Original subtitles

Are the mysterious symbols on this

wooden plaque the key to a

lost civilization?

This is the strangest cosmetic item in the

world? It

fits on a woman's head and takes

micro-measurements to

determine the level of beauty

and is this disc really 5000

years old? The first impression is that

it is modern and part a complicated

machine is

[music]

fascinating mysterious objects

long hidden in museums laboratories and

archives

now we can use the latest

technology to reveal their secrets

[music]

we can recreate them

disassemble

and enlarge

and so forgotten

[music]

these are the strangest things in the world

[ Music]

in the archives of a Roman

religious order there is a strange

wooden artifact. There

are mysterious symbols carved into its surface that

could come from a lost civilization.

This is an extraordinary object. We

can only imagine what it is about

its secret

this is a so-called rongo tablet it

is one of only a few wooden tablets that have been

discovered on the remote Easter Island in the Pacific

the strange wooden tablet is 29 cm wide,

19.5 cm high and about 2.5 cm thick

both sides are covered with strange

characters

There are about 120 different

symbols and pictures they show

everyday things like birds animals

plants and people

are the symbols of a forgotten

language what do they mean why did this

lost culture once create them

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Easter Island is located 3700 km west

of Chile in the middle of the Pacific

Easter Island is very small, actually

just a tiny dot in the ocean,

just 24 km long and 13 km wide, but

it is enormous.

The most famous inhabitants are the

huge stone statues that stand out all over the

rugged island.

In total, there are 900 of them

spread across the entire island have been since the

Europeans first set foot on the

island. Experts are puzzling over

what they mean and why they

exist. But the colossal

sculptures are not the only

mysteries on Easter Island.

For 150 years, the symbols on

this board have puzzled science.

They see a bit like

Egyptian hieroglyphs or

Mayan writing, but their arrangement suggests

that they are something completely new and

unique.

More than 1000 characters with more

than 120 different glyphs on

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fish, plants, native animals. This

is one of a total of 26 surviving

gliefentafeln from Easter Island

how did it end up in a Catholic archive

in Rome

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According to recent research,

the first people reached Easter Island

between 1100 and 1300 BC the

living conditions were ideal, there

were trees everywhere, they could

tap them and get juice from which they

made sugar or wine

had firewood and building materials

the ground was covered with flags and there

was at least one large crater with

fresh water

archaeological finds show that the

people fed on porpoises fish

and seabirds

the first settlers were doing

pretty well here for a while as the

population figures show at least

7000 people At its peak, there were even 20,000 people living on the island

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the first settlers hew the

gigantic

stone and carve the table out of

tropical wood

but the island soon turns out to be too

small for the growing population

the trees are being

cut down at an alarming rate

and unfortunately they had too Rats were

brought in and they

pounced on the tree seeds with great appetite. That

was a very unfortunate situation that

ultimately led to the complete deforestation of

the island.

The rough shape of the board testifies to

this ecological crisis.

Westholz was a very scarce commodity at the time

and every piece was one of this

wonderfully shimmering wood

was completely used. Even the

smallest pieces of it would not have been

sold.

The precious material allows conclusions to be drawn

about the meaning of the tablet,

but the wood is so valuable that they could have

written on gold. In

1772, the first Europeans landed on the

island report a treeless

landscape with bushes no more than three meters

high and mix for the

islanders called rappanui,

the new arrivals mean a radical

change in times

after the arrival of the Europeans

probably no more muahel were

created the Europeans brought

Christianity with them which means the islanders

had to convert and their previous ones

Practices were viewed as idolatry

which also explains why the rongerung

tablet is one of the few that

still exist today

after converting to Christianity and

most tablets are burned the

rongorongo tablet only survives because a

Catholic missionary brought it to an archive in

Europe

this artifact could give us one

give a unique insight into the culture that produced them, but are

the characters actually

a script? How do

you determine what a script is?

One way is to examine the arrangement of the

Greeks. These do

n't look like random

comic drawings, they have one clear

alignment and are repeated in groups

the arrangement and grouping of these

characters are known to linguists

that the characters on this board

are arranged in a very specific shape in technical language this is

called bustrophedon

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with this notation the board rotates

180 after each line Turned

upside down and

read from left to right,

it is actually a script.

If that is the case then this would be the

only known writing system from

this part of the world at the time. What

is written here

about the symbols of this script

To decipher rongo called Rango, you first have to

understand the system behind it.

Is it an alphabet like the German one, for example,

or are there symbols like

in Chinese? Most alphabets

only consist of a small number

of symbols, even one of the largest,

the Russian one only has 33,

the rongo However, rongo board has 120

unique symbols, far too many

for an alphabet, so they are

word symbols.

The problem with the word symbol theory

is that we only have 120 different

symbols, in Chinese there are around

20,000, so there are too few to

represent words.

A third possibility is that it is

a syllabary in which the

individual glyphs stand for syllables

like La le lu but this theory also

has a catch. The Japanese katakana

is a modern syllabary with 48

symbols but this board has 120

symbols too many so it could

may be a hybrid system

it is still debatable whether the

individual glyphs represent whole words

or syllables

current theories say it

could be a bit of both so some of

these pictograms could

represent a word while others represent sounds and

parts of a word In

any case, experts believe

it is a writing system.

We understand better and better how rongo

rongo works, but that doesn't help us

to decode or translate the language,

possibly because it is not

a writing system as we know it.

Some scientists suspect that

rongorongo is is not a complete language

but rather a kind of original language

with symbols that served as memory aids

when someone told a story

or practiced a ritual

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so the theory sounds plausible

but that doesn't help with cracking the code

like individual symbols

on the rangorongo board Solving the puzzle

In the 1950s, the German

writing researcher Thomas Bartel set out to

decipher the tablets.

He examines all the tablets he

can find worldwide because

he comes across something familiar with the Rango Rongo tablet.

Nanny, there are many symbols on the

tablet, but they are completely mysterious

One thing clearly represents a

half-Monday that

appears again and again,

which is very interesting

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since the lunar calendar

plays a major role in Polynesia, he came to the conclusion that

this could be a murder calendar.

In the 1990s,

writing researcher Jacky continued to pursue this theory and

suspected that a main symbol

on the board represents the woman in the moon from

Rapanui mythology there is also

another symbol on the tray which is

revealing

when you look at moon symbols you notice that it is

followed by a fish when the

moon is full the fish points up and

on the other side of the When the moon is full,

it points downwards, which suggests that

the fish pointing upwards

represents a waxing moon and the one

pointing downwards represents a waning

barbel and they have unanimously

agreed that this part of the board has been deciphered.

It is a lunar calendar,

but what about the other signs?

Lunar calendar provides a coherent

explanation but nothing more it does

n't help us decipher or translate the rest of the tablet

we have deciphered the tablet as much

as we can at

the moment but will we ever

decipher the complete rangorongo code

it is extremely fascinating but it will be

very difficult to crack it,

but there is still hope that we will

find new research approaches to

decipher the code one day.

As long as the mysterious symbols do

not reveal their secrets

[Music]

in a locked chamber under the

Hollywood entertainment museum is a

strange metal cage that looks

like a torture instrument from the

Middle Ages,

even if it looks like it, it doesn't come

from the Middle Ages, it's modern, it

comes from the 20th century and has

absolutely nothing to do with torture. The

most modern technologies help to reveal the

secret of the strange object

and its Assembly piece by piece

to reconstruct

adjustable metal screws and

rotating elements are attached to a frame.

The 43 cm wide and 38 cm

high frame is constructed in such a way that it

can tightly enclose a woman's head down to the neck, even the eyes -

this is one of the most expensive inventions

from Hollywood golden honor

the purpose of this device is to

measure beauty but who comes up with such a

strange idea can you

actually express beauty in numbers and how

exactly does this creepy cage want to

do that?

In principle the device was groaned over a

woman's head then

detailed measurements were taken

Finally, a number was produced that

determined the degree of beauty.

Flexible metal struts in a cage are

adjusted so that they

adapt to the perfect shape of a face and

can be fixed with screws.

Various micrometer screws are

attached to a rail in the front area.

A micrometer screw is, in principle, a

very precise screw device with which you

can measure things with an accuracy of up to a thousandth of a millimeter that's what makes things

technically so exciting.

A micrometer

screw generally uses a screw thread with markings on the long side.

Each marking stands for

a whole revolution and the

screw perhaps only turns 100 mm

further on the housing of the controller

Lines can

mark a thousandth of a millimeter a whole

revolution would then be 100

please the voice keys device can

measure so accurately that it is

not visible to the naked eye the system can

be moved up or down and inwards or outwards so

various parameters can be precisely adjusted measure

Jesus certain distances and

proportions on the face were measured

and compared with an ideal of beauty,

it was believed, for example, that the length of the nose

and the height of the forehead should be the same, the distance between the eyes

should in turn correspond to the width

of an eye, and from all these

measurements a score was then calculated

with a maximum of 100%,

of course no one

ever achieves this perfect beauty the inventor

made sure that improvements

were always possible

as soon as the data is compiled

all flaws can be cataloged and

corrected with make-up in the

hope of adopting the ultimate

ideal of beauty

the man who sets out to

define beauty is world famous but who is

the interesting thing about this device is it was

n't created by some inventor

who just did it for the sake of

inventing it

was built by the ultimate

beauty guru

even today he is still a legend

Max Factor

the company that was founded is now worth

billions Company factor himself

comes from Poland where he lived in poor

conditions as Maximilian.

He is one of ten children and comes

from a poor Jewish family in

Lodz. At the age of

nine he helps

the city's most famous wig maker and beautician. Around 1900 he opens

his own shop for a well-known

theater troupe uses his products which

in turn lands him an even more lucrative

job at the Russian State Ballet.

According to tradition, the

Russian Tsar's family is so impressed

by his arts that he receives an audience

with Hofer

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he is appointed chief cosmetics advisor to the

Tsar's family but draws for Jews in

Russia dark clouds over

the empire, the tsar's family and the

army are launching so-called

iodization programs across the country. The

situation was bad and getting worse and

worse. In

1904, Factorowitz flees

to the USA with his wife Esther and their three children.

From then on he calls himself Max Factor. He

lands in California and experiences the

Boom in Hollywood's film industry

He was horrified by the

make-up standards, the actors

still used the conspicuous thick

and greasy theater make-up that looked

very unflattering, especially in close-ups

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his chance In

1914 he brought out his own cosmetic line

that was special

Meeting the demands of the film industry,

many Hollywood pioneers used his

products

or kittens.

However, he had his big breakthrough in 1925

when he supplied over 2,200 liters of body paint for

the film Ben Huel.

All women want to look as glamorous

as the screen beauties in

Hollywood and they know the man who does

that What makes possible is called Max Factor,

hey, anyone in Hollywood goes

to him to have their hair or

make-up done, including stars

like Rita hey war or Judy Garland,

who sells his cosmetics to the

masses. He is also the one who coins the term

Make-up invents why does the

successful businessman need a

so-called beauty calibrator

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Make-up artist but also inventor and

pioneer

is not only known for

finding the right shades, he

also manages to make up the parts of the

actress' face in such a way that

certain characteristics

are balanced out the face looks symmetrical

with his device he wants to set the guidelines

so that

the symmetry is improved through a cosmetic treatment.

For me he was a kind of Leonardo da

Vinci, someone who produced wonderful art

and at the same time

had an eye for form and functionality,

this approach is innovation

created through creativity and logic

this strange device also plays a

role in the emerging

technology

originally the actors

only had to worry about whether they

looked good in black and white but with

the advent of color film in 1932 this became

more difficult

and that increased his desire for this

system To perfect

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Unlike his other developments,

this device was never intended for the masses

The beauty calibrator was never intended for the

mass market

It was aimed at the Hollywood elite

and the US celebrities who used it

because they could afford it

is beauty Such a device can really work in a measurable way.

When we use the term beauty,

we usually think of women because

in our opinion, beauty is

female. We should rather

talk about attractiveness because that applies to

both women and men. Everyone can be

attractive. That's an important

difference It's not about beauty, it's

about attractiveness,

but why do we find some people

more attractive than others? There

are a number of studies about what makes a

face or body attractive.

It's amazing that these

criteria

are very similar in many societies and cultures.

A basic element of attractiveness is

averageness

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normal faces in the scientific

sense, i.e. those that resemble the average of

society are,

according to various studies, perceived as more attractive

than those that deviate from the location

another basic element is symmetry

bad have a preference for

symmetry the more jesometric someone is,

the more attractive we find him

the reason This could be due to the

way our brain works,

faces that are closer to the norm.

Metric faces are

easily captured by our brain, the

brain has to process less, which is why

they appear more attractive to us,

but not only visual perception

determines the attractiveness of a

face, but also basic movements

in the face Choosing a partner plays a role

and this is where Darwin's theory of evolution comes

into play.

According to the theory of evolution, finding them attractive to someone depends on

how suitable they

are as a potential partner, i.e. how

strong the joint offspring would be. A

normal, symmetrical face indicates

greater genetic fitness than

humans with Symmetrical faces

often have a greater genetic

diversity.

This mixed inheritance is also

called heterozygosity. A high

heterozyguty is

said to have better health values.

Low cholesterol values ​​or low

blood pressure and genetic diversity are

directly related. When we

see average faces we

also see their positive characteristics.

Max factor is this symmetry

Developed in accordance with evolutionary research, he did

not know these findings, but

his work was significant. If a face

was asymmetrical, he could compensate for this with

make-up, so he came much closer to the

modern scientific ideal of

attractiveness

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even if it was about Distances and

Facial Features Max Factor is

one step ahead of research

According to a new study,

a person's attractiveness increases when the

vertical distance between the eyes and

mouth is approximately 36% of the face's length and

the horizontal distance

between the eyes should in turn be 46% of

its width

[Music ]

Faces with such proportions

are objectively perceived as more attractive.

Even if you show a

newborn a face with different

proportions, it will choose the

average one. Apparently

something is not caused by social

conditioning but is

innate.

Our brain is already calibrated at birth

for attractiveness or

Hollywood - standards of beauty

to maintain the consequences for the

individual are far-reaching

attractive people are perceived as better

morally superior and more honest

they are treated better

than others that is not fair and not

good but unfortunately that is the

reality in our society

Max Factor speaks So with his

beauty calibrator something in our

subconscious and he is by

far not the only one who approaches the

concept of beauty with research and

technology

[Music]

the beauty the beauty calibrator is

one of the first beauty machines

but not the last, it is at the

beginning of a long series of Devices

that wanted to improve female beauty through technology in the 30s, 40s and 50s

were immersed in frozen carbon dioxide to

burn away moles and freckles that spoil the perfect day.

The freckles Forster is just one

of many strange cosmetic devices

but despite the general enthusiasm

for beauty technologies,

Max disappears factors calibrator from the

scene

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beauty calibrator made it

to the front page of the magazine

Science in 1933 and then it ended up in a

storage room in Max factors company headquarters

the calibrator eke out

a shadowy existence in the warehouse for decades until the

building and its inventory were sold in 1994

only when that Hollywood Entertainment

Museum opens its doors in 2003,

it appears on the scene again

today the beauty calibrator seems

paid and antiquated but the logic

behind it still exists.

You shouldn't make fun of the fact

that people wanted to measure beauty that way back then,

we still do it today, we

look at our noses and if you find your forehead too

small or your forehead too big, we

examine things and compare them

with an arbitrarily set standard

that determines our lives to this day,

as strange as it may seem. Almost

100 years after its invention, the

spirit of the calibrator is still very much

alive

behind glass In the Egyptian Museum in

Cairo lies a mysterious object that has been

puzzling researchers for decades.

The first impression is that it is a somewhat

more modern part of a complex machine. In

fact, the object is more than 5,000

years old and comes from Egypt

To get on the trail,

this is the so-called sabo disk

full of secrets.

Since its discovery we have been puzzling over what

it is and what it was used for.

The scribe has a diameter of

around 60 cm. On the edge there are three

tongue-shaped openings called praises.

In the middle there is one around 8 cm The large

hole

is really organic, as if you could

fold it with your hands

because it is only 1.5 cm thick. You might

think it was made of metal, but it is

n't, it is made of stone.

Today you would use a 3D printer for something like that

was this strange object

made

what is it

[music]

and who owns it

discovered in January 1936 the British

Egyptologist did

not want to know exactly who Prince Sabo

was but we know that he lived at the beginning of

the first dynasty and was

a high official at that time and He may have

been an important personality,

he was the administrator of a

province in the early days of ancient

Egypt,

many typical grave goods in

the chamber, he comes across the sarcophagus of

Sabo, which contains his body as well as a

number of other objects such as stone vessels

and other items that he needed for the

journey into the afterlife

in the middle of the room right next to the

prince's body there was a

series of strange stone fragments

found an object that was broken into several pieces

an object that was unlike

anything we know from ancient Egypt

looking like a bowl except for those

three strange openings on the edge which are at

120 degree angles to each other

the shape of the disc is unique

it is so incredibly fine thin and

artfully shaped that you think it

was made of metal using modern techniques

theoretically you can make pretty much anything

out of stone but the

idea of ​​such a thin curved one

and ingenious work to complete it

looks as if it had been cast

this strange object is very

unusual for ancient Egypt

especially as it dates from the early days of the

Egyptian Empire

which ancient master created it

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the first dynasty is a very

important one Phase in the history of Egypt

Here, trade is carried out inside and outside Egypt for the first time,

society becomes more complex and

hierarchical, there is an administration

and the use of writing is

also popular. Stone work is also popular. The

step pyramid of King Diosa, the

first pyramid built in Egypt,

stands directly In addition to where the disc was found,

the craftsmen were incredibly

skilled at working with all types of stone,

be it granite, travertine,

diorite or quartzite,

but despite these craftsmanship

skills, there is no object from

this period that resembles the disc. It is

clear that the production of the disc

must have been very demanding

which suggests how important

it must have been.

So much work went into it.

It must have had a real use.

As an engineer, I wonder what

the use could be.

According to a new theory,

a

valuable raw material plays a role in the creation of the disc Some

experts believe that the hole in the

center of the disc provides the crucial

clue,

perhaps it offers space for an

axle, this strange disc could just

be an unusual wheel

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the idea that it is a wheel is

not unreasonable, we know that the wheel belongs to

the time the oldest wheel

in the world was

discovered near Slovenia's capital lubliana

it is made of wood and is around 5,200

years old the sabo disk could

be an Egyptian equivalent

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we know that the wheel

was already invented back then but we assume

that the ancient Egyptians did

not yet know this technology, even pyramids that

emerged much later were

probably built without the help of wheels,

the first hidden use of a wheel

in ancient Egypt hundreds of years later

[music]

the theory is questionable for another

reason

from engineers From this point of view it is

impossible that it was used as advice -

it is far too fragile to

bear any weight -

the exceptionally narrow edges and

the unique shape of the disk have

led to wild speculation and

conspiracy theories that often

arise when Egyptian

artifacts have no simple explanation

For example, aliens left behind a UFO steering wheel,

but there are also serious theories, it

could have been a battle shield,

the high weight of the stone disk

and the three large openings speak against

it,

perhaps it was an incense burner, but they

were widespread in ancient Egypt

and were usually constructed in a much simpler way

Complex construction

suggests that this disc had a very

important function

[Music]

Gary a theory is that it

was the drive of a centrifugal pump

if the disc was in

a housing and rotated around a

shaft

so you could have pumped water very efficiently

Fact speaks in favor of this theory

their

irrigation played an important role

in Egyptian society

very early on the Egyptians developed

various irrigation systems to

make more land fertile and to

practice agriculture they were always looking for new

ideas to make irrigation more efficient

actually there are in the old one Egypt

different irrigation systems

this device is a shaduff which is

a bucket that hangs on a rope at the end of a long

snake thanks to a

counterweight it can be

easily pulled up once

a single man could use it to

move 2500 liters of water per day its

structure is comparatively primitive

it is by far Not as complex as

a centrifugal pump. It's not

for nothing that the first

centrifugal pumps only appeared thousands of years after

the disc was manufactured. In

order for such a drive unit to work,

it has to rotate really quickly.

You would need bearings for it and it should have been in

a waterproof housing.

The shaft should have been sealed

You would have needed screws but none of

that had been invented back then, the fact

that the disk was part of a pump

seems too far-fetched,

but there is another theory

that also revolves around water.

The disk could have distributed water vapor,

for example in a sauna you

sink and immerse them in hot

water. When you pull them up, the

vapors waft through the air.

How common are steam baths in ancient

Egypt

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Although purity and cleanliness

played a big role in ancient Egypt,

there is no evidence that they

use steam baths, so this works

Theory is not based on

another theory that the

disk was used to make a drink.

Researchers at Kanagawa University in

Japan believe that the disk

was part of an apparatus that

could be used to brew beer.

According to their theory, a rod was

inserted through the center of the disk and

then the Disc moved up and down

to create a whirlpool

by allowing the water to mix better with the grain.

Similar tools have been around for

thousands of years and are still

used for brewing beer today. Archaeologists in

Japan find out that the disc is

perfect for this thanks to the so-called cuanda effect It

describes the flow behavior of

liquids over solid surfaces,

but does beer have such a high status in ancient Egypt

that it would justify the great

effort involved in producing this

disc?

Beer was one of two

staple foods in ancient Egypt,

along with bread. There are a number of

production facilities in which at the same time

Bread and beer were produced and

in fact there were many workers who were

paid with bread and beer.

Archaeological finds

suggest that the workers who

built the pyramids of Giza

received more than three and a half liters of beer every day.

Recent research has shown

that beer did

was of central importance at the beginning of ancient Egypt. In

2021, archaeologists discovered the oldest

production site in which

beer was brewed on a large scale. A very

old brewery. The large brewery is

located in the ancient city of Amyos and dates

back to the first dynasty, the time

in which the Eight discs were made,

each containing 40 large ones.

The archaeologists assume that

more than

22,000 liters of beer were needed for just one filling

[music]

four quantities would have been enough for a daily ration

for

8,800 workers. This

shows how important beer was in ancient

Egypt

There is another piece of evidence that

speaks in favor of the beer theory.

The importance of beer in ancient Egypt

extended not only to this

world but also to the afterlife.

In many graves, beer mugs can be found

as grave goods that were intended to enable the deceased to drink

beer in the afterlife drinking,

this device is, despite all the wild

theories, ultimately just an

instrument for brewing beer

[music].

We would have to find a

lot of them because of the large quantities of beer,

but unfortunately there is only this

one disc. The theory sounds nice,

but there are none further evidence

for you

there are many explanations for this

wondrous unique object but

none of them hit the mark

perhaps the disc was ultimately

made just for its beauty a masterful

craftsmanship

[music]