Original subtitles

[narrator] What was this gruesome hat for?

That's just a lot of teeth and whose teeth are they?

Did this machine reveal the dark side of humanity?

What does it take to get an ordinary person to shock a stranger to death?

And the answer, apparently, was not very much.

And can this golden weapon prove the legendary Amazons were real?

For so long, people thought that this couldn't even belong to a woman.

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 a small London museum, sits a disturbing, tattered hat

decorated with tiny objects.

It's just such a weird thing, isn't it?

Now, using the latest technology,

we're examining this strange thing

in forensic detail.

Its decoration is bizarre.

Close up, it's clear. It's covered with teeth.

Looks like something out of a witch doctor's sack.

But it actually comes from the back alleys of Victorian London.

Roughly eight inches tall and six and a half inches wide,

it is made of felt, with a faded velvet outer layer.

Stitched into it are 87 fragments of teeth.

Why would anyone make up such an object?

Why are teeth attached to it?

And whose teeth are they?

Unfortunately, there's not a lot to go on.

There are no pictures, no written descriptions,

nothing that really gives us much context,

just a couple of cryptic notes written by a collector.

So who does this gruesome hat belong to?

Why is it covered in teeth?

What is it for?

This macabre object was donated to London's Cuming Museum

in 1916, by collector Edward Lovett.

Lovett is the chief cashier for a major London bank

in the turn of the 19th century.

But that's just his day job.

When Lovett isn't counting checks at the bank,

he can be found combing the back alleys and rougher areas of London,

seeking out curios that he can purchase from street vendors.

[Dr. Mark Benecke] Charms, objects of magical power,

anything that is weird or considered to be strange.

[narrator] Lovett is part of a growing obsession

with collecting folklore across Britain.

This is really a response to the acceleration of urbanization,

when you have people that travel around England

trying to gather up the stories and artefacts relating to folklore,

all in an attempt to sort of protect these local traditions.

[narrator] But there is no known folklore in England

that describes a hat covered with teeth.

Which leaves a very obvious question.

Why would someone in Victorian London want to get a bit of material,

cover it in teeth, and then wear it on their head?

What possible purpose could this serve?

[narrator] Luckily, this gruesome hat comes with a clue.

Lovett does leave a cryptic note

that says it's believed to have magical properties

and it's certainly true that throughout history and in various societies,

teeth have been worn or used to adorn decorative objects,

clothing and weapons, all with reputed magical powers.

[narrator] There is another object in Lovett's collection

that might also be connected to magic.

A small, silk bag containing what is believed to be the tooth of a dog.

[Dr. Andrew Steele] There was a tradition of using animal teeth

to try and cure toothache.

And the idea was that as you wore that tooth,

then the pain, or whatever was causing the problem in your tooth,

would be sucked out and absorbed by the animal tooth.

[narrator] The problem is, these aren't animal teeth.

They're human.

But it turns out that in 19th century London,

wearing human teeth is surprisingly in vogue,

thanks to the queen herself.

The death of Prince Albert in 1861

prompts Victoria to enter a period of extended mourning

and this practice is soon imitated by other members of Victorian society,

women in particular, who'll wear black for up to two years

after the death of a loved one

and they'll often adorn themselves with mementos of that loved one,

including hair, and sometimes teeth.

[narrator] But if this is a memento for a mourning widow

or widower, there's a bit of a problem.

Enlarging the hat reveals tooth fragments,

which combined, could make at least 60 different teeth.

That's just a lot of teeth. How many dead relatives did this poor person have?

[narrator] So maybe not a charm or a memento,

but Lovett does leave another clue.

Which is a note indicating that this hat was bought from another London professional

in 1855 and his profession

was a dentist.

[narrator] Dentistry really takes off in Europe

after Columbus discovers the Americas

and refined sugar begins to arrive in vast quantities.

The rot sets in across Britain and no one is prepared.

People did not know until the 18th century what really made teeth decay.

The idea was that there is a tiny worm

that lives inside of your teeth

and produces the holes that many people know.

[narrator] And in a time before antibiotics,

blood poisoning from tooth decay is a killer.

Actually, it was the fifth or sixth leading cause of death in London

during that period of time.

[Dr. Sascha Auerbach] And if the infection didn't kill you,

the pain from the ache itself might do that.

In 1862, there is a report of a man in Sussex

who after suffering for five months of pain from a rotting tooth,

committed suicide because the pain was just so unbearable.

[narrator] All this decay and despair leaves a gaping cavity

in the market for dentists.

An assortment of different people came forward

from barber surgeons to street tooth-pullers to blacksmiths.

And what blacksmiths might have lacked in knowledge of dental anatomy

and maybe subtlety of practice,

they made up for with the ability to manufacture tools.

[narrator] Each one is more like a torture device

than a dental tool.

But tooth-pullers are supposed to pull teeth, not wear them.

So what is this hat about?

There's a painting by a 17th century Dutch artist that shows a tooth-puller.

And if you look closely, you can see that he's wearing something rather strange.

It's a necklace made of human teeth.

[narrator] So it's not unknown for tooth-pullers to wear teeth.

The question is why.

This strange hat is said to have belonged to a dentist.

It comes from an age when anyone with a tool and a strong arm

can practice medicine.

Back in the day when barbers were also doubling as surgeons,

they used to be bloodletting.

That red streak down the pole represents the blood on the bandages

as they removed the blood from a patient.

In the days predating that pole,

they used to use literal blood to advertise their services.

Just leave a bowl of blood on the street outside their shop.

[narrator] Traveling tooth-pullers go to even greater extremes.

It became kind of a theatrical event

to draw the attention of as many people as possible.

There could be juggling, there could be storytelling, there could be music.

and of course there was tooth-pulling.

And if the tooth-puller seemed to be good at what he was doing

and was yanking out those teeth without causing too much pain,

maybe they'd put themselves forward to have their teeth pulled.

[narrator] Some tooth-pullers were known to wear necklaces of the teeth they had pulled.

The more teeth they wore, the more skillful it made them look.

The most famous of the tooth-pullers

at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century

was Edgar Randolph Parker, otherwise known as Painless Parker.

And he joins a circus,

where he will offer his services as a kind of sideshow

amidst the other entertainments, you know, such as clowns, elephants,

the tent of mysteries.

He carried around a bucket of hundreds of teeth that he'd yanked out

and also reportedly wore a necklace of 357 teeth

that he claimed to have pulled in a single day.

[narrator] So this hat of teeth could be an advert

for a tooth-puller's prowess.

There's just one problem with this explanation.

When we look closer at the teeth on this hat,

we see something that's rather wrong

or rather, not as wrong as it should be,

because a lot of these teeth show no sign of decay whatsoever.

They're absolutely pristine.

[narrator] If this hat was an advert for tooth-pulling prowess,

why are most of them so healthy?

It's fair to say that tooth-pullers weren't always 100 percent honest.

The tooth-pullers occupied this strange space between really vital medical service

and yet they also had their share of scams going along with that.

Sometimes they'd have accomplices in the crowd

who'd volunteered to have their teeth pulled

and when they yanked out the tooth,

it wouldn't actually be one of the accomplices teeth,

but a hidden tooth that they'd got stuffed in their mouth

exactly for that occasion.

[narrator] The deception could explain the apparently healthy teeth

on this weird hat.

These tooth-pullers, they'd sometimes, let's say,

exaggerate the medical diagnosis and remove teeth that were perfectly healthy,

just to get a bit of cash.

[narrator] But there's an even more grizzly possibility,

because a healthy set of teeth isn't all that hard to come by in 19th century England.

Thanks, in part, to one of the most famous battles in history.

[Dr. Auerbach] Waterloo teeth comes from the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo,

which had an immense number of casualties.

And what you had was people roaming the battleground

pulling the teeth out of corpses.

Thousands of teeth were collected this way

and they were sold to the manufacturers of dentures.

[narrator] In the 19th century,

the trade in real teeth becomes so lucrative

that people aren't just raiding battlefields.

They're turning up graves.

A more extreme form of tooth collection came via the resurrectionists,

which is a polite term for graverobbers.

The origin of the resurrectionists

really comes from the demand of medical schools

for fresh cadavers that can be used to train students in anatomy.

And the resurrectionists figured, well,

it's not like they're going to need to examine the teeth,

so why not make a little extra money on the side.

[narrator] But if any of these teeth

do come from the battlegrounds of Waterloo or the spoils of graverobbing,

they don't come cheap.

[Dr. Steele] Given the highly competitive market for them in London at the time

this could have been quite an expensive hat to put together.

[narrator] Which might explain something odd you can only see in close-up.

[Dr. Steele] Some of these teeth are actually sliced in half

to make it look like there's more of them.

[narrator] But by 1855, when this strange hat is sold off,

the tooth-pulling business is on the way out.

The first dental colleges were being founded in the US and the UK

and this was the beginning of a regulated profession of dentistry.

[narrator] The days of the traveling tooth-puller are over

and one street dentist appears to quite literally hang up his hat.

But what about Edward Lovett's first note

that claimed this hat has magical properties?

If you go back to 2013, when this hat was being stored in the Cuming Museum,

there was a huge fire.

And that fire destroyed a load of extremely valuable and very old artefacts.

[narrator] Incredibly, the tatty velvet hat covered in 87 teeth survives,

unscathed.

So maybe not magic, but certainly a little charmed.

At the University of Akron in Ohio is a harmless-looking box.

It's covered in lights, switches and dials.

It looks like a prop from a 1960s science fiction movie.

But it's not.

This seemingly innocuous piece of equipment was actually created

for one of the most infamous experiments in the 20th century.

[narrator] Now, using the latest technology,

we can examine it in unprecedented detail.

This is the Milgram shock box.

On its control face is printed shock generator type ZLB,

because that is exactly what it is designed to do.

This box was part of an experiment

where one person was told to electrocute another person, literally until they died.

[narrator] And hundreds of people did deliver that final, lethal shot.

But what is the test's real purpose?

Who was behind it?

And how is an experiment this dangerous ever allowed?

In 1961, an unusual ad appears in a Connecticut newspaper.

[Sarah] These advertisements were looking for participants

to take part in a study that looked really inoffensive at Yale University.

Participants would get $4 for their time, which is about 40 bucks today.

[narrator] Initially, the experiment seems straightforward.

[Dr. Keon West] Two people enter the experiment

who've never met each other before.

One of them is chosen, randomly, to be the learner,

and one of them to be the teacher.

The teacher sees the learner strapped into a chair.

The learner is strapped down by their wrists,

so they can't get out of this chair

and they're hooked up to something.

[narrator] Electrodes and wires are attached to the learner's wrists.

The teacher then leaves the learner

and is led into an adjoining room.

They sit down at the controls of the device they will be operating.

The shock generator, type ZLB,

the machine at the heart of this experiment.

[Dr. West] There's a lot of different switches running along the bottom,

from 15 volts all the way up to 450 volts.

It allows you to shock someone,

to give them shocks of increasing magnitude and severity

as you flip each switch from slight shock, to moderate shock,

to higher levels of shock, to even a danger XXX.

[narrator] The machine is connected to the learner,

but the teacher is told that despite the alarming warnings,

the machine poses no threat to the learner's health.

But that's hard to believe.

The teachers were given a small shock,

just a taste of what they would be administering.

So they were given a 45 volt shock.

That's not going to kill you.

It's enough to give them a sense of what was going to happen

when they pressed these levers and switches.

[narrator] The experiment begins.

The learner is given a series of memory tests.

The teacher is instructed to give a shock

to the learner, whenever they give an incorrect answer

and then, subsequently, to raise the voltage one notch.

As the voltage went higher,

the teacher would begin to hear the learner react, through the dividing wall.

[learner screams]

The learner becomes increasingly agitated,

pleading that the experiment stop.

The learners would scream and shout.

Sometimes they would bang on the wall.

On occasion, they would go completely silent

and refuse to answer the questions.

The teacher was instructed that any refusal to answer

counts as an incorrect response

and therefore they should administer a further shock.

[screams]

[narrator] If the learner keeps getting it wrong,

the teacher will eventually reach the maximum lethal switch.

Four hundred fifty volts.

What's going on?

Will this machine really deliver a fatal shock to a learner

who just can't get it right?

Using state-of-the-art graphics,

we can get under the skin of the remarkable shock generator type ZLB.

You open up the box and it does look a bit fishy.

[Dr. Auerbach] The whole thing is held together by ordinary shelving brackets.

[narrator] And the chaotic interior seems totally at odds

with its professional exterior.

It's just a rat's nest.

It's a mess of wires. It's not really clear what's connected to anything.

[narrator] The switches and lights are wired to come on together

and there are buzzers that activate with each switch press.

But something vital is absent.

What is missing from it is the crucial element.

A high-voltage transformer

that would create the kind of voltages that allegedly it's producing.

That means the shock generator type ZLB is technically incapable

of generating a lethal shock.

[Dr. West] And that's the funny thing about the box.

The learner is never actually being shocked.

The box is a fake.

Is the whole experiment some gruesome practical joke?

[Sarah] This experiment was conducted

by the eminent Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram.

But the secret is that it was all smoke and mirrors.

[narrator] Everything about Milgram's experiment is rigged from the start.

The learners are never the subject of this experiment.

[Dr. Auerbach] The so-called learners are all in on it.

The only real volunteers and the true subjects of the experiment

are the teachers.

The screams and the cries were actually a recording.

And they were a key part of what was being tested.

Would the teachers continue to raise the voltage

if they were told to do so by someone in authority.

[Dr. West] The whole thing was designed to get the participants,

the teachers, into a situation where they believe

that they are going to shock the person to death

if they comply and flip all of those little switches.

[narrator] And if the teacher refuses to initiate a shock to the learner,

the scientist monitoring the experiment responds in one of four ways.

The first response was please continue.

The second response was the experiment requires you to continue.

If they still refuse, the response is

it is absolutely essential that you continue.

And the final response was

you have no other choice. You must go on.

[narrator] Will the teachers ultimately do what they're told

even though the markings on the box clearly suggest it could be lethal?

[Dr. West] Milgram designed this experiment to test the limits of human morality

and human response to authority.

Essentially, it was to answer the question

what does it take to get an ordinary person to shock a stranger to death?

And the answer, apparently, was not very much.

[screams]

People were horrified.

[narrator] The teachers are ordinary people.

Without any threat to themselves,

the majority sacrificed their moral compass

for $4.

What motivates Stanley Milgram to construct such a dark experiment?

[narrator] What motivates psychologist Stanley Milgram to build a machine

that makes people think they are delivering a lethal shock to someone?

[Dr. Auerbach] Milgram is born in New York City in 1933

and he's the son of Jewish immigrant parents.

And for quite obvious reasons, the whole family is deeply affected by the Holocaust.

[narrator] Between 1941 and 1945,

Nazi Germany and its allies systematically murder over six million Jews.

[Dr. Auerbach] The burning question in Milgram's mind

is why would ordinary Germans,

people who had never killed anyone or tortured anyone their whole lives,

why would they carry out these horrendous acts?

[narrator] This shock box is the result

of Milgram following through on that question.

[Dr. West] Milgram's study was a study of obedience.

What Milgram wanted to know is

can you get good people to do really bad things

if you ask them to obey someone in authority?

That was the central question.

[narrator] Milgram suspects the answer lies in something more universal

than extremist Nazi ideology.

Milgram is convinced that the uniform

conveys a very powerful element of authority,

so he makes sure that the people

who are instructing his teachers

are dressed in lab coats and identify themselves as Yale psychologists.

[narrator] To Milgram, this proves beyond doubt

that it is the uniform that makes people obey.

So what made the shock box so essential to the success of the experiment?

Although this box is actually completely harmless,

what was crucial to the experiment

is that it looked like it wasn't

and in order to really persuade people of that,

it seemed to be crucial

to get it to look like a proper, designed, commercial instrument.

[narrator] Milgram's box taps into the visual grammar of groundbreaking new ideas

surrounding product design and ergonomics.

[Sarah] There was a new way of thinking about the design of machines

called human systems engineering.

This brought psychology and engineering together

to think about the way that machines should be visually organized.

[narrator] Designers of everything from telephones to spaceships

were evolving controls to make them as intuitive as possible.

And Milgram takes the same approach.

[Dr. West] Milgram tried different versions.

Like buttoned versions and some switch versions for example,

and he found that people understood the switches.

[narrator] But there is more to Milgram's final shock box, the ZLB,

than just it's functional appearance.

It's also designed to leave no room for confusion

about the consequences of the teachers' actions.

[Dr. West] The little line underneath that said,

"Slight Shock," or "XXX" extreme shock,

that helped people figure out what they were doing.

They knew that over here was a slight shock and that over here was death.

They had to know what the consequences of the flips were.

[narrator] But is Milgram right?

Does all this carefully staged psychological theatre

that humans can be manipulated

to follow almost any order?

[Dr. West] As a psychologist, looking at just the first experiment,

I would say you have no idea why they shocked that person,

it's really difficult to tell.

Too much is going on.

[narrator] Milgram is aware of this and carries out follow up experiments.

In order to test his theory,

Milgram will sometimes replace the instructor in a lab coat

with an instructor in plain clothes.

And the results are dramatic.

The number of teachers

willing to administer a lethal shock

drops from 65% to 25%.

So it's exactly the kind of thing,

switching it out from a lab coat

to plain clothes and then watching the compliance drop.

That tells us it's the lab coat.

Changing the institution that Milgram is supposed to be attached to from Yale

to somewhere a lot less fancy and seeing if the compliance goes down.

That's how you tell what's driving the behaviors.

[narrator] The more symbols of authority Milgram eliminates,

from the white coat to the prestigious institution,

the less teachers comply.

[Dr. West] The original experiment is just the start.

It's the eye-catching headline,

but it's the later experiments that tell you why it worked.

That's the important part.

[narrator] Sixty years on, some dispute Milgram's results.

And it's a dispute that's unlikely to be resolved

because his groundbreaking study would not be allowed today.

In the old days,

psychologists didn't really have standards

for how to treat people or how not to hurt them,

and unfortunately, that meant quite a lot of people got hurt,

which is why we have the standards today.

[narrator] This lack of ethical standards

could have potentially fatal consequences.

[Dr. Auerbach] Harvard psychologist, Henry Murray,

decides to study the effects

of psychological attacks on people's core beliefs,

and he subjects volunteers

to weekly sessions of vicious verbal abuse.

In 1959,

a 17-year-old math prodigy joined the study,

and over the course of the next few years,

he's subjected to some 200 hours of verbal abuse.

[narrator] Nearly 20 years later

that math prodigy begins a 17-year bombing campaign in the US.

He kills three people and injures 23.

His name is Theodore Kaczynski.

The press call him the Unabomber.

It's been suggested that the psychological damage inflicted by the experiment

helped send him off the rails.

[Dr. West] I do think it is our responsibility,

if we're conducting experiments on human beings

to treat these human beings well.

To think about not only what can be learned from the experiment,

but also what are we doing to the people who take part,

to respect them as much as we'd like to be respected.

[narrator] Milgram was aware his shock box apparently killing someone

might have been traumatic for the teachers.

To look after them, he debriefed some participants

before they returned to their normal lives.

There's no evidence that any of the teachers

suffered long term issues from their experience.

-[shock box buzzes] -[narrator] Milgram's shock box study

remains one of the most significant experiments

ever conducted in psychology.

The implications of this are that what happened under Nazism

could happen to any of us, anywhere, at any time.

[narrator] Milgram's shock box changed our understanding of who we are.

In the archeological museum at Vergina in Greece

is a mysterious 2,300-year-old relic.

This strange thing holds a remarkable secret

about an ancient myth.

[Dr. Abigail Graham] It might allow us to connect

a real life individual

with the mythic legends of the past.

[narrator] Now, using the latest technology,

we're bring this incredible object into the light.

This is the golden quiver.

About the size of a briefcase,

it is an exceptional piece of ancient craftsmanship.

The golden surface skillfully embossed

with finely wrought details of lifelike scenes,

but this isn't an ornament.

It's a weapon.

A quiver is container that an archer uses to hold their arrows.

[narrator] And where it is found is startling.

The quiver was found in the tomb of a Macedonian king.

[narrator] But this style of quiver isn't Macedonian.

It comes from hundreds of miles to the north,

in Scythia, home to a mythical warrior race.

[Dr. Graham] The deadly warrior Scythian women

were said to be legends

that descended from the Amazons.

[narrator] And that's why the quiver matters.

Because the king isn't the only body in the tomb.

There are also the remains of a woman.

The question is, does she have anything to do with the quiver?

[narrator] What is the Scythian quiver doing in a Macedonian tomb?

Does it belong to the woman?

Could she be a real life descendant

of the legendary Amazon?

[narrator] This golden quiver is part of a spectacular find

made in 1977

by archeologist Manolis Andronikos.

The excavations occurred in the Macedonian city of Agia

which was an important city, really, in the Macedonian kingdom.

[narrator] Andronikos uncovers a complete and untouched

Macedonian tomb.

Nothing like it has ever been found before.

They uncovered this incredible building

with the vaulted room and two chambers.

And within them, they actually found a cache

of really incredible objects.

[narrator] In the tomb is a gold ossuary

containing the remains of a Macedonian ruler.

The tombs dating spans the reigns of Macedonia's

two most famous and ambitious kings,

Philip II,

and his son, Alexander the Great.

These men transformed the ancient world.

Philip II expands Macedonia into a Mediterranean powerhouse,

Alexander turbocharges this,

creating a vast empire that stretches over 3,000 miles.

But there are the remains of a second body in the tomb,

the partially cremated bones of a woman.

Beside her lie the tools of a warrior,

spearheads, shin guards and the golden quiver.

What is it doing there?

Where does it comes from?

This design of quiver is known as a gorytos.

An arrow case worn on the archer's hip.

The whole point is to enable rapid fire,

so you can quickly get your arrows, shoot at your enemies,

um, as fast as you can.

Often speed was the decisive factor who was going to win the combat.

The gorytos is unique to an ancient warrior race

that flourishes between 900 and 200 BCE.

The Scythians.

[Dr. Graham] The Scythians are a group of nomadic people

who lived on the steppe,

and travelled across broad areas,

from modern China and Russia,

all the way over to the Black Sea,

and they're known as a warrior people.

[narrator] And this quiver does depict a bloody battle scene.

Finding a Scythian quiver buried with a woman could be momentous.

Because according to legend,

the most deadly Scythians were mounted female archers,

said to be descendants of the greatest mythical female warriors of all,

the Amazons.

[Dr. Mark Altaweel] The Amazons derived from Greek legend.

They were female warriors

who would only selectively mate just to produce more warriors,

would get rid of the males usually, and just only keep the women,

and raise the women as effectively warriors.

[narrator] The problem with Ancient Greece

is that it's packed with mythical stories.

A lot of them are clearly works of fiction.

Like Pegasus, the flying horse.

Or Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair.

[Dr. Graham] Some of these are utterly fantastical

as opposed to actual things.

That doesn't necessarily mean that all of them are.

Um, but we want to tread carefully.

[narrator] Perhaps the stories of women warriors are just that,

stories.

Maybe the quiver simply belongs to the man buried in the tomb.

So who exactly is buried here?

The tomb is dated between 350 and 325 BCE.

A time that spans the reigns of Philip II,

Alexander the Great,

and Alexander's half-brother, Philip III.

We know that Alexander the Great

was buried in Egypt in Alexandria,

the city that bears his name.

[narrator] So it's not Alexander.

Could it be his father or his half-brother,

buried with their wives?

[Plummer Sires] So both Philip II and Philip III

fit the profile of the bones that were found within the tomb.

So each of them could have been contenders

for the identity of the bones.

[narrator] For 30 years, arguments raged

over whether the bodies could belong to Philip II

and his seventh wife, Cleopatra Eurydice,

or Philip the III and his teen bride Adea.

Then in 2013,

osteoarcheologists make a detailed study

of the remains of the women's pelvis.

[Dr. Steele] The pelvis is actually a really useful part

to allow you to work out how old the skeleton owner was

when they died.

That's because of the part when the pelvis meets the lower part of the spine,

and it's texture changes quite significantly during life.

By the earlier thirties, the surface becomes rougher.

[narrator] The analysis of the bone's textures

suggest that the woman

was between 30 and 34 years old when she died.

It changes everything.

[Plummer Sires] This rules out

Adea, Philip III's wife, because she would've been much too young.

[narrator] Historical texts reveal that Philip III was buried with Adea.

So if the body isn't Adea,

then the man isn't Philip III.

It has to be his father Philip II.

He is a legendary warrior.

So is the quiver his

rather than some mythical Amazonian warrior's?

[narrator] Many scholars believe this golden quiver,

and other armor discovered in a royal Macedonian tomb,

must belong to the man found there

rather than the woman.

We had these sort of associations of weaponry

that are often more linked with male warriors or kings even.

[narrator] That certainly fits with the battle scene on the quiver,

depicting an attack on a city.

All the warriors appear to be men.

There are women shown, but they seem to be running for their lives.

[Dr. Graham] For so long people have thought these

couldn't even belong to a woman.

So much so that in the museum, there was a plaque included

that said, "jewelry's for women, weaponry's for men."

[narrator] But in 2013, the legs are literally kicked out

from under that idea by analysis of the woman's bones.

[Plummer Sires] They discovered that there was a very severe fracture

to her left tibia, her shin bone.

This could well be the kind of traumatic injury

that you find in the skeleton of a warrior.

[narrator] The injury has left the woman

with one leg almost an inch and a half shorter than the other.

And when the team measure the shin guards from the tomb,

the left one is shorter than the right.

It's an exact match for the woman's injuries.

The conclusion from this is that quiver

and the associated armor and weaponry

belong to the woman and not the man.

[narrator] So who is this mysterious warrior woman

with the Scythian quiver?

Is she connected to the legendary Amazons?

The obvious choice for the quiver's owner

is Philip II's seventh and last wife,

Cleopatra Eurydice.

We know they died at around the same time

But the dating of the pelvis is a problem.

[Plummer Sires] It rules out Cleopatra Eurydice,

Philip II's wife because she was also much too young.

[narrator] Does that mean the woman is Scythian?

There is one other Macedonian candidate

Alexander the Great's half-sister, Cynane.

Her mother is Illyrian,

a society where women fight in battle.

And Cynane is raised as a warrior princess.

[Dr. Altaweel] She was famed for being trained in the arts of war,

she's even famed to have killed a queen in battle.

So, it does potentially suggest that she is a likely

or a potential individual who's buried in this grave.

[narrator] Cynane is killed at 34.

It fits the age of the pelvis.

So is it Cynane laid to rest next to her father?

One intriguing bit of evidence supports this possibility.

[Dr. Altaweel] When they excavate the tombs, they realize

it's actually the chambers that were found

were not exactly the same level,

there seems to be an elapsed period of time

between the main chamber and the other chamber that was found.

So it indicates that the individuals buried,

um, did not die at the same time.

This fits with Cynane

because she dies 13 years after her father, Philip II.

Cynane is a good match for the quiver's owner.

It can't belong one of the legendary Scythian women warriors

because they are just myths.

Or are they?

Throughout the 20th century, archeologists investigate

ancient Scythian burial mounds known as kurgans.

[Dr. Altaweel] And they found many bodies.

In addition to the skeletons,

a number of weapons were found.

Bows, knives, swords, shields.

So these clearly are warrior burials.

[narrator] They also find four gorytos with the bodies.

For over a century,

these battle scarred skeletons are believed to be male

until recent DNA analysis.

[Dr. Altaweel] About a third of the skeletons appear to be female.

This actually corroborates Herodotus and the other Greek writers

who talked about the Scythian female warrior.

This race of Amazons

is not entirely mythical.

There was probably a class of female warriors.

[narrator] The warrior women of Scythia are no myth.

They are real battle-hardened fighters.

So does the quiver belong to Alexander the Great's half-sister,

Cynane?

Or to a Scythian warrior?

According to ancient texts,

Philip II's son, Alexander, actually encounters

these warrior women.

[Dr. Graham] There was apparently a famous Amazon queen

who approached Alexander and apparently spent

13 nights with him.

[narrator] So it's possible these warrior women

are also known to his father, Philip II.

And if the woman in the tomb is Scythian

it explains the presence of a Scythian quiver.

But there is another possibility.

The quiver could be an artful copy of the Scythian style.

Macedonians would've understood how to make

intricate, elaborate metalwork.

They certainly had the skills to make very beautiful objects.

Making something like the gorytos that was found in the Macedonian tomb

would not have been above their skillset.

[narrator] Which would explain where Cynane might have got her hands on one.

Perhaps the quiver was a way for Cynane to connect herself

to the myth of Amazonian warriors.

It would certainly explain the graphic depictions of battle on the quiver.

[Dr. Graham] If it is Cynane who is buried inside the tomb,

what would we have is a female figure

who isn't a mythic legendary creature

like an Amazon, but a real woman,

a real empowered warrior figure.

[narrator] Scythian or Macedonian,

this quiver was the weapon of a powerful female warrior.

One who could trace her story back

to the most feared and powerful women in all of mythology,

the legendary Amazons.