Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Could the mysterious markings on this wooden

tablet be the key to a lost civilization?

GRAHAM: They look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs.

They look a bit like Mayan writing.

NARRATOR: Is this the world's most bizarre cosmetics device?

BELLINGER: It would fit over a woman's head and take

micro measurements, which referred to her level of beauty.

NARRATOR: And could this strange disc really be

5,000 years old?

The first impression is this is modern, it's from some

sophisticated machine.

NARRATOR: These are the most remarkable

and mysterious objects on Earth,

hidden away in museums,

laboratories, and storage rooms.

Now, new research and technology can get under

their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them,

pull them apart,

and zoom in to reveal

the unbelievable, the ancient,

and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's strangest things.

In the archives of a religious order

in Rome lies a mysterious wooden artifact.

Strange marks carved into its surface

may be the writings of a lost civilization.

It's an extraordinary object, and we're just

scratching the surface of what it actually is.

NARRATOR: Now, using the latest technology

we're bringing it into the light.

This is the Mamari Tablet.

It is one of only a small number of artifacts

discovered on a remote speck of land

in the Pacific Ocean called Rapa Nui,

or Easter Island

The strange wooden tablet is 12 inches long, 8 inches wide,

and an inch thick, and every corner of it is covered in

curious markings.

There are about 120 different symbols, pictures of things that

we encounter in everyday life --

birds, animals, plants, people.

NARRATOR: Are these symbols a forgotten language?

What do they say?

Why did this lost civilization create it?

The remote island of Rapa Nui sits 2,300 miles

west of Chile in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

BELLINGER: Rapa Nui is a really small island.

It's essentially a dot in

the ocean, just 14 miles long by 7 miles wide,

but it's hugely important.

NARRATOR: The island's most famous inhabitants are the Moai,

giant stone heads that dot the rugged landscape.

BELLINGER: There's about 900 of them,

and they're spread throughout the island,

and they've been creating a great debate

ever since Europeans first set foot on the island as to what

they are, why they were made.

NARRATOR: But these incredible monuments are not the island's

only mystery.

For 150 years, these strange symbols

have also confounded experts.

GRAHAM: They look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs.

They look a bit like Mayan writing, but in terms of

the way that it's presented and in terms of the language,

it actually appears to be

something quite new, quite unique.

NARRATOR: The Mamari Tablet contains more than

1,000 carvings, using around

120 unique symbols called glyphs.

GRAHAM: They depict various objects --

fish, plants, local animals.

NARRATOR: This is one of just 26

surviving glyph-covered wooden relics from Rapa Nui.

How does this one end up in a Roman Catholic archive?

The latest research suggests people first reach Rapa Nui

between 1100 and 1300 AD.

What they find is a paradise.

BELLINGER: It was filled

with trees that could be used to make rope and sap

that could be used to make sugar and wine,

used as firewood, as building materials.

There were ferns coating the ground,

and they even had at least one large crater of freshwater.

NARRATOR: And archaeological evidence reveals they

feast on porpoise, fish, and seabirds.

The first settlers did really well for some time,

and we know that, because we have evidence

that the population boomed to at least 7,000 and as much as

20,000 at its peak.

NARRATOR: The new arrivals sculpt the giant Moai

from volcanic rock,

and they carve the Mamari Tablet out of Pacific Rosewood.

But Rapa Nui is a tiny island

for such a large and growing population.

So they are using up the trees at an alarming rate,

and unfortunately, they managed to bring along with them rats,

who were prone to eat the seeds for

the trees, and this is the perfect storm, and it did

indeed result in complete deforestation of the island.

NARRATOR: Which accounts for the rough shape

of the Mamari Tablet.

GRAHAM: Wood, by this time, was actually

quite a rare substance, and so any

piece of it that you could get to this beautiful, shiny

Pacific Rosewood, you would

use and use as it was and certainly not be cutting off

any bits or pieces.

NARRATOR: This rarity suggests the tablet is very

important to the people who live here.

The high value of the wood,

it's almost the equivalent of writing on gold.

NARRATOR: When the first Europeans arrive

on the island in 1722,

they describe a grassland without a single tree or bush

over 10 feet high, and experts believe their arrival

likely signals the end for the Rapa Nui civilization.

No more Moai appear to have been built after the arrival of

the Europeans, and that seems to correlate to

the fact that the Europeans brought Christianity,

they converted the islanders, and so their previous practices

and beliefs were considered idolatrous.

Which explains why the Mamari Tablet is one

of the few carved wooden objects that survives.

BELLINGER: The islanders convert to Christianity.

Most of these tablets are burned,

and the Mamari Tablet itself survives

only by virtue of having been taken by Roman Catholic

missionary back to an archive in Europe.

NARRATOR: The Mamari Tablet could give us a unique

insight into the lost civilization that made it,

but is it even writing at all?

How do we determine that something is writing?

One of the things we look at is the way

that the glyphs are placed.

So these don't look like a random comic strip.

They're in clear lines facing in clear directions

with clear, repeated groupings.

NARRATOR: And the structure of these lines

and groupings is very familiar to linguists.

GRAHAM: One thing we've been able to glean from these tablets

is the way that the writing appears

to be presented, and it appears to be

what they would call reverse boustrophedon.

NARRATOR: In reverse boustrophedon

the first line is read, and then

the tablet is rotated 180 degrees

to read the next line that is effectively

upside down and back to front.

And so it's this that suggests the writing is actually writing.

NARRATOR: If so, this is the only known writing system

in this part of the world until the 20th century.

So what does it say?

NARRATOR: For decades, experts have been trying

to decode these strange symbols, known as rongorongo.

The first step is to try and figure out

the writing system.

There are two principal possibilities --

alphabets, like English,

and logograms, symbols that mean a whole word, like Chinese.

Most alphabets have a relatively small number

of symbols.

Even one of the largest, Russian, has just 33.

But the Mamari Tablet contains up to 120

unique symbols -- that's far too many for an alphabet.

So could it be a logogram?

One of the problems with this being a logogram is that

we only have 120 of these different symbols,

and in something like Chinese, you have 20,000, so we

don't have enough for these actually represent words.

NARRATOR: A third option is that rongorongo could be

a syllabary, where glyphs represent syllables,

such as do, re, mi.

But there is a problem with this theory, too.

Japanese Katakana is a modern syllabary.

It has 48 symbols.

With as many as 120 symbols,

rongorongo seems to have too many.

So more recent theories suggest it could be a hybrid.

GRAHAM: There's still a bit of a debate as to whether

the glyphs represent an entire word

or whether or not they represent syllables, and at

the moment, the prevailing theory seems to be

possibly a bit of both.

So some of these pictograms could actually represent

a word, while others could represent

sounds and parts of words.

NARRATOR: But experts are increasingly confident

that this really is writing.

GRAHAM: We're learning more and more about how rongorongo works,

but this doesn't actually help us in

terms of decoding or translating the language.

NARRATOR: Possibly because it may not be writing

as we recognize it today.

BELLINGER: A number of scholars have suggested

that the rongorongo is not a complete language

but rather a proto-language of sorts,

a mnemonic set of symbols that would prompt

memory as an individual told a story or performed a ritual.

NARRATOR: In the Rapa Nui language,

the word rongorongo itself means

to recite or chant, so this idea does make sense.

But that still doesn't help crack the Rapa Nui code.

Could the individual symbols on them Mamari Tablet

provide answers?

In the 1950s, a German epigrapher called

Thomas Bartel made it his mission to decipher

these tablets.

NARRATOR: Bartel travels the globe,

studying every tablet he can.

And on the Mamari Tablet, he spots something familiar.

Many of the symbols on the Mamari Tablet are really

just completely mysterious,

but there's one that's quite clear in

representing a crescent moon,

and what's more, it appears repeatedly,

and this is very intriguing.

Knowing the importance of lunar calendars in

Polynesia, he starts thinking, could this possibly be

a lunar calendar?

In the 1990s, epigrapher Jacques Guy

develops the idea further,

suggesting one key symbol right

in the middle corresponds to Rapa Nui's traditional

mythology of the woman in the moon,

and another symbol on the tablet provides

a further clue.

When we have the lunar symbols, they're followed by a fish.

As they come to the full moon,

the fish is facing up, and then on

the other side of the full moon, the fish is facing down.

NARRATOR: Guy suggest the upward fish

represents a waxing moon and the downward fish a waning one.

Most experts now accept that Bartel and Guy have

cracked the code of this part of the tablet.

It is a lunar calendar, but that's

not enough on its own to decode rongorongo.

GRAHAM: While we can get somewhere

with the lunar calendar,

the road of translation and figuring out the code

kind of ends there, it doesn't help us further crack the code

of the rest of the tablet.

So we've kind of taken the tablet as far

as we can go for this moment in time.

NARRATOR: Will we ever completely decipher

the rongorongo code?

GRAHAM: It's incredibly fascinating, but it's also

something that's going to be very hard to crack.

There's always hope that more materials and new scientific

approaches will allow us to crack this code one day.

NARRATOR: For the time being at least, most of

the secrets contained within these symbols remain a mystery.

In a locked cabinet under

the bright lights of Hollywood's

Entertainment Museum

sits a strange metal cage that looks

like a torture device from the Dark Ages.

AUERBACH: Despite its appearance, however,

it is not a medieval device.

It's very modern, it's 20th century,

and it's completely unrelated to torture.

NARRATOR: Now, using the latest technology we've brought it

out of the shadows and painstakingly reconstructed it.

Adjustable metal screws and rotary gauges

poke out of the frame.

Measuring 17 inches wide and 15 and a quarter inches high,

it's designed to engulf

a woman's head and lock it rigidly in place from

the cranium to the neck

and even the eyes.

STEELE: This really is one of

the most bizarre inventions of Hollywood's Golden Age.

NARRATOR: Its purpose is to measure beauty.

Who comes up with such a weird idea?

Can you really quantify beauty?

And how exactly is this

bizarre contraption supposed to achieve that?

NARRATOR: This weird machine is the beauty calibrator.

It is first unveiled to the public in 1932.

BELLINGER: Basically, this device would fit

over a woman's head, and it would take micro measurements,

and the operator would manipulate them to come up with

one number, which referred to her level of beauty.

NARRATOR: Flexible metal strips inside the cage

align with the wearer's facial features

and can be adjusted with screws so that it sits

perfectly centered on the face.

A rail at the front supports a series

of micrometers with metal probes on the end.

A micrometer is essentially a very accurate screw device,

which can measure things

to thousandths of an inch, and that's what gives it

its real engineering authority.

NARRATOR: A typical micrometer uses a screw,

which is marked along its length.

Each mark represents a whole turn,

and each turn might move

the screw just one-hundredth of an inch.

The body of the drum might be marked

around the circumference to show thousandths of an inch

so that one full turn would be one hundredth.

The device can measure things to such a degree

of accuracy that's not even visible with the naked eye.

NARRATOR: The micrometer system can be

moved up and down the rail and in and out,

allowing the machine's creator

to accurately measure different features.

He used his beauty machine to measure certain

distances and ratios on the face, which he believed

corresponded to optimal beauty.

For example, he thought that

a nose being the same height as a forehead was

optimally beautiful, and the distance between the eyes

should be about the same as the width of one eye.

After all of these various measurements

had been taken, a total score

could be assigned, with a maximum of 100 percent.

But, of course, nobody ever made it to that the idea of

absolute beauty.

The inventor made sure that everyone had something perhaps

ever so slight that could be improved.

NARRATOR: The man who believes he has the expertise

to determine what defines beauty is world famous.

So who is he?

One thing that's really interesting about this device

is that it wasn't created by an inventor who was just

casting about trying to think of something to make.

It was created by arguably

the beauty industry's ultimate guru.

NARRATOR: Even today, he is a household name.

Max Factor.

ANNOUNCER: Big news from Hollywood with the premiere

of Max Factor's colossal makeup studio.

NARRATOR: And the company he founded

is now a multi-billion-dollar business.

The man behind it all comes

from very humble beginnings in Poland.

His name is Maximilian Faktorovich.

AUERBACH: He is one of 10 children

born to a relatively poor family in Lodz.

At 9, he's apprenticed to the city's leading wig maker

and cosmetician.

By the turn of the century, he's opened up his own shop,

and a very famous touring theater is employing

his products -- that, in turn, lands him an even more

prestigious job working for the Russian Royal Ballet.

The story Goes that the Russian royal family is

so impressed by his work that he's brought

for a formal introduction.

NARRATOR: He is summoned to the Imperial Court as

Chief Cosmetics Advisor to the Russian royal family.

But for a Jew, this is not a good time to be in Russia.

The imperial family, with cooperation of the army, is

instituting a program of de-Jewdification

across the country.

Things are bad, and they are getting worse.

NARRATOR: In 1904, Maximilian flees To America with

his wife, Esther, and their three children.

Here, he takes a new name -- Max Factor.

He ends up in California, just as Hollywood is about to

take off.

STEELE: He was appalled by the standards of the makeup.

The actors were still using the rather brash, thick, greasy

makeup that was so popular

on stage at the time, and close up with the camera,

that just wasn't as flattering.

Max Factor spots an opportunity,

and by 1914, he has perfected a new style of cosmetics

tailored specifically to the demands of the movies.

Some of the earliest pioneers in Hollywood used his products.

I mean, we're talking Chaplain, Arbuckle, Keaton,

but his big break came in 1925

with a whopping order for 600 gallons

of body paint for use for the extras in Ben Hur.

Women everywhere want to look as glamorous as the sirens of

the Silver Screen, and everyone

knows the man to do that is Max Factor.

he is the go-to guy for hair and makeup

for anyone who's anyone in Hollywood at this point,

the likes of Rita Hayworth and Judy Garland, included.

NARRATOR: Max Factor Cosmetics go mainstream.

He even coins the term "make-up."

So why does someone this successful

need a beauty calibrator?

NARRATOR: This weird device is conjured up by

a titan of the cosmetics industry -- Max Factor.

But why does he need it in the first place?

BELLINGER: He's not just a gifted cosmetic artist.

He's an inventor, and an experimenter.

AUERBACH: One of the things that Max Factor becomes known for is

not only finding the right hues for different skin tones

but also finding subtle ways to apply makeup

differently to different parts of an actress's face

to even out all the features so that it's symmetrical.

The goal of this device is to find

a way to formalize that measurement in order to later

achieve better symmetry with the application of cosmetics.

SOMARA: To me, he was a kind of version

of Leonardo da Vinci who created

such beautiful art but then also cared a lot about

functionality and form, and it's this idea

that innovation is born out of

creativity and logic.

NARRATOR: This incredible contraption is also meant

to help with the advent of new color film technologies.

BELLINGER: Originally, all actors had to worry about

was looking good in black and white,

but in 1932, with the advent

of Technicolor, that all got much more complicated,

and this really was the impetus behind

his desire to perfect this system.

NARRATOR: But unlike many of his other inventions,

this one is never meant for the public.

The beauty calibrator was never intended for

mass consumption -- it was targeted

and, in fact, used by Hollywood royalty, essentially,

and American socialites who had the money to pay for it.

But can it really work?

Is the idea of measurable beauty credible?

WEST: When we use the word beauty, we tend

to think mostly about women, because we've constructed

an idea that beauty is a feminine thing.

Really, though, we should be talking about attractiveness,

because everybody can be attractive, whether you're a man

or woman or anything else, you can be very attractive,

and so that's an important consideration --

not just what's beautiful, but what's attractive.

NARRATOR: So why are some men and women

seen as more attractive than others?

WEST: There have been many studies about what makes someone

attractive, what makes a human face or human body attractive.

People are surprised that these are reasonably consistent

across numerous societies, numerous cultures.

NARRATOR: One key factor in our perception

of attractiveness is averageness.

STEELE: If you have an average face

in the scientific sense the word,

are you one that's close to the population average, numerous

studies have shown that those faces are considered to be more

attractive by other people than

faces that deviate from those average proportions.

NARRATOR: Another key factor to what we consider attractive

is symmetry.

WEST: Humans like certain things --

they like symmetry, for example, and so the more symmetry

you get, the more attractive people think you are.

NARRATOR: This could be something to do

with how our brains function.

STEELE: There's evidence that faces that are closer to average

proportions and symmetrical faces and any other

symmetrical objects are easier for

our minds to cognitively understand, and that reduced

burden of processing might be

one of the factors that makes them appear more attractive.

NARRATOR: So Max Factor may be onto something with his beauty

calibrator, because one thing it measures is symmetry.

STEELE: Although Max Factor didn't have access

to this science at the time

when he developed his beauty machine, nonetheless, there may

have been something to what he was doing

in the sense that if he detected a face that was

slightly asymmetrical, then he could apply makeup

to try and correct that to make the face

look more symmetrical again, and we get closer to what modern

science would let us understand is an ideal of attractiveness.

NARRATOR: Max Factor might also be onto something with

his device's measurements of the ratios of facial features.

A recent study found that attractiveness is optimized

when the vertical distance

between the eyes and mouth is approximately

36 percent of the face's length

and the horizontal distance between

the eyes is approximately 46 percent of its width.

We find that faces the shadow these ratios are perhaps almost

objectively perceived to be more active, because even if you

show a newborn baby faces with different proportions, it will

tend to pick the one that's closer to these ratios

and closer to the average -- seems to

be something that we don't learn through societal

conditioning but something we're actually born with.

NARRATOR: This suggests our brains may be hardwired

at birth to look for attractiveness --

or as Hollywood prefers to call it, beauty.

And it's possible that this may sometimes hijack our minds.

People who are more attractive are perceived as better, as more

moral, as more honest, as more

worthy of being treated well -- attractive people are

just treated better than everybody else,

and that's not fair, and it's not good, but it

is, unfortunately, a reality of the society we live in.

NARRATOR: So somewhat surprisingly

with the beauty calibrator,

Max Factor may have spotted something

fundamental about our brains.

And he isn't the only person

to apply science and technology to beauty.

NARRATOR: This eccentric device is designed to use science

and technology to enhance beauty, and it's not alone.

AUERBACH: The beauty calibrator is one of the earliest of

these beauty machines, but it's far from

the last -- it was just the beginning of a long

line of various gadgets and devices that appear in the '30s,

'40s, and '50s, all with one

purpose in mind, to enhance female beauty through science.

BELLINGER: One of these was called the freckle freezer,

a contraption that used a wand dipped in frozen

carbon dioxide to burn off offensive moles and freckles,

which would ruin an otherwise perfect complexion.

NARRATOR: The freckle freezer is just one of many weird

cosmetic devices,

but despite the general enthusiasm for beauty

technologies, Max Factor's calibrator fades from view.

The beauty calibrator is first created in 1932, and in 1933,

it makes it to the cover of

Popular Science, but after that, it just ends up sitting in

a storage room in Max Factor's headquarters.

NARRATOR: The calibrator remains there for decades before

the building and all its contents are sold in 1994.

It doesn't return to the light of day

until this museum opens in 2003.

The beauty calibrator may seem antiquated and weird today,

but the ideas that underpin it do persist.

WEST: We should almost never look at these things and laugh

and say how silly that such a thing would exist that we'd

measure beauty that way --- we're still doing that.

We still look at our noses and think

they're too small, we still look

at our foreheads and think they're too big, we still look

at one thing or another thing and compare ourselves to some

other arbitrary standard, and this continues to affect

the way we think about ourselves today.

NARRATOR: Bizarre as it may seem, nearly a century

after its creation, the beauty calibrator's legacy lives on.

Locked away in a display case in the Cairo Museum sits

a mysterious object that has

confounded the experts for decades.

The first impression is this is modern.

It's from some sophisticated machine.

But it's not -- it is more than 5,000 years old,

and it comes from Egypt.

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: This object is completely unique.

We don't have anything like it from ancient Egypt.

NARRATOR: Now, using state-of-the-art

digital imaging, we're unlocking its secrets.

This is the Disc of Sabu,

and it's a complete mystery.

Since it was discovered, we have been trying to find out

what it was and what it was used for.

NARRATOR: The disc is 24 inches in diameter,

with three sweeping lobes

separated from the rim by three distinct apertures.

At the center is a smooth hole roughly 4 inches across.

Its shape is really organic, as if

you could fold it with your hands.

NARRATOR: It is so thin, less than half an inch,

it seems as if it's made of metal, but it's not.

It's made out of stone.

To make that today, you would use something like a 3D printer.

NARRATOR: So how was this strange object made?

What is it for?

Who did it belong to?

January 1936.

Famed Egyptologist Walter Emery is

excavating the tomb of the Egyptian prince, Sabu.

We don't know much about who Prince Sabu was -- we know that

he lived during this very early period

of the First Dynasty, and we know

that he was a high official and an important person in

the court of this time and perhaps the ruler of

a particular province in early Egypt.

NARRATOR: Once inside Sabu's tomb, Emery

discovers many typical Egyptian burial items.

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: In the burial chamber, we find the coffin

of Sabu with the body inside

and a series of objects, stone vessels and different elements

that would allow him to go into the afterlife.

NARRATOR: But in the center of the room, positioned close to

the body of the prince, is a collection of strange

stone fragments.

Walter Emery found this broken object in many pieces,

an object that doesn't resemble anything

that we have from ancient Egypt.

STEELE: This disc-shaped object resembles a bowl, apart from

these three strange lobes

that protrude from the periphery

at about 120 degree angles from one another.

NARRATOR: The shape is unique.

STEELE: The incredible delicacy, the thinness of that material,

and the incredibly elaborate shape makes this thing look

like it's made of metal with modern metallurgy techniques.

SOMARA: In theory, you can pretty much make anything from

stone, but the idea that they were able to achieve such

a thin, curved, finessed finishes...

I mean, it looked like it had almost been cast

NARRATOR: This strange thing would be unusual

in any period of ancient Egypt,

but it actually dates to the very

earliest days of the Egyptian Empire, 5,000 years ago.

Who were the ancient artisans that crafted it?

The First Dynasty is a very important period in

the history of Egypt.

We're starting to see trade with different lands in Egypt

and also outside of Egypt -- we see an increase in

the complexity of the society, a more hierarchical society,

a developed administration, the use of writing.

NARRATOR: The First Dynasty is also marked

by the prominence of stonework.

STEELE: Ancient Egyptian craftsmen were

incredibly skilled at extracting and shaping

all different kinds of stone, including granite,

travertine, diorite, and quartzite.

NARRATOR: But despite the obvious skill

of the ancient artisans, nothing

this finely crafted has ever been found from this period.

Exactly how it is made remains a mystery.

But it's clear it would

have been incredibly difficult to produce,

which suggests that whatever it is, it must be important.

Too much work has gone into it -- it must have had

a real use, and, as an engineer,

the mind boggles as to what that use could be.

NARRATOR: Now there is an astonishing new theory,

one that involves a precious resource

that sits at the very center

of ancient Egyptian life.

This strange disc was somehow carved from

a single block of stone 5,000 years ago.

What is it for?

Some experts propose the hole in

the center of the disc provides a clue.

They think it could be for an axle

and that this weird disc is just an unusual wheel.

The idea that this could be a wheel isn't entirely crazy,

and we know that the wheel had been invented by this time.

The oldest known example, the Ljubljana Marshes wheel,

is made of ash and oak

and has been dated to about 5,200 years ago.

Could the Disc of Sabu be an ancient Egyptian equivalent?

Although we know the wheel was around at this time in history,

as far as we know, the ancient Egyptians didn't have access to

this technology -- even pyramids that were

built long after this disc was discovered were manufactured,

as far as we can tell, without any help from wheels at all,

and the first recorded instance of wheel usage in ancient Egypt

dates several centuries after the disc was made.

NARRATOR: And there is an even bigger problem with this theory.

SOMARA: From an engineering point of view,

there's no way that this could have been a wheel,

because those thin, fragile sections would never

have taken any kind of load.

NARRATOR: The extraordinary thinness and unique form

of this disc have led to even more outlandish ideas,

including the conspiracy theory that often comes

with unexplained Egyptian artifacts -- little green men.

But for every idea about UFO steering wheels, there's

a different and more Earthly explanation

that's a bit easier to swallow.

Could it be a battle shield for warfare?

The fact that it's made of heavy stone

and has three large holes in it suggests it would

be less than ideal.

One suggestion is that it could be an incense burner,

but incense burners are commonplace

in ancient Egypt and are much simpler in design.

The sheer difficulty of producing this strange object

suggests something much more important.

One of the theories is that it was part of a centrifugal pump,

and it was essentially the impeller part of

the device that sat inside a casing

and spun around a shaft,

and centrifugal pumps are

a very efficient way of pumping water.

NARRATOR: But there are very good reasons

why centrifugal pumps don't

turn up until thousands of years after the disc is made.

SOMARA: For the impeller to work,

it has to spin really fast,

and for that you need bearings.

it would have had to have been encased

in a watertight container, split in two halves.

There would have had to be sealings around

the shaft, they would have used screws, and none of that

technology had been invented at that time.

NARRATOR: The disc's use in a pump is just a leap too far.

A slightly less implausible idea also focuses on water.

STEELE: This disc could have been used to distribute

water vapor in an environment like maybe

a sauna, so you bring the disc down in

a column and allow it to contact the hot water.

Then as you lift it up, the shape

naturally causes steam to waft about.

NARRATOR: But are these ancient Egyptians really creating

steam rooms?

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: Even though purity and cleanliness

were really important for the ancient Egyptians,

we don't have any evidence

that they had steam rooms to clean themselves,

so this theory just doesn't work.

NARRATOR: Recently, a new idea has surfaced, one that proposes

the disc is used in a liquid, just not water.

Scientists from Kanagawa University in Japan

has proposed that it

could have been part of the tools used for brewing beer.

What this theory proposes is that there will be a pole

inserted in the middle of

the disc, and then the disc will be moved

up and down to create a vortex,

or circulation of the water,

in order to mix this water with

the grain in a more efficient way.

NARRATOR: Similar implements, known as mash rakes or paddles,

have been used for thousands of years

and are still used in the brewing process today.

But is beer important enough to the ancient Egyptians to

justify the time and effort to make this complex disc?

Beer was one of the two staple foods

in ancient Egypt, together with bread,

so we find lots of production centers for both

bread and beer together, and it was one of the ways in which

workmen, for example, were paid, by means of bread and beer.

NARRATOR: Archaeological evidence suggests the workers

who build the pyramids of Giza are

given a daily ration of more than a gallon of the stuff.

And another recent discovery has revealed that beer is just

as central at the very beginning

of the Egyptian empire.

In 2021, archaeologists found what is considered the oldest

large production factory of beer, a very old brewery.

The site in the ancient city of Abydos dates to

the First Dynasty 5,000 years ago,

the same era the disc is created.

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: The brewery was composed of eight large areas

of around 65 feet long, and each

one of them had 40 large containers for the beers,

so this was a massive space.

NARRATOR: The team who unearth it estimate

5,900 gallons,

or 22,400 liters of beer,

could be brewed here in one go.

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: The amount of beer has been calculated

to be able to support the daily ration for

8,800 workers, which gives you an idea of how important beer

would be for the ancient Egyptians.

NARRATOR: One further clue could support the argument

that the disc is related to beer production.

ESCOLANO-POVEDA: The importance of beer for the Egyptians

was not just something for daily life,

but it also extended to the afterlife.

In the tombs, we find beer jars deposited as offerings that

would allow the deceased to drink

in the -- in the afterlife.

NARRATOR: So despite all the wild theories of

alien intervention and ancient hydraulic

engineering, maybe this strange relic is simply

a tool for brewing beer...

or is it?

If this disc had been used for the production of beer,

we would have many of them, because of this large-scale

production, but unfortunately, we only have one, so even though

it is a nice theory, there is no evidence to support it.

NARRATOR: There are multiple explanations for this beautiful

and strange thing, but none seem like a perfect fit.

Perhaps it is simply made for its beauty

and for its strangeness with no practical purpose,

an expression of a unique artistic ability.