Original subtitles

We innovate and mould the bounty of the planet

To our needs.

But new resources forge new struggles,

Give power to new peoples,

And with them, ideals and ideas that transform our lives.

Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet,

Most species will fail.

But for one, all the pieces will fall into place,

And a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.

This is our story, the story of all of us.

This is our story, the story of all of us.

The nile delta of egypt,

Twelve hundred years before christ.

Mankind's greatest civilizations falling one by one.

A new enemy.

Egyptians call them the sea people.

Hungry, violent,

Their origin a mystery even today.

"Their ships came, our cities burnt,

"And they brought evil to our country."

A thousand years after the age of the pyramids,

Even mighty egypt faces destruction.

Around the mediterranean,

Great cities and empires are swept away

By peoples on the move.

Troy, the mycenaeans in greece,

The hittite empire of turkey.

The sight of ships on the horizon

would have just sent chills down your spine.

It would have been the most terrifying thing imaginable.

When the sea peoples cause one great state to fall,

then that one domino has fallen,

and then the rest around the Mediterranean go.

Chaos rules.

Trade dries up.

Supplies of bronze,

The lifeblood of civilization, dwindle to nothing.

Mankind faces the collapse of thousands of years of progress.

But on an island in the eastern mediterranean

A group of pioneering metal workers

Uncovers one of the keys to our future.

What they discover will arm new peoples,

Give power to new ideas,

Send mankind across the world,

And transform the planet.

The age of iron.

An age we still live in today.

An age we still live in today.

Alashiya, cyprus.

An island named after its rich resources of copper.

But the supply of rare tin to make bronze from copper

Has dried up.

Faced with ruin, metalworkers make a discovery

That will change the future of mankind.

Rusty red rocks, found all over the island.

They contain one of the most important raw materials

In history: iron.

Born in the heart of an exploding supernova star,

Iron forms the earth's molten core,

Larger than the moon, hot as the sun.

Without it, no atmosphere, no magnetic field,

No life.

The fourth most common mineral in the earth's crust.

After depending on bronze for so long,

iron was a far superior metal,

but it took a much higher level of skill to work with it.

To forge iron, a super-fuel:

Charcoal, wood burned in kilns,

More carbon, more energy,

Burns hotter, longer.

They needed to smelt it,

to get that ore into a position

where it would interact with charcoal,

and great groaning bellows would push air into this fire.

The heat would infuse the iron,

and it would coagulate into these chunks.

Iron is harder, it can hold an edge better

and it's extremely plentiful.

Those skills must have spread very, very quickly,

as people realized what a huge advantage iron could give you.

Iron and charcoal transform the surface of the planet.

In europe alone,

70 million acres of trees, an area bigger than oregon,

Are felled to feed iron foundries,

Creating the landscape of the world we know today.

Now, on the plains of greece,

Iron ushers in a new age of warfare.

Soldiers prepare to defend their small kingdom.

Sparta.

A society dedicated to war.

With the richest iron mines in greece.

Their leader: pausanias.

A prince of sparta, acting commander-in-chief.

Bearing down on them, the superpower of the day:

Persia.

Sparta is just 3000 square miles.

The persian empire, more than a million.

The battle they face against the odds

Will shape the story of mankind.

Pausanias is holding sparta together

After the death of the king, his uncle.

They prepare for a final battle to defend greece.

They're the baddest human beings on the planet Earth

and they wanna stay that way.

It's really "We're gonna breed the ultimate warriors."

And they build a whole caste system,

a whole belief system, around this idea.

a whole belief system, around this idea.

In sparta, from the age of seven,

Boys are trained as warriors.

At 18, they join sparta's army,

The most fearsome,

Most disciplined fighting force on earth.

Young men were taken away from their families

and lived a very what we call a Spartan life,

a life without luxury

and a life of deprivation

and a life training and testing their courage.

The Spartan boy is tough as nails,

he has to be able to sleep outside

when it's raining and even snowing,

to have to forage and even steal your own food.

Spartans are armed with the best weapons of the day,

Spears and swords of iron.

But sparta cannot fight persia alone.

Within greece, sparta's rival: athens.

Also small, vulnerable,

A city of merchants, playwrights, and farmers.

But faced with a powerful enemy,

Athens must decide to accept persia as its master

Or try and make common cause with its bitter rival.

The decision will determine the future of the western world

And the story of all of us.

S power to the people.

The small city-state of athens faces a choice:

Submit to the persian empire or fight for freedom.

An envoy of the persian emperor xerxes

Offers the people of athens a chance

To surrender and avoid bloodshed.

Their freedom.

Male citizens of athens gather on a rocky hill called the pnyx.

Among them: sophanes.

Brave, outspoken,

An ordinary citizen who will become a military legend.

Citizens of athens are armed with iron weapons.

They have a duty to defend themselves and their city.

The ability to express yourself freely

is so uniquely tied

to the ability to defend yourself freely.

The Athenians appreciate and value freedom.

Their ability to be self-expressed,

their ability to have a say in their government.

And they're willing to fight for that.

Political decisions in athens are made not by kings,

But by its armed citizens, men like sophanes.

A new political system,

A legacy still shaping civilization today:

Democracy.

It's not everyone,

it's primarily male land-holders who can vote.

Women were not part of the process, at this point.

Nonetheless, it's a dramatic shift

from having strong men and tyrants.

You have the ability for self-determination.

A black stone: surrender.

A white stone:

Fight.

Vote 'yes' and you've committed yourself

to risking your life to fight.

Vote 'no' and you'll be safe

but you'll be ruled by a stranger.

Tough decision, but the point is,

it's being made by ordinary people,

and that's what's astonishing

about what the Greeks introduced to the history of humanity.

An athenian records the will of the people:

"Such is our love of liberty, we will never surrender."

August, 479 bc,

Near the coast of greece.

Bitter rivals lay aside their differences

To defend their lands against a mighty empire.

The persians: 100,000 conscripted soldiers

From across the ancient world.

On the other side, greek patriots.

Pausanias leads a force of men

Whose entire lives are dedicated to the art of war.

With the spartans, citizen-warriors from athens.

Men like sophanes.

They were putting everything they knew

on the line.

I think there is such great gallantry

in the idea of going to battle, going to war,

knowing you are severely outnumbered,

but believing you have right on your side.

The persian commander, mardonius,

Believes superior numbers will be the key

To an easy persian victory.

The greeks have halted the persian advance

For more than a week.

Phalanx!

The greeks line up to face the enemy head-on.

They're exhausted, outnumbered, exposed.

But now a new weapon...

...A new way of fighting...

...that decides the future of the western world.

The future of western civilization

Is being decided in greece.

Greek allies have held off a persian army of 100,000

For more than a week.

They're exhausted, outnumbered 3 to 1.

Spartan leader pausanias and athenian militiaman sophanes

Prepare to make a last stand.

The greeks unleash a new weapon,

A tactic that will transform warfare.

The phalanx.

What the phalanx required

was soldiers working closely together

both to protect each other

and give that unified, tightly-packed force,

enough power to push forward.

By blocking those shields together

and then separating just enough

to drive the spear into your enemy,

you could take one more step,

and you could start to dominate the battlefield

by working together as a coordinated team.

The phalanx - a human tank.

The greeks smash the persian advance.

Soldiers scatter.

Soldiers scatter.

In the heat of battle, the thing that matters

is what you're going to do in that moment.

Survive, kill, and take care of your buddies.

The persian commander attempts to rally his troops.

But pays the price.

But pays the price.

A greek historian writes:

"In peacetime, sons bury their fathers.

"In times of war, fathers bury sons.

"Great deeds are wrought from great risk."

Pausanias will be remembered as the spartan commander

Who won the war.

Sophanes, as the bravest of all athenians.

With the help of iron weapons,

People power has resisted tyranny.

A generation after the war,

Athenians vote to commemorate the victory with a monument:

The parthenon.

It takes 15 years to build.

It takes 15 years to build.

A temple to athena, goddess of wisdom,

It will become a symbol of democracy.

It's the fairest way to organize a society

that anyone in human history

has ever conceived and realized.

And we owe all of that indirectly

to a small group, a handful of men,

who lived in a place called Athens

two and a half thousand years ago.

In the west, iron helps city-states fight for freedom.

Five thousand miles to the east, it's one of the building blocks

Of the world's most enduring empire: china.

The world's most powerful man is on a journey

To find the secret of eternal life.

Shi huang di, the first emperor of china.

He's been fighting for his throne since age 13.

He's survived a coup,

Three assassination attempts.

Now aged 49,

He's created an empire he believes will last forever.

Crucial to his success, a new type of technology:

Cast iron.

By superheating iron in a blast furnace,

Chinese metalworkers lay foundations

For mankind's industrial future.

Basically you can pour iron into a mould

and make pretty much whatever you want.

Then you have really a world-beating technology.

The liquid iron is cast into moulds

To produce identical objects,

By the thousands.

200 years before christ, the birth of mass production.

A technological revolution

Driven by one of the greatest game-changers:

War.

A sad but inescapable fact of human history

is that war drives technology.

A new kind of weapon will transform the way we fight,

Help unify an empire,

And lay the foundations for a feat of engineering

That will change the face of the planet.

A new kind of weapon will transform the way we fight,

China, 200 years before christ.

The soldiers of china's first emperor

Change the face of warfare with a new kind of weapon:

The crossbow.

The Chinese crossbow draws back nearly 24 inches,

more than five times that of a European crossbow,

so, for the same weight of bow, you get five times the power,

five times the range and five times the punch.

Bolts with an iron core,

Fired at high velocity, nearly a quarter mile.

In the history of mankind,

this was really the first time that mass productions

became so important as part of state building,

empire building.

Easy to use, with just a few days' training,

Foot soldiers become killing machines.

They drilled three-man crews,

so that you would have one man bracing it with his feet.

He would then pass it to a man standing who would load it,

who would pass it to a forward man who would shoot it,

by which time the man on the ground

had got round to the front,

and so the army could advance with this constant fusillade,

this constant barrage of crossbow arrows.

It really was the most aggressive mechanism

for advancing an army.

A new innovation: standardized, interchangeable parts.

The crossbow is the first modular weapon system

basically in history.

So now you have a weapon system

where I can have extra spare parts,

extra strings, extra steel, extra wood.

You can build it quickly,

you can replace its parts very easily,

you can fix it quickly.

It will be 2000 years...

Before standardized mass-produced parts

Become common in other weapons.

American gun-makers are some of the first pioneers,

Making the 1861 "Springfield" Rifle musket.

A decade later, the iconic colt .45.

If I can mass produce a bunch of these things,

I'm going to be able to win a lot of battles very quickly.

Armed with the crossbow,

The armies of the first emperor storm across 6 warring kingdoms.

In just 9 years he conquers more than a million square miles.

27 million people.

China's first historian writes:

"His armies devour the land

"Like a silk worm eats a mulberry leaf.

"Nothing will stop them."

The first emperor of China put an end

to hundreds of years of states warring against one another.

By unifying China, he unified what is, quote/unquote,

all under heaven, all creatures under heaven.

And this victory symbolized

the concept of the birth of China.

To defend his new empire, the first emperor begins

Perhaps the most ambitious engineering project

In the story of mankind:

The great wall of china.

Designed to hold back the nomadic hordes of central asia,

And extended over the next 1800 years.

Construction claims a million lives.

Construction claims a million lives.

But after 11 years of rule,

On a journey to find a legendary magical spring

Said to hold the secret of eternal life,

Shi huang di, the most powerful man in the world,

Falls ill.

Mercury tablets prescribed by his doctors to make him immortal

Are destroying his brain and body.

The first emperor's pursuit for immortality

stemmed from his megalomania.

He had conquered and created

this vast, never-seen-before empire,

and he thought he would rule forever.

But he could not cheat death.

Aged 49, shi huang di,

China's first emperor, dies.

He's buried in a tomb stretching 20 square miles,

But he does not journey to the afterlife alone.

With him go the wives who failed to bear him children.

With him go the wives who failed to bear him children.

And hundreds of craftsmen,

Buried alive to keep the secrets of his tomb.

And guarding their emperor,

An extraordinary force of 8000 soldiers.

The terracotta army.

Every single one unique,

Believed by some to be modeled on real people.

While in china the age of iron forges an empire,

Off the coast of africa a fleet sails on an expedition

That launches mankind's first great age of exploration.

Leading a fleet of 60 ships,

Hanno, king of carthage.

Adventurer, pioneer.

He's on one of the first recorded voyages of discovery,

Pushing into the unknown.

Hanno's people are the phoenicians,

A maritime trading empire

With colonies all over the mediterranean.

It's made them the best shipbuilders in the world.

Their secret: iron.

What makes iron better than bronze

is it holds an edge better.

If you're trying to work with wood,

the ability to keep a sharp edge meant

you could make thin planks,

you could shape beams, you could build better ships.

Iron tools revolutionize shipbuilding

And allow mankind to innovate as never before.

A revolutionary invention:

The keel.

Now ships can remain stable in the roughest waters,

The key to mankind's future at sea.

Hanno has sailed from the mediterranean

Into uncharted waters: the atlantic ocean.

With 30,000 colonists,

He's looking for new lands, new opportunities.

For some of these early explorers,

all they've been told

is that the world drops off.

It's a step into the unknown, it's huge.

Hanno writes an account of his journey:

"We saw at night the land covered with fire.

"In the middle was a high flame, higher than the others,

"Which seemed to reach the stars.

"A high mountain, named the Chariot of the Gods."

The first written description of mount cameroon,

The largest volcano in west africa.

Recorded using a revolutionary new writing technology:

The alphabet.

The phoenicians invent 22 symbols or letters

That can be combined to represent almost any sound

In any language.

Easy to learn, the alphabet puts reading and writing

Within everyone's reach.

One of the keys to the future of communication.

The invention of the alphabet was one of the biggest steps

in the history of writing.

It just simplified dramatically the way the script worked,

and made it so much easier for people to learn

how to read and write.

Off the coast of modern-day gabon,

Hanno records another extraordinary encounter:

"There was an island full of wild men and women.

"They had hairy bodies.

"Our interpreters called them 'Gorillae'."

Two and a half thousand years before darwin,

Phoenician explorers recognize the great apes

As our distant cousins.

The phoenicians create colonies across the mediterranean world,

Spreading trade and ideas

To lebanon, tunisia, cyprus, sicily,

And the island of ibiza.

As they expand, so does knowledge of the alphabet.

And amongst a group of exiles in the city of babylon,

It becomes the key to creating a book

That will shape the story of mankind:

The bible.

And the island of ibiza.

Babylon in the middle east,

A great city famed for its hanging gardens.

Here, a spiritual revolution is underway.

The age of iron is an age of new people,

New ideas,

And faiths that still dominate mankind's world today.

Across the world, local religions give way

To powerful new beliefs,

Spread by the written word.

World faiths still with us today.

Hinduism unites much of india.

From the foothills of the himalayas,

The words of buddha spread out across asia.

And in china, the writings of confucius

Will help order the lives of one quarter of the world.

The age of Jesus and Buddha and Confucius,

there seems to be a period

roughly timed with the emergence of iron technology.

It's as though humankind all around the earth

is reaching a level of social and political sophistication

that just hadn't been there before,

and they're all doing it about the same time.

In babylon's libraries,

A group of jewish exiles use their own alphabet,

In the language of hebrew,

To write down the history and the beliefs of their people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept,

"When we remembered Zion."

Two generations ago, babylonia conquered jerusalem.

Destroyed its temple to the jewish god yahweh,

Exiled the jews to babylon.

Now, captives in a foreign land,

The jews begin what will become the most influential book

In the story of mankind:

The bible.

What we now know as the Jewish faith

starts not with Abraham, not with Moses,

not really with even the temple of Solomon.

The Jewish faith begins in the Babylonian exile.

Babylon is a city of the future.

Cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, a city of many different gods.

But in this melting pot,

The jews write into mankind's story a revolutionary idea:

Monotheism.

All existence created by one god.

Rather than thinking of Yahweh as the highest amongst the gods,

just one of many gods, but the god of Israel.

The Jews begin to think that perhaps Yahweh is the sole god.

But for the jews of babylon, the word of god is under threat.

The city is besieged by the armies of the persian empire.

If it falls, their fragile writings could go up in flames.

Now one man seizes this moment.

He sees opportunity.

Zerubbabel...

Exiled prince, descendant of kings solomon and david.

He decides he will lead the jews out of exile

And back to the promised land.

But many don't want to go,

They have lived their entire lives in babylon,

And the journey will be dangerous.

Zerubbabel persuades a hundred families to leave.

Their departure from babylon will become a new chapter

In the story of mankind:

"Go out from Babylon, flee from the Babylonians.

"Declare this with a shout of joy,

"Proclaim it, send it out to the end of the earth:

"Say, 'The Lord has redeemed his servant.'"

An epic journey of 500 miles

Back to the sacred city they have never seen:

Jerusalem.

"Even if you have been banished

"To the most distant land under the heavens,

"From there The Lord your God will gather you

"And bring you back."

Carrying with them words that will become

The old testament of the bible,

The most widely read book in the world.

Six billion copies printed over the last 500 years.

I'd definitely call the Bible

the most influential text ever written.

The Bible was the first bestseller,

it was the first book ever printed on the printing press.

Even today, it's the bestseller.

Iron has opened a new age for mankind,

Transforming landscapes, forging new connections,

Changing the way we think.

Now a new kind of empire will rise:

Rome.

Mankind leaps forward with a new pace of life.

And in a city within rome's empire,

One man's life and death will transform the lives of billions.