Original subtitles

why is this thing one of the

most decisive weapons in the world

the Germans were convinced they had created the

holy grail of cryptography

how does this image of a

helicopter come from an ancient Egyptian

inscription

[music]

but the hieroglyphs are thousands of

years old

and this 800 year old device can

with the strange inscriptions really

predict the future because there are

strange things hidden in me I am the

revealer of secrets

fascinating mysterious objects

[music]

long hidden in museums laboratories and

archives

[music]

now we can

reveal their secrets with the most modern technology

we can recreate them

disassemble

and enlarge

and thus

reveal the forgotten, hidden and bizarre

these are the strangest things in the world

this inconspicuous 80 year old device

looks like a typewriter in

a simple wooden box but it is

one of the most powerful secret weapons

in history

this is one of the most successful and

powerful

with modern Digital technology allows

us to bring this machine back to life

now we reveal its mysterious

inner workings

this is the Enigma cipher machine

it is about 15 cm high and 30 cm wide

inside there is a complex system of

wires electrical contacts and

rollers for each roller and every contact

there are countless

possible combinations

the technology is revolutionary in its time

the culmination of a long

history of encrypting and

decrypting messages the

Enigma Kot is not considered to work

there are more than 150 million million

million different combinations

if each one lasts a second

you need 300 times longer than that Universe

is old and to crack the code

how exactly does it work where is its

weak point

[music]

at first glance it is not

particularly spectacular

that this inconspicuous little thing was

the secret weapon of the Nazis it is the

culmination of a thousands of year old

arms race

like the Enigma Uses a ships

cipher is a very old method of

encrypting information so that

no one can read it unless it is

supposed to. It has been used for 2500 years. It

was used in Sparta as early as 400 BC.

A strip of cloth was wrapped around

a stick and the message was written

on it you unroll the fabric

but there is a crucial

catch

if you had a stick of similar thickness

you could wrap the fabric around it

and read the encrypted message.

Since then the battle for the best encryption has been raging -

one side or actually both are

trying to develop better and better ones at

the same time work

on cracking each other's codes

500 years after the Spartans

Julius Caesar uses a code

based on exchange

all the letters in the message are

shifted by the same amount in the alphabet if you shift all the letters by

five from Aas it from

bsfs and so on,

but this system also has a

weak point because the exchange of

letters follows rigid rules.

As soon as you see through this rule, your enemies

can read every message.

In the following 2000 years,

code makers and shit-crackers fought a

bitter competition

until the 1920s to this

strange machine

the Germans were convinced that they had created the

holy grail of cryptography

an unbreakable

code on

the key to the success of the Enigma is

a simple principle

you press a letter on the

keyboard above it is a lamp field with

the same letters when you press a key

Another letter lights up at the top.

Inside the Enigma,

every letter on the keyboard is

electrically connected to the

lamp field via three rollers. The rollers are the

heart of the encryption. Each of

them has 26 electrical contacts on both sides

that

are assigned to the 26 letters of the alphabet

Contacts of the different rollers

are each connected with wires and are

different for each roller. The

special thing is that every time a letter

is pressed, the first roller rotates

one position further. Once the first

roller has rotated completely,

the next roller follows and finally

the third then the process starts over again

[music]

every time the reels spin

the code changes when I press a I can

get a Q I press a again it

can become an it or a tea

and this seemingly random pattern

of letters makes the Code extremely

difficult to crack

an electronic control panel on the

front offers further options for

changing the encryption.

Despite the complex technology,

decrypting the messages is

child's play provided you have

another inigma with the same

settings.

The original text appears

letter by letter in the lamp field

and you can deliver the message to his

commander

the Enigma is the best

encryption machine of its time the

Germans think it is unclear

but why is it so important

poor encryption technology plays

an important role in the defeat of

the Germans in the First World War

in January 1917 State Secretary

Arthur Zimmermann sends an encrypted

message to the German embassy in

Mexico

the telegram was about getting Mexico to

support the war

[music]

as a reward the Germans would slam

the US state of New Mexico after their inevitable victory.

The Mexicans

manage to decipher the message, the

Germans have no idea that the

code used in the telegram had long since been

cracked.

The British passed the message on to the

Americans, who then

entered the war against Germany.

Now the German intelligence service

had failed and a

diplomatic disaster ensued. So after the

war, the Germans

definitely wanted one

develop a new encryption system and

that was the Enigma. The

first thing the Polish

secret service became aware of was the Enigma.

For good reason, he kept an eye on

German activities

[music]

the Treaty of Versaille had

given the Poles areas that

belonged to the German Reich.

Many Germans saw them These are still considered

German areas.

Eight years after the end of the war,

Polish interception specialists

suddenly sound the alarm.

As if out of nowhere, in 1926

the doors are suddenly closed and the Poles can

no longer decipher any of the German codes.

Enigma has been in service for

two years The Poles were cut off from

all German military communication for a long time

until, in 1929, chance played into their hands.

Customs in Warsaw received a package

that, according to the declaration, contained radio parts.

A call from the Germans followed, saying that the

package had been sent by mistake

and they had to have it back immediately

Urgency made the Poles

realize that these were more than just radio parts,

the package contains a civilian version

of the Enigma,

which for the Poles is the

opportunity to look at the inner workings of the

cipher machine that

makes life so difficult for their code breakers,

the question is, will they be able to do it? In 1932, the mathematician Marian Rejewski managed to

crack the code

[music]

with the help of the civilian inigma from the

fire and other data

Enigma is

constantly changing

the Germans continue to develop Enigma

they add new rollers

change the wiring and make the

code more and more complex and

harder to crack

rejewski builds his own in igma

he calls it cryptological bomb or

Polish bomba

[music]

it consisted from several replica

sets of Enigma rollers and was able to run through their

various

encryption options practically

one after the other.

The approach of

trying out every option is still pursued by hackers today.

This is called the blutforce attack. If

you want to crack an email account,

you simply test different passwords for so long

until you got the right one with the

Enigma code it was similar, they tested

every possible position of the rollers

but in September 1939 reliefski's

efforts were ever ended. Hitler invaded

Poland

the Polish code breakers were able to

escape

the headquarters of the British

but the Germans continued to develop their

machine and make it more and more

complex the British can't keep

up

while German submarines are sinking

more and more Allied supply ships

in the Atlantic and threaten to

cut off supplies from the USA

the Germans have a

decisive advantage they have the

perfect weapon to attack the convoys

and the

supply line that is important to the war effort to interrupt the

submarine or U-boat an

invisible, ruthless and

deadly enemy

the Allies have to crack the Enigma Kot

before the German submarines

completely cut off the supply line in the Atlantic

a man thinks he knows how to

do it

[music]

is one of the greatest math geniuses

of his time, he is a Cambridge

graduate, brilliantly clever and also

quite eccentric. He has the

crucial task of cracking the Enigma code

[music],

follows the Polish method and

builds a mega machine, the so-called

Turing bomb,

which was an incredible calculating machine

Calculating combinations with rotating rollers and kilometers of wire than a

human would ever be able to do,

even a mega bomb ca

n't crack the Enigma code fast enough,

but he finds a weak point

not in the machine but in the

people who operate it -

the human weak point exists in

the fact that people

send predictable messages, e.g. regular

weather reports, that is, when you

get a message that could be a weather report, you

search for the word

weather

such acquaintances or probable

words call the shit-crackers Chris

combines it with another

weak point and that lies in the

supposed one and crackable machine

even

a letter can never

be coded to itself when I press a the

a goes through a tangle of wires but

because a always has to be connected to something else a

can never

come out is

based on the Crips and limits

the search to them

[Music]

when you search for the word weather

you go through the text and when you

find one of the letters in the right place in a word you know

that it can't be that. This

vulnerability is the key to

cracking the code

Now you can no longer test every conceivable

combination

and feel that the remaining

options

[music]

have worked.

Some historians suspect that this

shortened the war by two years. The

Germans' feces were not

unbreakable after all, but the machine is not

the end of the story

in many ways In many ways, the

Enigma competition between the code

makers and code breakers was the beginning of the

information age. For

the first time, information and

access to it were the focus of military

efforts, but

80 years later, principles of

Enigma are still being used.

The Germans had more of Enigma

Rollers added and thus

increased the complexity of the encryption.

Today's technologies work in the

same way. The

modern analogy is the 128 or 256

image encryption. With each additional image,

the number of patterns that have to be

searched doubles and the

blutforce attacks take correspondingly

longer. The cryptography is so advanced that

the fastest computers It

would take longer than the universe is old and

cracking the code

has shown that there is always a

weak point in people. All

it takes is for a colleague in the office to

click on a strange link or

open an attachment and enter their password

and hackers have access to the

network Humans are the reason

that cracking is still done

today. The fascinating

Enigma machine and the attempts to

crack it still have an effect in the modern world,

only that the computers today

are much faster than the legendary

encryption machine,

which is the ancient Egyptian city of Abudes,

400 km south from Cairo

here are the ruins of a 3000 year

old temple that was built in honor of the god

Osiris.

A picture is engraved in a door lintel

that cannot actually

exist there. It apparently shows a

helicopter. How can that be

with modern imaging processes

like this enigmatic artifact

reconstruct in detail

[music]

the door lintel is approximately two meters

long and over half a meter high

its sandstone surface is

decorated with hieroglyphs that are reminiscent of the

reign of the mighty pharaoh look

from the first

they show something that clearly looks like a

modern attack helicopter

included Rotor blades aerodynamic

even stranger the helicopter is

not the only example

almost 100 kilometers away in the temple

of denderer is a stone carving

reminiscent of a light bulb

complete with glass bulbs glow-colored and

even electrical cables

some believe that these are

actually depictions of

advanced technologies in

ancient Egypt is a

projection surface for marginal ideas

and people who suspect the origin of such

phenomena elsewhere. Common

theories in this context are

aliens or time travel. Despite

the similarities, experts know that

these images do not

show modern technologies.

For us contemporary viewers, they

seem clear, but in

fact they are ancient thousands of

years older than us so the real

question is what they really

represent what do these

hieroglyphs mean who do they come from and what

does something that looks like a

helicopter do on a 3000 year old

temple wall

the pace where this temple was the

mortuary temple of a pharaoh named Setos

the First

may not be as well known as

poverty actually does,

nevertheless he did a lot

he stabilized the country after a

period of internal disputes and

difficulties

temples all over Egypt

although it may seem that way to us

experts conclude that helicopters played

a role in the military

successes of the Pharaoh

because building a helicopter is

complicated.

To get a helicopter into the air you

need various

innovative technologies. You need

knowledge of aerodynamics to build the rotor.

You need an energy source

that has enough power and a

control system

[music].

other technologies

highly developed metal construction skills

lubricants gears and engine construction

for all of this there is not a single

archaeological reference from the time of the

ancient Egyptians

both light bulbs are no different

[music]

you need electricity cables and to

make the piston you have to be

able to blow glass

the ancient Egyptians couldn't

blow glass that was first invented by the Romans

a helicopter and a light bulb

just don't fit into the time of the

pharaohs

I've been studying ancient Egypt for

years and although it's easy

to see a helicopter and a light bulb

then unfortunately I have to say that the

helicopter in the temple of Osiris there

is no helicopter and the light bulb in the

temple of the teachers is not a light bulb

but if they are not

what are they then

[music]

to reveal the secret we have to

go back to the time of the pharaohs

the so-called helicopter is in the

temple of Osiris in abidos

is more precisely the Dead Temple of Set

from the first one.

Here the pharaoh was supposed to become virtually immortal,

his story was preserved as perfectly as

possible for eternity.

The hieroglyphs in the temple tell the

story of Setos as a powerful

ruler and conqueror

Helicopter was

originally translated as a praise of the

Pharaoh,

it means he who renews the birds

strong with the sword and who

subjugates the new bows the new

bows are a crooked one the enemies of

Egypt the inscription celebrates them despite

great merit until eternity

or at least until he dies

Ramses the second is also known as

Ramses the great he is one of the

most important pharaohs in the dynasty

of the new kingdom

and it is also clear that he did not

want to stand in the further,

just as his ego is as great as his achievements

he decides on all the dedications in

honor of his father should be replaced by his name

[music]

the second has the name of his

father Setos the first admitted and

his own name in the stone cracks

on the lintel with the helicopter

Setos is no longer praised as the great

leader of Egypt Enemies

destroyed but rather Ramses

that was around 3000 years ago and

time does not pass by the hieroglyph without a trace

[music]

what we see today is a combination

of hieroglyphs that have been scratched on top of each other,

they look like a helicopter individually,

not

something as human as that is behind

the amazing inscription

the symbols are not evidence of

advanced technologies that

were ahead of their time or alien

cultures that came here to build the pyramids

if these symbols

prove something then the ego of the pharaoh

that would solve a mystery but the

picture in the temple of Dendera is in

its original condition and has not been

subsequently changed.

If this thing does not represent a light bulb,

then

the Egyptologists are sure they

know the answer

because such depictions are not new;

people in ancient Egypt, especially from

higher social classes, would have

known immediately what was being depicted here

In fact, this is a very

traditional and central motif in ancient

Egyptian religion.

Thread is actually a snake

which probably represents the god Atom.

The frame represents a

lotus flower as it represents rebirth.

The glass bulb is supposed to

represent the air bubble of the sky and

finally there is something on the ground that

looks like a cable that is actually

a barge it stands for the

sky barge that carries the sun through the

sky

all this together shows that the picture

surprisingly does not depict a light bulb

only tells us a lot about

ancient Egyptian theology

[music]

but why do we see things in the

representations that aren't there at all, and

not just in ancient Egyptian art,

we see strange things everywhere,

for example Jesus on a slice of

toast,

faces in rocks,

ducks in the clouds

and even faces on Mars

[music]

In 1976, NASA's Viking probe sent one

Surprising photo from the

surface of Mars to Earth. It

apparently shows a human face.

Some see it as evidence of a

lost civilization on Mars,

but when NASA takes photos with better

cameras it becomes clear that the face

is a natural rock formation.

We constantly see things that aren't there

are

why is this so? To

find out, researchers measure

the electrical activity in the brain when

looking at corresponding images.

They find out that we

often recognize certain things before we

become aware of what we are

actually looking at,

which means we recognize the face before

we see it Recognizing a slice of toast or the

helicopter in front of the hieroglyph,

the technical term for the phenomenon of recognizing

faces or familiar

objects in things that aren't even there, is

called pareidolia.

Harald Oli is a way

our brain works that allows it to

quickly develop patterns and

recognize them again However,

errors also arise and we see patterns

where there are none. The effect may

seem meaningless, but it helps us to

stay alive.

In some cases it is about

survival when we see unclear shapes

or a shadow between the

leaves and think that is a thing Tiger

then we run away if this

interpretation was wrong, that's not a

bad thing, but we wouldn't have

reacted like that and it really was a tiger

then that's because

we recognize things very quickly

that are familiar to us, that

explains a lot of things that

nobody sees in the picture

Dendera was something special until

electric light was invented in 1878. Only

then did visitors notice the similarity, which is why

no one thought of a helicopter for a long time.

One day we

might see something completely

different in these hieroglyphs that simply had

n't been invented yet In

a glass display case in the British

Museum lies a mysterious

metal device with strange sayings engraved on it:

I am the revealer of secrets

within me are the wonders of wisdom and

strange hidden things.

It is a device created from the past

to predict the future

using the latest technology

we can now examine the mysterious mechanism

with forensic precision

the geomantic calculator in the entire

history of human civilization

there is nothing that comes close to this device

it is not mentioned anywhere

not in historical books not in

manuscripts it is twice the size of

an iPad and impressively beautiful

an elaborate metal work with gold

and silver that came a complex

construction with several slider

wheels and Arabic inscription

this extraordinary object is almost

800 years old it is the key to the

mysteries that have been buried by time

[music]

what secrets does it hide how

does it work and what exactly is it

[music]

on the front there is an

engraving in Arabic script it reads

like a riddle

of the keepers of eloquence and the silent

speakers and through my language

adult wishes and fears the clever one

hides his secret thoughts but

I reveal them something

Is that supposed to mean it remains a

mystery but other engravings on the

machine provide further clues

on the sliders and wheels we see

groups of dots they resemble

dot patterns like we know from books

about divination

these patterns of dots are found in

texts from Spain Africa and England

Going back to the 12th century,

they are about an ancient

method called geomancy

based on predicting fate

or the future by studying

objects on earth and how they fall.

This is a geomantic calculator that is

supposed to predict the future but how

does it work

The term geomancy comes from the

Greek

Geomancy is a form of sign

interpretation that starts from natural phenomena or

certain objects.

Definition sign interpretation is an

ancient practice that

was widespread worldwide and over time

the methods of divination became more and more

unusual.

There is pyromancy, which is related to the

observation of flame patterns

to predict the future

or the hydromancy which deals with

patterns emerging in water

or the crystallomancy which

reads the future in glass balls,

the geomancy uses sand or earth with

the same goal

[music]

was very common in the Islamic world

about the future glorified to

say the name for it was Aram which

means science of the land or

sand knowledge

and the Exchange with the spread of

Islam geomancy also reached

Europe

Richard II had a text about

geomancy

he is not the only one many

European rulers have geomantic

writings in their libraries The

Middle Ages in Europe were a troubled

time. Many wanted to know what the

future of their kingdoms looked like.

The rulers of the earth used the

earth itself to predict the future.

Geomancy could

be practiced by anyone from princes to

beggars

[music]

you throw the sand and draw a

seemingly random arrangement of

dots while you think about something or

ask yourself a question and then you have

these dots

after each roll you add up the number

of dots

if the number is odd you have one

point if it is even you have two dots

you need four Throws to

have a geomantic series called

mother matrix

each row consists of one or two

points this whole process is

repeated three more times until you finally

have four mother matrices

the procedures mathematics instead of 1 and 0

you take even and odd and you

do these calculations again and again

and creates more and more patterns.

Next you take the dot patterns

from the first row of the mother matrix

and produce a daughter from them. Each

row of mother dots produces a

daughter so that we create further patterns

from your mother. The daughter pair

then becomes a niece.

You go through them and if it

is an even number you take two points

and if it is an odd number you take one at the

end you have 16 such patterns this is called

a geomantic tablet

the geomancer then has to interpret this tableau

and read the future from it

making a tableau is simple

mathematics and looks more complicated

than it is

Sex 16 x 16 x 16 x 16 means that there are

65,536 combinations

for a device that was built 700 years before the

first computer

seems to be a complex task,

exactly how does the geomancy calculator work,

the answer is behind it richly

decorated back wall

[music]

when you make its inner workings visible

it quickly becomes clear that

none of the knobs and sliders are

connected to another one

when you turn a control

nothing else moves

[music]

geomancy machine is basically

not a machine at all it is a

collection of unconnected

dials and levers and offers

a kind of reference or memory aid.

The geomancy calculator does not calculate

fate, it is just an elegant

development of signs that were

previously simply scratched into the earth.

It doesn't matter to the result,

it's all about that anyway

Interpretation of the points on the

tableau It

's not like there is only one

standard interpretation, there are

stacks of books about the

interpretation of all possible

results. The

geomancer's job is to

interpret the calculated symbols.

This all looks very mathematical,

but in reality it is just that an

artful method of

randomly determining one out of 65,536 possible numbers

and assigning meaning to one,

allowing for many different interpretations.

The interpretation itself is

ultimately made up, it can be anything, so

with the geomancy machine it's

just about not getting your hands dirty, that's what it

says

I spread it out in front of my face

and built it with devotion

as a replacement for the earth.

It is the ultimate tool for the

discerning geomancer,

the only one of its kind in the world

[music]

where does this special device come from and

who built it and

how much of the designer of this

geomancy machine is actually

immortalized on the board his name is

Mohammed in rudlug so we know where

it comes from

[music]

the name translated means Mohammed

son of kutluk from marsili which is

still called that today and is located in Iraq

in the 13th century Mosul was one of the

largest cities in the Islamic world

it was a large trading center with

connections to the Silk Road Mosul was

an important commercial and

intellectual center

in which artisans like Mohammed

in the hotlock fit in well

Medieval Mosul is famous

for its masterful metalwork

with combinations of different

materials just like the

geomancy machine

it is a very finely

crafted object with many

different metals whoever

created it was very experienced and

Rosul was the perfect place for it

but why did he

make this geomancy instrument instead of

a decorative vase

a white one this piece should

be as magnificent as possible and the geomantic

practice thereby moves away from the backyard image

towards a scientific

professional coat of paint

that fits well into the period 1200

years ago, science flourished in the

Arab world

the period from the 8th to 13th centuries is considered

the golden age of Islam it

was the time But there are seven caliphates in

Baghdad and it was also the time

in the House of Wisdom or the Great

Library

[Music]

in the library there are many

translated works from antiquity it is

at the same time a center for new

research in science, construction and

medicine

were occupied with nature

made observations and experiments

things that are still part of science today

and that led to many

inventions

here the hypodermic syringe was

invented and the tweezers here were

operated on cataracts we see

progress in astronomy and

mathematics was further developed, for example

through the invention of the decimal point

and complex fractional calculations and also

in algebra

[music]

actually comes from Arabic,

as well as algorithm, we still use these words

today, everything comes from the

Golden Age of Islam

in this world the

geomancy machine was also invented

but when geomancy was in the

Arab world plays such a big role

why is there only this one

machine

the answer to this could

provide the date of manufacture of the machine

there is an engraving on it of the year 639 according to

the Islamic calendar or

1241 42 according to the Christian calendar

only 16 years later will be the golden

age of Islam ever ended

the attack of the Mongols from the East

was a violent blow

[music]

the Mongol hordes led by the

grandson of Genghis Khan destroyed the

knowledge that had accumulated in Baghdad

and hospitals were destroyed

they threw so many books into the

river that, according to tradition, the water turned

black before ink

this is one of the last artifacts of the

golden Islamic age it is

exceptional in several respects in the artistry

in which it was crafted and in its

importance to the history

of geomancy calculator gives us an

insight into the creativity and

creative power of the Islamic world of the

Middle Ages but he couldn't

predict that the Mongols would end this time

[music]