Ever since, the volcano has been dormant.

But a legend was born,

of how the natural world can snuff out a whole civilisation.

And it resounded down the centuries.

The Greeks came to fear the power of their mountains.

The highest, Mount Olympus, rose almost 3000 metres.

It was the home of the gods.

The Greeks thought of the world as having a navel.

It was at Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus.

There they built a temple to Apollo, the god of light.

It was the seat of a priestess, the Pythia.

She was the oracle who communicated with the occult powers of the earth.

But the Greeks had another side. They wanted to understand.

Throughout the land, they built theatres

to express their doubts... their philosophies.

It was a revolution in human thought.

The Greeks freed themselves from their natural cradle.

They cut open their sacred mountains to build their temples.

Today, the symbol of this intellectual revolution

is the Acropolis, the lofty citadel in Athens.

The Greek gods were Zeus, the supreme god of Olympus...

Poseidon, the god of the sea...

and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and of war.

They were all descended from the same divinity -

Gaia, the Earth.

At the same time, the Greek gods were jealous,

belligerent and benevolent...

That is, they were drawn in man's image.

It was the dawn of the principle of humanity,

which has since become universal.

The Parthenon, dedicated to Athena, still dominates Athens.

The temple was also a treasury where the city's wealth was stored.

That wealth would be welcome today

as the Greeks face an unprecedented financial crisis

and a battle for their sovereignty.

A strange twist of history

when we recall that it was here, in Athens, that democracy was born.

The Greeks were also great seafarers and traders.

They founded some of the Mediterranean's greatest ports.

The roll-call of Greek cities is endless.

Mycenae, Corinth, Miletus, Rhodes and Phocaea,

all were Greek.

So were Istanbul in Turkey, Marseille in France

and Cyrene in Libya.

The foundation of Alexandria

marked the height of the Greek empire.

After that came the fall.

Another empire would change the face of the Mediterranean.

Rome.

Today, Rome is one of Europe's great capitals,

with four million people.

It is the historic cradle of Western civilisation.

And it all began with its conquest

of a small kingdom in northern Italy.

Italy's northern coast is jagged and rocky,

as it is here, in Liguria.

In the Cinque Terre region,

the villages hang suspended between the mountains and the sea.

In Manarola, people have fished and grown grapes since time immemorial.

Northern Italy also means Tuscany.

Here the land is rich,

and each hill boasts a granary or a fortified village.

Tuscany has grown grapes and wheat for 4000 years.

The most notable vineyards are in the Chianti and Montalcino regions.

This was the kingdom of the Etruscans,

a cultivated people who ruled northern Italy for hundreds of years.

The Etruscan kingdom was swallowed up by Republican Rome.

It was the first time a republic had defeated a monarchy.

Rome drew its strength from an extraordinary military machine

and from a natural weapon...

salt.

Salt is extracted from the Mediterranean

at saltworks like this one in Alexandria.

In ancient times, it was used as money.

But Rome also found a warlike use for it.

Salt allowed the Roman legions to preserve their rations

while on campaign.

The legionaries were even paid in salt

which was the origin of the word 'salary'.

It was an era of conquest.

Rome's authority knew no limits.

The Mediterranean was renamed.

It was no longer 'the sea in the middle of the land',

but Mare Nostrum, 'our sea', belonging to Rome,

and in a broader sense, to humanity.

Rome conquered North Africa.

In Libya, the colossal ruins of the cities of Sabratha and Leptis Magna

include a capitol, baths, circuses and theatres.

To unite the Mediterranean peoples and stave off rebellion,

Rome entertained them.

The heart of the empire lay in its cities.

Anyone who passes through the gate of Timgad, in Algeria,

can understand what a rich heritage this is.

The evenly spaced streets laid out at right angles

not only made it easier to move about,

but also created a new model for communities

in which houses could become suburbs, and suburbs, whole cities.

Rome invented a new way of living.

It set the pattern for urban planning in today's metropolises.

Cities like Genoa in Italy

are still inspired by the urban model of Rome.

With each new territory, the Romans laid roads, dug harbours,

and built bridges to unify the empire.

Who remembers today that it was Nero

who first conceived the monumental Corinth Canal in Greece?

One by one, Rome absorbed all of the earlier Mediterranean empires...

the Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and the peoples of Europe.

Each new conquest became an imperial province

linked by road to Rome.

At its height, in 117 AD,

the Roman Empire extended from Britain to the borders of Persia.

Under the Pax Romana,

the Mediterranean was united for the first time...

and for the last.

Meanwhile, in the east, a new revolution was about to begin...

in Jerusalem.

In the outer reaches of the Roman Empire,

Semitic nomads journeyed through the depths of the desert,

to what is today called Wadi Rum, in Jordan.

For 1000 years, they had led their caravans

to the heart of this rocky furnace.

They knew the secrets of the desert.

They controlled the caravan routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Commercial centres grew up where these routes crossed.

South of the Dead Sea,

there was even a city in the heart of the desert.

It was the most splendid of all the commercial centres.

It was called Petra.

All that remains of Petra today

is the facades carved out of the rock face.

The unmistakable Greek influence

reflects the mixture of cultures and religions in the city.

After their exile in Egypt,

the Israelites too came out of the desert.

Into the world of polytheism,

they brought with them their conviction

that there was only one god, a universal God,

who had chosen them, out of all humanity, as his people.

It was the Mediterranean world's first monotheistic religion...

Judaism.

The Israelites founded a kingdom

in the land their God had promised them.

They built a temple in his city, Jerusalem.

The city was a holy place, a place for prayer.

But it would see more prayers than its builders ever expected,

because two more monotheistic religions were yet to come,

making the holy city a place of contention.

The men of Israel were erudite.

On scrolls, they wrote a testament

to be handed down through the generations.

The Hebrew bible contained the Torah,

which defined the beliefs, history and identity of the tribes of Israel,

and texts governing the way to live.

These rules of conduct were to ensure the cohesion and unity of the people

and hence their survival.

Then things got complicated.

In the time of the Romans,

one of the men of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth,

was accused of heretical preaching.

The Roman governor condemned him to death.

But after suffering death by crucifixion,

the condemned man rose from the dead.

In the eyes of his followers,

the miracle proved that Jesus was the Son of God,

the Messiah sent to the world of men.

His disciples dedicated themselves

to recording his teachings in the Gospels,

and to preaching them to the world.

So was born the second monotheistic creed, Christianity.

600 years later came the third monotheistic creed, Islam.

For much of his life, the Prophet Muhammad received revelations

that he transmitted to his companions who recorded them in the Koran.

Islam taught that the faithful should pray

facing the Kaaba in Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet.

This empty stone cube symbolised the believers' renunciation of paganism.

With these three religions born of the same God,

nothing in the Mediterranean world would ever be the same again.