4 Hours Of Ancient History Facts To Fall Asleep To

o [Music] [Applause] [Music] of all the great monuments of the past Stonehenge is one of the most enduring and enigmatic a mystery which appears to present more puzzles the more we attempt to discover its Secrets it stands on Salsbury plane in Wilshire in the southern part of modern day England where it has endured the trials of 5,000 [Music] years I mean one of the probably the most exciting things about Stonehenge is that um why it was built for what purpose and exactly how to even to this day um with all the technology and the advancement

of Technology we really don't know it is a mystery there has been a henge on the site for some 5,000 years the present Stone structure took shape some 3,000 years ago around 1,000 BC but the first stages of Stonehenge were created around 2,800 BC just after the end of the Mesolithic age which makes Stonehenge older than the great pyramid at Giza unlike the pyramids Stonehenge resolutely defies explanation in the distant times when it was built farming techniques were primitive crops uncertain wild wolves roamed the woodlands and the scattered bands of hunters lived a precarious existence

Stonehenge in its prime must have been an awesome site the single largest structure which any of its visitors would witness in their whole lives [Music] one of the problems that we've had in understanding Stonehenge has been the fact that although a very large part of it has been excavated those excavations were not written up for a variety of reasons so a great deal of the information that has come out about Stonehenge has been B based really on very little archaeological fact that gives us some facts on which we can base various ideas and various thoughts

but it will only take us so far because we can only look at the physical remains and as archaeologists and scientists we try to work out what has happened from those physical remains it's for anybody and everybody to decide what those remains actually represent in terms of how people felt what they were doing there how they thought about things we can't get that information from the archaeology despite the very best efforts of some of the best brains in the world of archaeology it stubbornly declines to fit any of the theories Advanced and remains as unexplained

today as it did when it first entered the Realms of folklore in one of the earliest written records of Stonehenge recorded in the 12th century Henry of Huntington named it even then as one of the wonders of Britain this contemporary print depicts the legend that the stones had been magically transported to saly plane by the great magician Merlin Stone circles as um uh an enduring feature of the British landscape have always attracted myths and legends and there are great many different theories about what they were there for who built them even and of course the

myth that Merlin built Stonehenge by um transporting huge rocks across from Ireland and so on they are magical places and they're very mysterious and some of them quite quite wonderful the powers of magic are no longer the favorite explanation but Stonehenge is a mystery that may never be solved older than the Great Pyramid of Giza Stonehenge marks time as an object of Wonder and almost natural beauty 150 generations of people have regarded it with awe and admiration it marks the beginning of a natural heritage [Music] The Wonder of Stonehenge has always drawn the crowds but

it is now a victim of its own immense popularity today today the Stonehenge site is encroached by modern roads and fenced off from the general public English Heritage wants eventually to return Stonehenge to its dignity and isolation and it would be wonderful if one day Stonehenge was here without the roads and that you could walk to the stones you could follow the processional Avenue and perhaps then people will formulate even more of their own opinions Stonehenge is at the center of an extraordinary concentration of Neolithic monuments found in southern Britain and it may have been

the center of intense ritual activity for at least 2,000 years since the time of Henry of Huntington dozens of alternative theories have been Advanced involving belgi Phoenicians Danes Romans Greeks Egyptians and Dru however very little information about its Builders has come from Stonehenge itself some tools some broken pots and some burnt bone are all that have been recovered these few unspectacular relics are now housed in the museum at Salsbury it is very little evidence upon which to build a picture of a whole society but in popular imagination Stonehenge will always be associated with lurid Tales

of Druids and speculative descriptions of all kinds of fanciful rituals involving Human Sacrifice but there is no tangible evidence to link Stonehenge to such practices however these colorful and graphic Tales have always gripped popular imagination the association of stone circles and particularly Stonehenge with The Druids is really down to two people the antiquarians um John auy and his successor the Reverend Dr William stukeley of the two John albre is a by far the more respectable antiquarian an early archaeologist a very close Observer of um Stone monuments um and an early Enthusiast but one of the

things he said and it's almost an offhand comment has come down and almost haunted archaeologists ever since and this was a description of Stonehenge as what he considered to be um a great church or Cathedral of The Druids or the ancient Britains from the evidence of the cremated human bones found on the site it has been suggested that Stonehenge was a huge burial ground but despite numerous archaeological digs only one complete set of human remains have been discovered on the site but the skeleton of the man discovered at Stonehenge did reveal that at least one

violent act had indeed taken place for there embedded in the skeleton were the remains of the three arrow heads which had been fired into his body the most famous burial that we have from Stonehenge is the the so-called Archer who is lying in the ditch um he is he goes with the earliest stone monument is an easy way of putting it he is of the same date and he was killed by being shot with arrows uh some of which got him in the back and some of which got him in the front whether he was

a sacrificial victim whether he was mugged and thrown in the ditch we really have no way of knowing uh it's it's a very nice scenario to suggest that he was a human sacrifice particularly because he happens to be close to if you like the entrance to the monument but we don't know the bones of the murdered man of Stonehenge are now housed in the museum at Salsbury and they Remain the only significant find of its type in spite of the presence of at least 460 barrows or burial mounds in the immediate area it would appear

that Stonehenge was not developed as a cemetery at least as far as excavation has so far proved besides the berial ground Theory a huge variety of other ideas have been offered some stranger than others but Stonehenge has yet to be proved to have been a king's Palace a battle ring a place for sport and pleasure or the sight of an alien landing there are all sorts of different theories none of which we can particularly uh prove um we are able to to some extent to to disprove in as much that we're fairly certain it was

never used for sport for example the most widely accepted current theory is that it was an astronomical computer used to chart the passing of the seasons a whole host of bewildering explanations have been offered for this usually revolving around the fact that the monument aligns with Midsummer sunrise and midwinter Sunset beyond that despite the great number of theories the flimsy evidence for alignments of Luna and solar eclipses grows more and more suspect well there's no doubt that there is an astronomical alignment to do with the sunrises and the Sun sets at solstices but people who

have worked on this in recent years have not been able to find any other true astronomical alignment or configuration that that we can definitely say has any bearing on Stonehenge itself it is estimated that Stonehenge was in use for more than 1,500 years then it fell into ruin and became the Enigma we see today it has descended into Oblivion A Relic whose real purpose is long forgotten an enduring reminder of the unforgiving march of [Music] time there are over 900 surviving Stone circles in the British Isles this is ay which is situated near to Stonehenge

others are further a field such as these stones at Castle R in the Lake District [Music] [Music] this is kenish which lies on the of Lewis in the herdes [Music] Stonehenge itself is not only the biggest Neolithic structure in Britain it is also the largest and most complete megalithic monument in Europe the surviving stones of Stonehenge can today be conveniently classified into three main types the blue stones these are the smaller Stones near the camera the larger Stones which Loom up behind them are the famous Sasson Stones the blue stones comprise the stones of the

original Blue Stone Circle and blue stone horseshoe and are the oldest stones at Stonehenge most of these are indeed blue gray in color especially when wet the sarson circle of uprights with their lentils framed the great circle of the completed structure the sarson trilian Horseshoe originally composed of five groups of Three Stones arranged in a horseshoe shape this would have been the most striking feature of Stonehenge nowadays we take the ability to move huge weights for granted stones are ripped from the ground by machines transported by ship or lri and delivered right to the door

of the customer every intermediate stage is helped by cranes and other heavy lifting machines but the people who made Stonehenge possessed only very primitive technology some of the sarson stone used to make Stonehenge was fairly local but the blue stone did not occur within 20000 miles of Stonehenge the question which had puzzled researchers up until this century was where did the blue stones come from the blue stones come from the prelli mountains in South Wales that may seem a very strange place for them to have come from and it may seem sort of weird and

wonderful that they've come that distance to Stonehenge but we know that there were contacts between the people who lived in the Stonehenge area and those people who were living in South Wales at possibly from as early as 3,500 BC and we know that because Stone objects that were produced in one area are found in another area and where the stone doesn't exist naturally the question of transporting these heavy stones from the area where they occur naturally to their present locality on Salsbury plane is still a matter of debate some 80 blue Stones weighing up to

7 tons each would have been required for the double Blue Stone Circle of Stonehenge Phase 2 if they were moved by human endeavor all the way from Wales this meant a minimum journey of about 240 miles this was something of a puzzle because it was not necessary for the Stonehenge Builders to travel to Wales for supplies of durable Stone large outcrops of equally suitable Building Stone were available less than 20 M [Music] away we know that the smaller Stones the blue stones came from the prell mountains and that uh certainly when you touch them versus

the larger Stones the the Sasson Stones the smaller blue stones are warm to touch even on a cold day so whether or not uh as as rumor has it or as Legend has it that the the people that built Stonehenge um thought they were magical um we don't really know the theory has been Advanced that these Stones were deposited close to the site of Stonehenge by glaciation but there is no clear evidence of other glacially derived material in the Salsbury plane area in view of this it is accepted that the blue stones must have been

moved from Wales to their present setting by human effort the most likely of the possible routs for the transport of the blue stones was Overland from prelli to Milford Haven on the coast then they were taken by some sort of craft around the coast of South Wales and across the mouth of the seven to the Bristol aen from there they traveled along the river FR then Overland for 6 miles to the river Wy at Warminster finally they joined the aen at Salsbury and they took the Stones 2 mi Overland to Stonehenge all this of course

took place before the widespread adoption of the wheel the distance on land by this route is about 24 Mi over which the stones would probably have been drawn by Sledge it was then a further 216 Mi by water blue stones individually are not that big and it's quite likely in fact it's almost certain that if they were brought from the prelli mountains as we think that they were brought by sea rather than by land on a raft of some sort we we know that people at that time were perfectly capable of seaing and the waters

around southern the southern coast of England are not too difficult the other stones at Stonehenge and Visually the most striking are the huge sarson Standing Stones this type of sandstone can be found scattered unevenly over the greater part of the wessix region with a concentration on the malur Downs about 20 m to the the north of Stonehenge despite the shorter distance the task of transporting more than 80 of these enormous Boulders from the malor Downs was undoubtedly more difficult than the removal of the blue stones from prelli it has been estimated that the task of

preparing and shaping the sassin preparing haage equipment and transporting them to Stonehenge May well have taken years it is obvious that stones of a particular size would have been sought after and this undoubtedly involved splitting larger boulders to preset requirements in this respect an additional attraction of the sassin may have been their tendency to occur naturally in tabular blocks any reduction in size would have been accomplished by applying hot and cold stresses to the brake line and by driving wooden wedges into the cracks minor quarrying shaping and dressing was achieved by pounding the stone using

very hard SASS and Ms while the Masons were putting the finishing touches to each Stone and it was nearly ready to be raised workmen began preparing a socket in the ground finally ropes tied around the Stone's head were passed over an A-frame and harnessed to oxen or men who needed to haul the stone into a vertical position the final position could be adjusted with packing Stones hammered in all around the base of the stone until it was exactly vertical it is in itself a huge feet of engineering and without the use of of slide rules

and computers the Precision with which it was built was quite amazing so whoever um was organizing the building of it was very structured in in their own format they they obviously had quite a a culture and were very aware of the needs for uh perfection I suppose then came the most astonishing achievement the raising of the lentils without pullers and cranes it is almost inconceivable that the lentils could be placed onto the tops of the stones with such mathematical precision as we can see the top of each standing Stone was crafted to include a semicircular

raised Tenon designed to fit snugly into an aperture known as a mortise carved into the underside of the [Music] LOL obviously with the Primitive measuring techniques available mistakes were made this lentil which has fallen down has two mortis holes carved into it one was in the wrong place causing the builders to have to make a second on the other side raising the lentil was also a puzzle the most likely solution was that the lentil was eased into place on a Timber crib at ground level a meter from the uprights a long wooden lever was used

to raise the lentil and a chalk of Timber was pushed underneath the process slowly continued until the crib was elevated into a tower with the lentil raised to the same level as the tops of the uprights when all this was ready the lentil was levered sideways until it was perched securely the thing about Stonehenge is that it's the biggest and the best but they actually if you break it down into its individual elements most of those elements occur elsewhere and sometimes in quite profusion there are a lot of monuments that are similar to the different

bits of Stonehenge where Stonehenge differs from everything else is that the Final Phase of it was in stone the mathematical and astronomical abilities of the Neolithic people are hotly debated it is not possible to infer from the evidence of archaeology alone the prehistoric man in Britain had an interest in science and knowledge for its own sake there is no clear evidence that his concern with the heavens was either scientific or metaphysical almost certainly interest in astronomy was connected with practical considerations in so far as it might control the smooth running of the farming calendar now

it has been said that stone circles were probably calendars for agricultural purposes but it's been pointed out that um any farmer that relied on um observations from the stone circles um probably wouldn't be very successful because um in many ways the readings the astronomical readings that you can take from the stone circles are hopelessly inaccurate but that is not to say that the stone circles themselves didn't form apart in the process of calendar making the establishment of a calendar was extremely important for a culture for cultural purposes now it told the cycle of the seasons

in a broad sense but also the um the calendar itself often embodied ideas of of um of birth growth death Decay which is the the very heart of all the world's major religions the observation of the midsummer and midwinter solstice would probably have enjoyed some religious or ceremonial significance the shortest day of the year was important to the agricultural communities as the hours of daylight increased the certainty came that the seasons were going to follow their natural order spring would come after winter crops would grow and life would go on as [Music] before well the

the site is certainly significant what we don't know is why it is significant it was certainly significant and very important to the people who built it what we do know is that the midsummer uh alignment of the Summer sun um has some significance to what extent and what significance that is we don't really know if it was a Heavenly Observatory Stonehenge was not a particularly accurate one the supposed alignments of sun and moon have been interpreted in many different ways none of which justify the creation of such a complex structure in its day the building

of Stonehenge was clearly a massive task the impetus for such a drive is unknown but it must have required the involvement of large sections of society the scale of the project suggests an elite clearly existed that could give orders and see them carried out we don't know exactly who built ston hedge uh but we do know that it had to have been built to a large extent by people living in the area how precisely it was built in terms of who the labor force was we we cannot know there's no way of knowing uh it's

quite possible that slave labor was used but archaeologically that we could not find any evidence for that I think it's equally possible that it was a great honor to be involved in building Stonehenge it seems the scope of Neolithic technology was startlingly ambitious the more we learn about it from detailed studies of the tools and reconstructions of the way they were used the more impressive it is that so much could have been achieved with so few tools made from just Flint stone and Bone what is truly a inspiring though is the vast amount of time

that many of the techniques required but the roots of Stonehenge could be traced back to the end of the last ice age about 10,000 BC Ice Age man had lived a nomadic existence and hunted all his days these Nomads followed the herds to their successive grazing grounds never settling in one place but as the ice retreated it became possible to set down roots to capture stock and breed domestic animals for food and produce and to develop primitive agriculture sewing and reaping and eventually storing his own food supply these changes took place over a long span

of time some 6,000 years to approximately 4,000 BC about the end of the Mesolithic age during this period the semi Nomads were also making tools for cutting and shaping Timber these earliest tools were made of flint and stone and a trade in them grew with established Roots over hundreds of miles Mesolithic man was also becoming a builder and the first permanent settlements were beginning to take rote the the earliest Neolithic settlers in Britain have been called The Windmill Hill people simply because their main archaeological remains have been found at a 21 Acre causewayed Site of

the same name it is located not far from Stonehenge this site has yielded artifacts and information about the Primitive Society just before the construction of Stonehenge the enclosures of the windmill Hill people with their Banks ditches and gaps were probably not used for Penning livestock or as habitation settlements it appears they were used for ritual or ceremonial purposes it was structures like these which were the ancestors of Stonehenge looking at Stonehenge today what we're actually looking at is the end product of something like 1500 years of Monument building we see the ruins of the very

last monument that was built at Stonehenge and in fact it's a whole series of monuments one inside the other the first monument that was built there was a simple ditch with a bank on the inside of it and the people who built that bank and ditch were just the normal everyday people who lived in and around the Stonehenge area and it's not the only Monument of its type in the country there are lots and lots and lots of circular monuments with banks and ditches all over the country and it's something that would been going on

for all already a thousand years before any Monument was built at Stonehenge in the beginning the Stonehenge site was a simple circular earthwork or henge an open space bordered by a chalk bank and large enough to hold several hundred people for a thousand years this earthwork continued to be a meeting place of native Farmers it was then altered by the digging out of a circle of 56 pits just within the bank these pits are now known as the Aubrey holes after the 17th century antiquarian John Aubry the Aubrey holes were part of a structure which

was the very first at Stonehenge it was a wooden structure we know that there were wooden posts there we don't exactly know how those posts related to each other again we have theories this we believe was one of the earlier phases and um represents sort of one of the many faces of Stonehenge this Stonehenge Phase 1 was probably completed around 2,800 BC but it was to be nearly 600 years before the familiar outline of Stonehenge as we know it today would take shape in the intervening years Phase 2 was created it saw the entrance slightly

realigned so that from the center it faced approximately towards midsummer sunrise and in the opposite direction to the midwinter Sunset an Avenue of two parallel banks with external ditches was laid out for about 530 M towards Stonehenge bottom four small stones known as the station Stones were set up on the inner edge of the ditch two of them enclosed by small ditches of Their Own It would appear that at this stage it was decided to erect a double circle of blue stones in the center about 3/4 of the circle was set up but a change

of plan seems to have brought the work to a sudden stop the stones were cleared away and the holes refilled this took place about 245 BC at the beginning of the Bronze Age the circular monuments that we have belonging to the Neolithic period um and they begin about 3,500 BC and they they go along for500 years or so they seem to have almost been like um one could say sort of like Regional fairs that we tend to find artifacts in them which have come from a wider area than you would expect they're certainly communal monuments

in the sense that they seem to be a place where people came together to do things and it may have been people from a wide area it is generally accepted that the steady growth in population from the end of the ice AG allowed a higher degree of organization which made the building of Stonehenge possible the Precision of much of the stonework is notable and some reasonably sophisticated measuring techniques must have been perfected since most traces of the people who made Stonehenge have long gone succeeding Generations have speculated endlessly about the purpose of monuments like this

and the identity of the builders [Music] with the arrival of phase three the great Sasson Stones were transported from the malor downs and set in an outer ring of 30 uprights inside it had a horseshoe of five trilithons all crowned with sarson lentil in Phase 3B around 1,540 BC an oval of blue stones was arranged inside the five trilithons and two rings of holes were dug probably to hold the remaining blue stones however this project was abandoned and the blue stones were rearranged in the Horseshoe and circle setting which partially survives [Music] today one final

event phase 4 was the extension of the Avenue from Stonehenge bottom to the river aen at West Asbury making its entire length 1 and 1/2 miles this phase was completed around 175 BC Stonehenge is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent monuments in Europe if not the world and I think it's very easy to be overall by it and I think it's very easy for us to look at it and think this has to have been something utterly Splendid I think in its final form with all the stones in position and everything it must have been

the most incredible thing it still is but the problem we have I think is that we tend to project our own ideas onto the people who built it and ultimately we don't know why it was built but we do know that it was a very long process building it so whatever the significance of the site in the first place it was dead important for a very long period of time and it persisted to be important over something like 1500 years which is an enormous amount of time we simply do not know enough about the nature

of Neolithic Society until the present Century the popular view of Stonehenge was still colored by lurd Tales of Druids and sacrifice Neolithic Britain were characterized as Savage and barbaric the elaborate Monument on Salsbury plane was used as evidence of a wild Society populated by Druids and Warriors the great number of axes and earthware from the period were interpreted as signs of warlike Tendencies and human sacrifice was taken for [Music] granted the modern view from our own less religious age is that it was constructed before the time of The Druids the consensus is firmly in favor

of the theory that it was a huge astronomical Observatory but this VI does not adequately explain the scale of Stonehenge and the complexity of the design if you place yourself in the position of the early peoples who might have built them and try to imagine what it would have been like seeing the heavens rotating around of course for them the mve ment of the Stars the movement of the Sun and the Moon and so on was terribly important they needed to know of the cycles of the seasons in order to know when to plant and

so on and so forth debate about the origins and uses of Stonehenge is not new in 1655 the architect enigo Jones published a book Stonehenge restored following acrimonious debates about the connections between the mysterious Stones Merlin The Druids and the Romans [Music] what is certain is that at some time after 1,000 BC Stonehenge was savagely damaged the destruction of Stonehenge can be convincingly argued as the work of man or the work of nature or more probably both some scholars believe that natural processes are mainly to blame in modern times some of the stones have fallen

down unaided as they have become unsafe and this suggests that time and weather may be enough to explain the damage to the monument in support of this idea much of the damage seems to be on the southwest side the side that bears the brunt of the severe weather gusting gale force winds from the southwest could have rocked the uprights in their sockets and dislodged the lentils whatever effect the weather has had in dislodging the stones pillaging has been a major factor some stones may have been collected after they fell as a result of natural processes

others have clearly been rooted out and with some Force the broken blue stones provide evidence of this we should not Overlook the possibility that Stonehenge was never completed and that the remains represent the furthest point to which the structure was Advanced the ruins that we see at Stone hen were not the last Monument that was going to be built on the site there was going to be at least one other around the stones there are two Circles of holes you can't see them now because they're they're filled in and they appear to have been dug

to hold stones of about the size of the blue stones but we can tell from the bottoms of them that no Stones were ever placed in there and we know really that this was an unfinished monument in the present day some Modern repairs have been affected using the concrete which can clearly be seen here this obvious blend of old and new is a deliberate policy on the part of English Heritage designed to clearly differentiate the original from the modern repair the images and metaphors that supposedly made up the prehistoric mythology and religion that surrounded Stonehenge

have left an enduring Legacy a fertile hunting ground for artists and illustrators we can only speculate on this Temple of the sun god the Earth goddess and who knows what are the deities of the Moon and sky but there has been no shortage of artist s ready to fill in the gaps most famous of all is Turner's atmospheric evocation of the elements [Music] Stonehenge by the 18th century Stonehenge was already a tourist attraction The Mystery of the great Stones rising out of Salsbury plain lured visitors to count the tumbled pillars to chip bits off them

and to speculate about their origin maybe it was for something to do with worship and something to do with um uh the sun and the moon was it an event that was perhaps um started or or pushed by other beings I think it was worship the Sun or something worship any kind of gods or something yeah you know it's just it's beautiful and maybe they just wanted to leave something for other people to see I don't know I think it was a a religious symbol probably um worship the send and so I've heard the the

legends about you know anything from Aliens did it to you know being a a temple to the gods or whatever it's kind of easy to say that they've had help from like extraterrestrials but um it's it's it's definitely a mystery I mean that that goes without saying the volume of visitors in recent years has grown to such an extent it was obvious something had to be done to protect what was left of the finest megalithic monument in Europe in March 1978 after much careful deliberation a fence was erected [Music] the streams of visitors to Stonehenge

find very little in the way of explanation when they arrive there and many naturally assume that it is all a matter of speculation and Imagination whatever importance was placed on it centuries ago that importance is still there and in a way I suppose the nice thing about it is is that it means different things to different people the same is true today some would see it as a monument to the victims of prehistoric battles to others it is an astronomical calculator or a temple as alive today as when it was built for many though the

constant function of Stonehenge is a magnet attracting both interest and speculation why Stonehenge became the ultimate if you like in terms of prehistoric monuments I don't think we can ever be entirely sure but it has something to do with that area being special and I actually think one of the possible explanations for it is actually fairly mundane which is that it was the Bread Basket of England at the time it was an extremely rich area for agriculture now how it came to be that I don't know but in terms of the technology that was available

the way people were living it's very likely to me that the most important reason was the fact that it was just such good area for growing food antiquarians artists and present archaeologists have all combined to contribute to a rich written and visual record of a unique Monument this is the strange and challenging story of Stonehenge the continuing Enigma a thing of beauty that continues to Delight without striving to inform [Music] [Applause] [Music] for the ancient Romans Hadrian's Wall marked the very edge of the Civilized world in the winter the wind whips in from the north

with snow in its teeth this was obviously not going to be the favorite posting for a Mediterranean Soldier to capit all hostile tribes were never far away but here they had to stand the last outpost which covered the whole of the Known [Music] World Imagine a snake 73 M long 10 ft wide 20 ft High built from millions of tons of stone and turf twisting and turning over the landscape from sea to Sea this is where the Romans drew a line as if to save the this far and no further creating a division across an

entire country this is the mark to show that This Land Is Ours here is the end of civilization behind us are order law and prosperity Beyond this wall are only barbarians the Romans had actually been in occupation up here for nearly 40 years before Haden's wall is built they' briefly gone into Scotland had to send a lot of troops abroad for other activities withdrew to more or less the same line that Haden's wall was eventually built on it was a frontier was a basically a lateral Road from Coast to Coast with forts every seven or

eight miles along it for a Roman soldier in a mile castle with his comrades gathered from the corners of the Known World Hadrian's Wall represented safety the military might which had forced conquered lands to give up their men to f Wars on the other side of the world this was the greatest of all Roman fortifications the Roman legionaries were equipped trained and transported by the great Machinery of the Legion they faced mysterious hostile lands occupied by bearded and painted Warriors uncivilized cunning and deadly we know the great wall across the north of Britain was ordered

to be built by the emperor hadrien we also know why it was built as his biographer recalls his reasons the Britains could no longer be held under control hadrien was the first to build a wall 80 M long to separate the Romans and The Barbarians [Applause] hen's wall is is the most impressive of all Roman artificial Frontiers and hren himself came here and had a look and obviously set the thing in motion because the the Romans were getting attacked by rebellious Britains at that time there's no question about it but I think the the main

purpose of of it was was a statement for internal consumption hren really wanted something impressive to say this is the end there's going to be no more expansion therefore he made it as elaborate and as impressive as possible the wall still stands today as a reminder of the power that was Rome a monument to the vibrant and Powerful Empire which extended from Asia to Britain Hayden's decision to build a wall was undoubtedly due to the fact he knew what the countryside was like around here he must have had reports from his surveyors and Engineers now

he's basically going from coast to coast uh and he's taking advantage in the center of the country of the great Rising windsil Ridge just a rid just a mile north of us learn that it would look totally spectacular and undoubtedly a certain amount of the wall is a reflection of Hadrian's personality it's a big job I mean fancy building a wall 9' 6 or so thick 15 20 ft High ludicrous for the job it was supposed to do uh but he built it cuz it's a symbol of himself today many of these remains are strikingly

well preserved as they wind over h side valyant crack standing against the rain and the cold in Northern Britain the dark Stones contrast with the green of the land in the midst of some of the wildest and most spectacular scenery in the British Island the sheer magnitude of the operation was an amazing feat of engineering no bulldozers or mechanical diggers were used to dig the ditches and raise the wall there was precious little technology beyond the simple trenching tools and the strong arms of the legionaries to wield them this expresses so well the essential flavor

of Rome and all it stood for at the height of its power here was a confident people making the Brave and Bold decisions to Mark a line from sea to sea with a wall here was an organized people with the vast reserves of Manpower and money to see that it was carried out here were a people with an eye to history itself having built it they seemed ready to stand and guard it for over 300 years over a million cubic yards of stone had to be torn from the ground transported to the site and set

in place by the hands of the legionaries it began as a single wall but it evolved in the building by the time it was finished it had become a complicated defensive system what you got to bear in mind about hen's wall as you see it now is that that is the final version you know ditch wall with its mile castles turrets and forts then a lateral Road then the great valum and then to the south of the valum of course there's the original Frontier line the road running from Coast to Coast with its forts every

7 or8 miles along it when the Romans landed in Britain they moved through the countryside constructing their crisscross network of Roads building their Forts and dominating the land the forts were mostly of a similar construction with Earth ramparts raised to surround the buildings Within These ramparts were crossed through wooden gate houses and had watchtowers at the corners set to guard the buildings that lay [Music] inside the layout of these buildings usually followed a set pattern at the front facing the enemy were the barracks and stables for the troops stationed here as well as common rooms

for the men there were separate rooms for the Centurion and other officers the barracks ranged down either side of a Central Road that led to the headquarter building it was here in a square building built around an open courtyard that the day-to-day activities of the fort were organized on the side of this building was a long narrow Hall with a des at one end this was the tribunal on which the commander stood to address his men behind this room were a series of smaller rooms the central one of which was usually a shrine and below

this Shrine was the fort strong room alongside the headquarters building was the Commander's house another Square building around an open courtyard and to the rear were more barracks and the workshops the bath house was usually found outside the fort this was the pattern repeated all over the country an outstanding example of a Roman paath house can be found on the wall itself at Chesters built right next to the river a complicated system of aqueduct brought water straight up into the bath house comprehensive excavations have revealed a system of boilers hot rooms warm rooms cold rooms

and even changing rooms which paint a complete picture of the Romans love for bathing it was a line of forts like this that was first used to Mark the northern Frontier of Roman occupation in Britain this line of forts two of which can still be seen at Corbridge and velanda were linked by a road which we now call the stain gate further south within Striking Distance of the wall were other Roman fortifications this is hard knock fort in the the Lake District and its construction follows the classic Roman pattern of building on a chill Winter's

day the evocative landscape still gives a glimpse of what it must have been like to be a part of the Garrison in these last outposts of the Empire like the wall and the network of PS the Roman roads which connected them were no mean engineering feet in themselves built of layers of stone upon smaller stone with a metal and cambered surface to let the water drain into the ditches at its side they provided the occupying troops with a quick means of getting from place to place forts were usually built 14 M or so apart as

this was reckoned to be a day's March along a road Road by this means the forces of occupation had both the communication structure and the power base to hold Europe the exact reasons why Haden decided to replace this well-tried and tested system of forts along a road which worked in so many countries with a wall is not clear there was a Crisis general crisis on when hadren became emperor I mean the circumstances were were very difficult his predecessor died on his way back from a a disastrous campaign in the East he was proclaimed Emperor by

the Army he was in command of in Syria and then there were rebellions all around all around the Frontiers including in Britain I mean as far as Britain is concerned the our source says the Britains could not be kept under Roman control so uh you ask a question what what sort of rebellion was it and where was it I think the vinder Landa tablets have shown some light on that for example there's one tablet which is obviously a report on Britain who been conscripted into the Roman army and they're described as the naked Britain and

they're described as as the Briton which is previously unknown word obviously meaning something like nasty all pathetic little Brits no love was lost between the Romans and these Northern tribes the branes saloi and nanti these warlike peoples living in the harsh climate of the north of Britain were never really defeated they may have been subdued and pacified but smoldering resentment directed at the invading Romans appears to have been quick to burst into Flame the fact that they kept a large army up here and you're talking of many thousands of men is to a certain extent

a sign that they failed in what they were trying to achieve up here because normally uh by moving an Army in and keeping people under control for a while they sort of civilized those people as they like to call it and they then gradually withdrew their forces as they did in Spain as they did in parts of North Africa and so on here they never succeeded now that is presumably due to the the nature of the people they were dealing with up here a document found at vindel close to the wall reveals how these Britain

appeared to the Romans it has been translated to read the Britain are unprotected by armor there are very many Cavalry the Cavalry do not use swords nor do the wret Britain take up fixed positions in order to throw [Music] javelins over the years a number of folk Legends have grown up which include mythical victories over the Romans by barbarians one of these is The Disappearance of the ninth Legion Rosemary sliff the great children's author used it as a basis for her famous Story the eagle of the ninth in the book she describes how the n

Legion marched out of its Barracks near York in the year 117 ad to deal with an uprising amongst the caledonians and was never heard of [Music] again the sobering facts are rather less flattering to the Barbarian tribes records from this time show that the ninth Legion moved from Lincoln to York when the new Barracks were finished there they did indeed then move further the north to do battle with the British tribes this was under the leadership of the then governor of Britain gas Julius agricol he is recorded as leading a campaign to civilize the northern

tribes during the first year of this campaign he failed to bring the caledonians to battle instead he was attacked himself in a night attack by the the tribesman he lost nearly onethird of his army including elements of the ninth Legion this is probably the incident that has passed into the folklore as the legend of the Lost [Music] Legion but like all great myths there is an element of Truth in the T discoveries over recent years have proved that the ninth Legion was actually destroyed in the line of of Duty but in Syria over 40 years

later in 161 ad if a whole Legion had been lost to the Caledonian tribes it certainly would have been cause for comment a Roman legion of that time consisted of nearly 6,000 [Music] men as well as the legionaries there were Cavalry auxiliaries and support troops offering all sorts of different trades and skills to keep the army on the move it would have been extremely rare for all these to have been in the same place at the same time nowadays it's thought that the ninth Legion was probably withdrawn from Britain shortly after 155 ad at that

time relations with the northern tribesmen and the British in general were becoming more settled [Music] they moved to another trouble spot through Holland and Germany where records have been discovered to do battle in the Middle East against the parthum it was during this campaign that they were indeed wiped out a long way from the mountains forests and valleys of Northern Britain [Music] nevertheless the legend of the destruction of the ninth Legion Echoes down through the Mists of time even today people standing on or near the wall have claim to have heard and seen the ghosts

of marching Roman soldiers the legend of the Lost legionaries continues to hold the popular imagination the general tone of popular myths like these suggest that the Romans were losing the war in this area this was not the case although in order to hold their own the Romans had had to make a series of incursions into Northern Britain hren seems to have simply decided that too many scarce resources were being deployed and that enough was enough he ordered that a line had to be drawn to Mark the Northwestern Frontier of Roman influence it was across the

wild Countryside north of the stain gate forts that the wall was built naturally they chose the more defensible parts of that landscape in the absence of a natural barrier such as a river hilltops and ridges were ideal it was hadrien himself on a visit to Britain in 120 ad who ordered the wall to be built right from coast to coast such a wall is built in spite of the fact that in this Central sector here there was never any threat from the north no no Army has ever come down the center uh in this area

it's it's all mes and bogs and swamps up there and the poor old Soldiers actually building the wall on the top must have known this you know what on Earth is the point of building a wall here and the Centurion will quietly say because you're told to do it and that's the only reason you need to know at first it was to have a purely military function the original wall was to be styled on the mound and fence constructions found in Germany and on other boundaries of the Roman Empire the age of Roman expansion had

come to a halt and the time of consolidation was upon them the wall was simply to mark this Northwestern limit of the Roman Empire to separate the Romans from The Barbarians in Germany he had a similar sort of Frontier and these were these were the first time Frontiers the Romans had up till that point up till hadren the Roman attitude was that their empire was going to go on expanding Without End so having having a frontier was was was was as as as below their dignity as as the idea of having walls around the city

of Rome they they didn't need it they they were Invincible hadrien Haden Chang this initially the orders were given to build a single wall in the East where Stone was plentiful it was to be all Stone 10 ft wide and 20 ft High in the west they were building it all from from Turf because there wasn't enough Limestone to make the mortar and so to start with they they had a Turf wall uh we know this because there's one section where they slightly rejigged it when they finally came to replace it in stone which may

have been a matter of 10 years it may have taken a bit longer um and they built it on a slightly different alignment so there's one stretch in Cumberland where the actual Turf wall which was the first sort of temporary structure was still there alongside most of the length of the wall on the Northern Barbarian side except where the local landscape made it unnecessary a ditch was to be dug this was to be about 9 ft deep and 27 ft wide the whole length of the wall was to be peppered with forets and [Music] turrets

the forets each with gates to the North and South were to have a accommodation for up to 32 troops and were to be built every Roman mile between each of these mile castles there would be two turrets from these the small Garrison stationed on the wall itself probably drawn from auxiliaries recruited into the Roman Legions from the British people themselves looked northwards into the Hostile Lands Beyond the Wall here they watched for signs of trouble and if it looked like it was going to be more than they could handle they would send urgent signals back

to their fellows in the forts on the stain gate reinforcements would then arrive hotot it seemed like a perfect solution to the problems of this turbulent Frontier and very soon men from every British Legion were hard at work on the wall it's a common misconception that the uh all the rotten jobs of building on the wall are probably done by the natives or the few Romans in charge LGE supervising but that's definitely not the case the the native Britain would be a very unreliable labor force and apart from anything else they weren't used to building

in stone at all they wouldn't have known what they were doing we've got plenty of evidence that the wall is actually built by the men the skilled Craftsman drawn from three Legions that were in Britain at the time the second Legion the 20th and the 6th and they they've left their building Stones all the way along the wall and we know they built it obviously uh a legionary gang is given a sector of maybe 100 yards or so of wall to build and the Centurion in charge once it's built normally signs his name off on

a special little tablet on the wall many of which we've found even before it was finished the plans were altered orders went out that the main fighting force was to be moved onto the wall itself presumably they were being attacked or it was taking too long for the regiments to get up if there was an emergency so they decided to put Fort actually on the wall in some cases across the wall in the end there were a total of 17 forts which are more or less on the wall there one or two such as vindel

Landa which were left although it's a mile away uh there are a few others which are not actually joined on physically to the wall but um in in many cases they actually um were arride the wall with with three gateways two at the side and one one on the North side Beyond the Wall probably for Cavalry so Cavalry could could could come out in strength uh simultaneously from the three gateways that was what you can call the third stage and it must have been absolutely mad name because they'd already built the wall and and turrets

and masts and some case had to be demolished and then they put the for there it was also ordered that the wall itself should be narrowed to 8 ft rather than 10 and that it should be extended in stone at each end to protect the flanks as long as they could get the [Music] limstone per perhaps this was an indication of heightened tension or increased threats you can still see the signs of this change of plans today in Parts a narrow wall sits on Broad foundations and there are turrets and mile castles that were built

to fit into the wider wall and had to be changed to fit into the new narrower gauge this radical change of plan has been dated to about 124 ad at at the same time work had begun on extra defenses to the immediate south of the wall this was the valum two Earth Ms Rising some 6 ft above ground level flanking a central ditch some 10 ft deep with a total width of about 120 ft this would have presented a formidable obstacle to any wouldbe attacker they build a wall with a great ditch in front of

it and they have all these mile castles and turrets along it and then uh a few years later they decide well we've got to put the regiments absolutely on the wall too so they build these forts like house T and they build this great earthwork to the South now there's no conceivable reason for that except to to to seal off the military zone and therefore the the implication is that the natives were creeping up at night and setting fire to Roman Roman installations um which suggests that their control over this this area the penines was

was not was not absolutely uh 100% under control this was the southern boundary of the military area a sort of Roman barbed wire as with the mile Castle Gates which they faced The valum Crossing points offered a measure of control over the North South traffic in the region rules about Contraband and weapons could be enforced and more importantly taxes could be collected it was the Customs barrier of its day it's not built for defense although he's got a of troops stationed along it there are more troops stationed to the north and a lot more troops

also to the south I mean a Roman Frontier is a frontier in depth the physical barrier uh well what he does by building that is Achieve something that he probably had in mind an excellent excellent Customs line um there are all sorts of gates in the wall and whoever is going to be Trading North and South has got to go through those Gates where of course the Roman soldiers can search them tax them do all sorts of things to them but why make changes to plans hardly begun things were not going well in this part

of the Roman world and the natives were getting restless they didn't like the Romans and they didn't like their [Applause] [Music] wall it was like a modernday Motorway cutting through the landscape severing longed footpaths and trade routes and even cutting off fields from farmsteads what happened after the wall is built and was the wall for example successful did it do the job hayen wanted it to do did it quiet the natives down did it actually separate this lot from that lot up there um the short answer is that from Roman historians we know absolutely nothing

um again we go back to this business they had to remain here so presumably there was always a problem but you know the natives on both sides weren't fools and although there are all these gateways leading through the wall Mann certainly where they might be taxed and so on um I'm sure a certain amount of Ingenuity would be used and they must have known of the odd corrupt Roman soldier and they could get through his mile castle if they went at the right time and also of course in the ultimate Resort if they really had

trouble in along the wall they could get into a ship and sail around it soon the British on both sides of the wall were plotting and planning against the Romans and their wall very soon the wall had become for the Romans a way to divide these allies from each other rather than keeping the enemy at Arms [Music] [Applause] left the military purpose had changed as well no longer the passive line of watchtowers if there was a threat from the northern tribes the Roman troops could mass under the excellent cover of the wall their enemies would

be un able to see this and could not foresee where the mighty Army would Sally Forth against them meanwhile the valon Protected Their Banks life on the wall was hard this was no fertile region of Roman influence there were no locals to adopt Roman ways such as the were in South there was no one who was prepared to come to this dark Wilderness region to build their Villas and Farms to share the administrative load the Garrison town and Supply base at Corbridge were the sole example of urbanization it's true that small settlements for retired legionaries

and traders made a brief appearance and civilian Villages grew up under the protection of the fors but this remained mainly a military area other documents found at velanda give more of an insight to this one written on thin oak bark and dated to a day in May around ad90 gives an account of the forces stationed at that Fort at that time there were 751 men led by six centurions assigned to the Fort although 470 were not actually there they were absent on other duties some were collecting the pay others were in London and some 300

and their Centurion were at Corbridge this was likely to be a group of new British recruits undergoing their basic training before taking their place in patrolling the [Music] [Music] war there was a further small group of 46 also with the leard the Region's Chief administrator who was either in York or London at the time that left only 270 or so actually holding the fort in case of local hostilities but they were lucky the same piece of Oak records that there were only 30 on the sick list and only some of these were suffering from wounds

this seems to point to minor local skirmishes rather than a major pitched battle in the area life in the forts was routine after a breakfast of porridge bread and fruit the normal day would be taken up with duties around the fort physical fitness and weapons training were important to keep the troops in Tip-Top condition and there were jobs around the PT itself that had to be [Music] done supplies of food and building materials had to be gathered the workshops had to be maned and there are even records of legionaries being detailed to clean the armor

of the commanding [Music] officer guard duties were not confined to the Fort but covered important local resources like mines and Mills or escorting trading Caravans the main duties however would probably have been patrolling either along the line of the wall or to the lands to the north the local British tribes were known to be hostile and ready to attack without warning hadren sent over we know from an inscription 3,000 legionaries from other from Spain and Germany to presumably to replace gaps in the ranks the Regiment of Tongans that were stationed here was a thousand strong

and for a few years it was down to 500 well that again as an example so I think there were pretty heavy losses hadrien had to do something the local British tribes were forbidden to gather in large numbers except at times and in places defined by treaty keeping an eye on them to be sure they were obeying this treaty would have been a major part of the duties for the soldiers stationed on and near the wall [Applause] Hadrian's Wall was finished and life had settled into a routine but again all this was to change Emperor

antonina Pi who replaced hadrien after his death ordered a fresh assault on the Northern Clans in 138 ad this was a highly successful campaign and pushed back the northern tribes a new wall the anonine wall was built further north from the fourth to the Clyde but they kept the bathouses inside these forts perhaps a sign of Greater hostilities in this region it also had more fors than hadrians which also perhaps goes to show they were experiencing greater Danger meanwhile back at Hadrian's Wall the evidence shows signs of evacuation the valum Mounds were breached and the

ditches filled in the garrisons in the forts were reduced to caretaker size even the gates at the mile castles were taken off their hinges the frontiers of Rome had been pushed further into the lands of The Barbarians but not for long 17 years later the brigantes revolted and within 6 months Hadrian's Wall had been reoccupied and its defenses hardened in the face of this new threat this pattern of events expansion followed by retreat was to be repeated at least once more in the following 20 years until the wall ceased to Be an Effective Frontier marker

for the once proud Empire one of the uh things you got to bear in mind about hen's wall is that it was a typical multi-million pound government job um you know it was built and completed in hen's lifetime few years later hen then dies what happens to this huge vast project short answer is it's it's abandoned it's boarded up and they go back into Scotland for a while under antoninus pi and for 10 odd years it must have just been moth Mall down here now as it happens they find they they don't want to stay

in Scotland for a variety of reasons and and the wall is then reoccupied and it it is more or less maintained with a few hiccups uh to the end of the Roman period of rule on all the forts there are signs of Destruction from time to time and rebuilding um but the destruction it's difficult to say whether that's destruction at enemy hands or whether it's destruction because the Roman soldiers had gone away and the natives had wered in and pinched what they could now the story is of decline records speak of the British tribes crossing

the wall in force about 180 ad it looks like they were able to burst through the center without opposition but the rest of the wall was untouched it was after this that Roman troops were pulled back towards Rome from Britain to help with Claudius albus's attempt to become emperor and the British tribes saw their chance there were great battles and much destruction [Music] [Applause] [Music] shortly after this a various lupus was sent from Rome to buy off these Northern tribes it seems that Roman money was still highly valued by the Britain for the next 200

years or so there was Peace On The Wall there are signs of refurbishment and rebuilding but by 400 ad the final Garrison had gone the wall was left deserted to the elements and the sky the slow process of Decay and destruction now began the Anglo-Saxons replaced the Romans and while a few of their objects have been found on the wall in the main these newcomers passed it by maybe they feared the might and power that had raised this set of marking Stones perhaps some descendants of the soldiers continued to live in the forts or their

Associated civilian settlements we cannot say they withdraw their uh Authority from Britain tell the Britain to look after themselves and you get chaos you get the breakdown of Law and Order and with the breakdown of Law and Order the breakdown of trade and with that you no way can you maintain this huge population up here people drift away a few people would stay on subsistence farming and so on and then then eventually you get the Anglo-Saxons the Vikings and all this lot coming in um and the W ceases to exist only at vindel Lander has

any post Roman inscription been found and that dates to about only 500 AD but the wall had not been forgotten and accounts by writers of the time after the Romans have persisted to the present day most notable is that of the venerable bead who in about 730 ad gave a good description of it he said it was then 8 ft wide and 12 ft high this account May well have resulted from his own observations as his Monastery at jaro lay close to the Eastern end of the wall but when it came to dating the wall

or to its purpose he depended more on local garble Tails he assigned a date some 250 years too late for its building and presented the erroneous view that it had been built to keep out the PS and the Scots this view has continued until the present [Music] day through the centuries that followed the wall became a quarry the stone one so hard from the ground by the hands of Roman legionaries was easy pickings for those building churches houses Farms or even simple dry stone walls people begin to settle in here again you then get the

enclosure movement and people create these fields they needed field boundaries Roman SES again wonderful Hadrian Wall look at all this Stone all the field walls around here are built out of the Stone from these Roman remains in the 18th century for example after Bonnie Prince Charlie had had been through creating Panic they decided to make sure that Communications were better so they built a new road a few years later between newcast and Carla when they got to the Adrian's wall area they said ah just what we need to make a road and nobody thought twice

about it Stones were carried miles and other Raiders came to plunder the once proud War King John in 121 sent men to dig for treasure they found only Stone local brigands in the 17th century used house TS as their base from which to range out over the local Countryside and the local Gentry when they wanted to decorate and Adorn their great houses with inscriptions and sculpture came to the wall to join in with the destruction it was 300 years after the excavations of King John that the age of serious observations began accounts from the 16th

century still prove a useful if not valuable record of the state of the wall at that time in fact it was not until the writings of the Reverend John Hodson in 1840 that the wall its Forts and valum were correctly attributed to hadrien and his time this was also the time of excavation along the wall site reports record the continuing Decline and disappear of this once proud Frontier marker all this was reversed mainly through the work of one man John Clayton of Chesters during his long life 1792 to 1890 he bought many miles of the

wall and several of its forts from the local landowners he then proceeded to dig up the walls turrets mile castles and parts of the forts at Chesters and haads he even built a museum into which he gathered his finds that still stands today and can be visited at Chester he set the pattern for the work that was to follow and which continues to this day it was during the years leading up to 1939 that many of the puzzles and problems about the wall its Associated buildings and defenses and overall purpose were solved nevertheless there are

still large areas where our knowledge is imperfect there remains much to be discovered about the wall and its true place in Roman history the remains that haven't yet been excavated and that must be about 98% of adrien's wall hasn't yet been excavated they're safe under the turf protected as well as they can be by ancient monuments legislation which means that even archaeologists uh if they want to look at these remains have to get special permission from the Secretary of State to excavate and examine what's under the ground so it's reasonably safe now what's left of

it large SES of the wall have now passed into the care of the nation some parts are looked after by English Heritage others by The National Trust while still more areas are cared for by charitable trusts now the main work is conservation rather than restoration and much of the wall itself has been Consolidated following the ravages of time and stone robbers the wall is photographed and drawn as it is before the stones are removed one by one they are numbered and placed to one side when the original Roman mortar is reached everything is cleaned and

washed then the stones are replaced in what is thought to have been their original position using modern mortar no attempt is made to restore the wall and no new stone is added at sites like vindel Landa there are reconstructions of Roman buildings this blend of old and new makes the site an ideal one to visit for tourists or School parties wishing to learn more about the life of Romans in Britain and on the wall this is a form of experimental archaeology because actually building something on the lines of of herrin's wall or some of these

Turf and Timber constructions and digging ditches to Roman specifications you get an idea of how many man hours it takes and you know how much water you need to mix the cement and all that kind of thing and then the other point is uh 15 20 years on you can see what sort of state of it's in whether these Turf uh ramparts or wooden Towers have started collapsing or not so you can get some idea of of of of that aspect of it too so as you stand at housesteads and Survey where once Roman soldiers

from across the Empire lived and worked under the shadow of the northern threat and as you stand at steel rig or on any of the cracks looking North into the same biting wind and feeling the same hail on your cheeks think of the men who worked on the wall belgians syrians and Moroccans pulled far from their homelands to guard this furthest flung part of a once proud and Powerful [Music] Empire remember too those archaeologists of the 19th century and beyond without their work Hadrian's Wall would be one of Britain's and the world's lost treasures [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Music] the pyramids have risen up out of the Sands of Egypt as a proud Testament to the nature of human achievement they are both monuments to that which endures and to that which Fades away their original grander has been sandblasted by time but these man-made mountains the product of many thousands of hours of sweat and blood now stand as fixed points in the North African landscape [Music] they are as natural a part of it as the desert PLS the mountains or the Great River [Music] Nile modern Egypt is very far removed from the

ancient nation of the pyramid Builders but still her pyram pids form a focus for national pride and identity they are a legacy which has been handed down to the Egyptians from ancestors who believed in multiple gods and whose government was imposed by ruling dynasties the great rulers of these dynasties were the Egyptian pharaohs the creators of the pyramids anyone who has visited Egypt will have visited the pyramids and the sheer size immediately fills you with such awe that you begin to want to find out more I think the pyramids and the Sphinx are the symbols

of Egyptian culture more than any other if you want to invoke the culture of ancient Egypt you stick a picture of the pyramids or the Sphinx on it and it automatically calls up all those associations One Thing Worth bearing in mind is up until the early part of this Century the great P at Giza was the tallest building ever created by mankind and still the sheer mass of stone it's most massive building ever created which is fairly amazing given it's one of the earliest buildings of mankind when the first pyramid was built Western Europe was

still shrouded in the mids of prehistory Stonehenge would not be built for another 500 years or [Music] more civilization grew in Egypt as it would Elsewhere on the banks of a river the Nile the great life provider in an otherwise hostile environment the Egyptians considered the river to be a God and that it was kunan the god of creation who caused the river to [Music] swell the south of Egypt was as arid as it is today but in the north where the land was low lay the wide Delta of the Nile which was cool and

Marshy after the river had flooded and receded the land would be left covered by mud washed down from the African interior the whole of the Nile Valley would then become fertile the Nile I think we can say was the lifeline for the ancient Egyptians it was the fact that the Nile flooded every year that meant that the ancient Egyptians had fertile land and this fertile land enabled them to pretty much every year grow a good enough crop to then feed the people and if it hadn't been for that annual flooding of the the Nile and

the new deposit of thick black Nile silt that was laid down each year then the ancient Egyptians just would not have been able to feed their population Egyptian Farmers could then grow crops such as wheat barley and fruit as well as Papyrus reads from which they made paper Papyrus was perhaps the single most important crop as far as the creation of a civilization was concerned the Egyptians had developed a written language by 3,000 BC the chief minister of the land under the Pharaoh was also the agriculture Minister which reveals what an important role crops played

in Egyptian life centuries later when Egypt was an Eastern province of the Roman Empire it was as an area of AR production that it was most valued it was cultivation of the land that led to other forms of cultivation the organization of food production allowed time and Manpower for the development of writing arts and building and in turn a highly Advanced [Music] civilization the Cradle of Egyptian civilization was founded on the Nile's regular flooding and ability to sustain life the Nile provides all kinds of things first of all it's the highway of Egypt Egypt itself

really is constrained to the this the narrow territory on either side of the Nile so therefore All Transport really could go along there it also meant that it also was the source of food fish and so on comes from there and the inundation the annual of the Nile was the whole basis of the agriculture of Egypt so without the Nile there would not have been an Egypt there still wouldn't be an Egypt but this culture which relied so much upon the life given by the Nile was also one which was very much preoccupied with [Music]

death the first pyramid arose in the time of zza who reigned as Pharaoh from 2,667 to 2,648 BC during this time the Nile had failed to flood for seven years resulting in a lengthy and severe famine perhaps it was this which caused zza to contemplate his own [Music] death he employed the architect imep to build him a morelan which would be incomparable to anything ever made by man so important did zza deem the task that he honored him hotep with the title of sculptor Builder and chief minister of the land motep is a fascinating figure

his memory survived down to the generations and by the GRE Roman period he became a God but his his Fame goes right back to Early times is the fact there was a statue Bas was found in the enclosure of the step pyramid it was a statue base of the king himself and normally such a statue base would perhaps have the king's name and members of his family but this has the name of Imhotep on it as well prior to this such large structures had been made with mud bricks but for this project himote used Stone

and stone was the material which would remain in favor from then on in [Music] [Applause] [Music] for [Music] to begin with a stone base was built 10 and 1/2 M high this was surmounted by three squares of diminishing size positioned symmetrically and forming steps on the four sides the base was then enlarged allowing for two additional steps these early pyramids are known as step pyramids and are clearly distinguished from the smooth later Pyramids by their giant stepped sides through the dynasties which followed the Egyptians built nearly a 100 pyramids in fact it would be true

to say that it became Egypt's biggest industry During the period that we refer to as the pyramid building era a considerable number of the ancient Egyptian people would have been put to working the pyramids so this of course means that these people are then given employment and this will then generate a whole uh a whole host of other Associated Industries such as feeding those people such as supplying the tools such as supplying work for people in the area around Aswan where they were coring the granite uh of course the supervisors the administrative officials then of

course once the pyramid is completed a fery cult developed around the pyramid site with Associated temples and we have a whole host of of uh warb priests purified priests lectal priests the priests who spoke the Spells Of The Daily rituals of the king the deceased King spirit and so there was a whole Associated industry that evolved around the pyramid building although pyramid building was continued for centuries it is the pyramids that were built during the time of the Old Kingdom on the site at Giza just a short distance from the Royal Palace at Memphis which

have caught the Eternal imagination it is no wonder that these Giants have earned a place among the seven wonders of the world kops who reigned from 2589 to 2566 BC commissioned a pyramid of such size and lender that it took 30 years to complete I think that at the time they were complete the pyramids would have been regarded with great Awe by people um who saw them first of all we've got to remember what else they can see in the built environment at that time it's it's not very impressive and these great um polished structures

coming off the Horizon would have seemed quite quite awesome the Greek historian Herodotus writing 2,000 years after the event claimed that the pyramids used the labor of around 100,000 workmen at any one time in all likelihood only about 8,000 would work in a shift any more men especially 92,000 more would have gotten each other's way Herodotus further claim that these men were slaves is equally untrue there are probably two basic groups of people involved in this first of all they were the skilled workmen who are working on the pyramids all the time they were the

skilled Masons artists um overseers all those sorts of people but then probably working on a seasonal basis were basically Farmers other laborers who were brought in from the point of view of dragging Stone up to the site so probably when they were otherwise unengaged when they were working on their fields the permanent staff would actually be doing the actual job of bringing everything together and building the pyramid whereas say the during the periods of the inundation when the fields are underwater farmers and their families will be brought in to drag the Stone close up to

the building site the building of a structure meant to protect the dead Pharaoh was an honor the pyramids were intended as resting places for the Pharaohs somewhere they were protected and preserved for the afterlife a measure of the honor of the task was that the workers were fed from the Royal stores mainly it would appear on onions often at times when food elsewhere was in very short supply they were provided with free accommodation as well as food but in return for this the work they undertook must have been arduous at best and dangerous at worst

these people are are doing work that is so unbelievably strenuous that is in a climate which at the best of times is fairly warm and they were living in mud Brick Housing very close together smelly it would have been pretty Grim I would have thought and yet these people are necessary they need to to be kept alive of course so these people were being given homes they were being wellfed but it must have been fairly dire pyramid building was really a turning point in the history of man because it was our first large scale application

of Technology it required organization of Manpower and correct application of tools and materials the first 10 years were taken up with preparation ation first the builders cleared the site of sand then leveled the stone to do this they had to rely on tools made of hard stone or of copper which had to be constantly sharpened or replaced creating work for copper Smiths when this task was completed they dug a tunnel running steeply down into the rock and a burial chamber was carved out deep underground this was the first of three such Chambers which would eventually

lie beneath or within the Finnish structure nearly all of the pyramids contained a Subterranean structure as well as an internal system although no two of these were the same much of the next 10 years were taken up with quaring and shaping measured blocks of limestone from a sight in the mtan Hills these blocks formed the great Foundation which covered Acres the transportation of the finished building blocks from the Quarry to the site at Giza depended as so much of Egyptian life did on the flood pattern of the Nile when the water level was at its

height the blocks were floated Downstream on barges they were then unloaded onto a specially constructed Landing wall a massive ramp was also built via which the great blocks could be hauled to their destination as the pyramid took shape with a number of different categories of stone built at going into the pyramids first of all there's the simple core blocks and those were quarried very close to the pyramids within a few hundred yards if possible next there was the much finer quality Limestone which was used for sheathing the outside of the pyramid and that was quarried

just across the river at a place called Tura um and that was floated over on barges during the flood Seasons there was also very some hard specialist Stone like granite bassal and so on these came from other parts of Egypt and here the Nile became absolutely fundamental because the quaries for granite down at Aswan oh a couple of hundred miles south of of the pyamid sites so the river was was the only way these great blocks of this very hard very prized Stone Granite were brought up to the pyramid Plateau kops Pyramid built in the

late 4 Dynasty contains 2, 3,000 blocks of stone some weighing as much as 60 tons some of the largest Stones were used to form the roofs of the burial [Music] Chambers the enormous Stone tomb known as a sarcophagus in which the body of the Pharaoh was to be laid was first lowered into the burial chamber the sarcophagus would have been far too large to carry through the complex small tunnels this was done by filling the chamber up with sand hauling the sarcophagus on top then removing the sand from the chamber which in turn gradually lowered

the tomb the sarcophagus was finally placed into a hole which was specially prepared for it in the floor of the burial chamber when this was done more sand was then piled in this time forming a mound on top of which the giant slabs of stone could be supported as they were set in position over the chamber the stones were arranged to lean into one another forming a roof shape so that when the sand was removed each took the weight of the opposing Stone the weight of the stones which would be built on top of this

roof would further push the stones together but the inverted V Arrangement would ensure that the burden was transferred to the surrounding stones of which there would be in abundance the visible structure above the ground the pyramid we can see is formed from a mast aror the first and second Dynasty kings were being buried in what we refer to as Master Bates and this is from the Arabic word for bench because what we have is a super structure which is is a mound basically so the earlier Kings of the early dynastic period were being buried in

Subterranean tombs with Mound style super structures and what we find is that the later tombs at Sakara are in fact stepped mud brick stepped superstructures so we don't have a leap out of the blue when in the third Dynasty zoza chose to create a stepped super structure to his burial what he did decide to do was to make it quite enormous and to create it out of stone the giant super structure of the pyramid had the same function as the Musta the visible outer Monument rather like the front of the pharaoh's house the Greek historian

Herodotus whose account of the pyramid is remarkable for its combination of hard research and shrewd speculation described its construction the pyramid was constructed in tiers or steps something like battlements and when the base was completed the remaining blocks were lifted up by a kind of crane made of short Timbers onto the first tier on this first tier there was another lifting crane which raised the blocks higher still it must be remembered that Herodotus was writing many centuries after the events he describes and it's possible he was inferring the use of the cranes from seeing similar

structures at the time perhaps serving to raise water from the Nile for purposes of irrigation but it's also possible that this is indeed how they lifted the great blocks of stone these machines could have been built of Timber from the great Cedars of Lebanon from which the Egyptians also built their boats Herodotus also describes how they completed the pyramid and Marvels at the costliness of it all the finishing off of the pyramid started at the top and worked downwards ending with the parts nearest the ground an inscription on the pyramid in Egyptian characters records the

amount spent on horseradish onion and heads of garlic and if I remember what The Interpreter who read me the inscription said the sum involved was 1,600 talant of if this is true how much must have been spent on the iron used on other food stuffs and on the clothes of the laborers I think we need to be quite careful about using Herodotus as account of the building of the pyramids first of all we need to consider that Herodotus is writing in the uh fifth century BC so thousands of years after the uh pyramids were actually

built secondly I think we need to think of Herodotus is broader agenda which is really to talk about the conflict between the culture of Greece and the culture of of the east in which Egypt obviously plays an important part so he isn't really trying to write an authoritative and reliable history he has broader agendas I think so I think we do have to take Herodotus with a pinch of salt we also have to remember that very likely he was being fed information by Egyptian priests who couldn't necessarily Converse in Greek and so Herodotus was perhaps

communicating them with them through an interpreter perhaps they considered uh that they they wouldn't for one moment tell Herodotus the mysteries of their ancient traditions and so perhaps they they chose to lead him up the Garden [Music] Path zoza step pyramid looks as if six mastas or layers of stone each one smaller than the last have simply been put on top of one another it was in 1837 that the discovery was made that the step pyramid consists of an accumulation of vertical steep buttress walls which slope inwards at an angle of 75° the butress walls

decrease in height in stages towards the outside of the pyramid giving the impression that it's made up of horizontally formed layers imotep had discovered a way to make tall structures safe and this stable design formed the basis for all pyramids but for all the work and all the profound significance that was afforded it on its Inception this pyramid like those which succeeded it was to be overtaken by time both Universal and personal its religious purpose as a morelan was forgotten and it was plundered by those without the ability or the inclination to quarry stone for

themselves and sand blown relentlessly into its sides by the Desert Winds have eroded it over the centuries the result is that the pyramid has been reduced by some 30 ft from its original height of 481 ft the pyramids of zoza and his successor saket are located at Sakara close to the capital of Memphis these are the only large pyramids close to the capital the rest of them having been erected well away from the city whilst the foundations of the pyramid Nation were laid in the third Dynasty by zza and his architect hotep it was the

fourth Dynasty founded by by the Pharaoh snfu which is renowned for the great Stone pyramids snfu is probably the greatest of all the pyramid Builders he actually built four pyramids during his lifetime one of which was abandoned Dury due to structural failure another one was actually used for his burial and one was a some kind of of cotap the other one is most interesting it started off Life as a step pyramid but was converted into a true pointy pyramid PID while it was under construction and that's the big difference between the third Dynasty and the

fourth Dynasty third Dynasty you have these stepped monuments the Ste pyramids in the fourth it's the true pyramids which Remain the standard form of pyramid right through to the end of pyramid building following on from him of course his son kops built the largest of all the pyramids kops pyramid stands today 20 M north of Memphis at Giza not only is this the largest pyramid it is still the largest stone building in the world no Cathedral not even St Peter's Basilica in Rome comes close to competing with it its structure is so sound that the

first archaeologists to explore it were able to blast out entrances with gunpowder secure in the knowledge that it would not collapse kops pyramid covers an area of 230 M Square Rises to a height of almost 150 M and is made up of about 6 and2 million tons of limestone as such it remains one of the seven wonders of the world originally the pyramid would have been clad with white Tia Limestone giving it a smooth appearance but unfortunately it's been completely stripped of its casing the pyramid contains a polar entrance in the North Face a feature

which is common to all the pyramids from the fourth Dynasty onwards by the fourth Dynasty the dead Pharaoh was regarded as a companion to the Sun God and the circumpolar stars were linked to the king's burial chamber by the direction of the entrance passage it would be wonderful to know what the people actually thought when they looked at a pyramid and if only we had their musings recorded their jottings what we have to assume is that a pyramid to the ancient Egyptians was symbolic of kingship was symbolic of the power of the king and very

importantly was an icon of the solar element to the religion because for the ancient Egyptians the flooding of the Nile coupled with the creative power of the sun meant that they could live when koop's son keine became Pharaoh in around 2566 BC he commissioned a pyramid of his own though containing a mere 60,000 cubic feet of stone and weighing only about 5, 310,000 tons it was not one to rival his fathers in scale the new pyramid had a far less complex internal structure too containing just one burial chamber however Kine was a pharaoh who awarded

himself unlimited power and was perhaps the first to give himself the title The Great God it would appear that the smaller size of the pyramid was related to its being built uphill from the first one with the aim that its Summit should equal it in altitude kefren built the second largest of all the pyramids So-Cal second Pyramid of Giza which although smaller in volume and actual height to his father's it actually looks higher when you're actually on site at geiz it's on Higher Ground situated 500 ft Southwest of kops pyramid krons is positioned so that

the diagonals of the two lie along the same straight line the white Tia Limestone casing has remained intact on the upper part of the pyramid revealing how closely this casing fitted together and how smooth the entire pyramid must have been though in terms of size this pyramid may have been less impressive than its predecessor at 140 M it was given a protector which is the only ancient monument in Egypt to rival the pyramids this Monument immediately strikes the onlooker with a and in its sheer recognizability the Great Sphinx [Music] there are a lot of theories

about the purpose of the Sphinx uh my own is that it's some kind of boundary marker for the Giza Plateau it's something which sets it apart as a sort of sacred area but it's important to remember that the Egyptians themselves forget what it's for so uh after the Old Kingdom um in in the 18th Dynasty 14400 years after it was built it's thought to be a representation of the god hakus Horus of the Horizon and later on Herodotus is told something completely different as well so uh it's important to remember that it is something which

slips out of popular memory the Sphinx like much of Egyptian Antiquity does remain a mystery to us and we can only speculate as to why kefren chose chose to create out of this natural Limestone desert in escarpment an incredible Monument a Lon formed body with the human head with the nemes headdress and it's often suggested that this is a guardian figure as it's alongside his Valley temple in Arabic this giant sculpture is known as Abu El H the father of Terror representing a creature with the body of a lion but the face of a human

it seems to combine the most distinctive attributes of both the impassive face suggests an enigmatic intelligence the body exudes power and natural Authority some believe the face to be that of keine himself set to watch over his last resting place before his journey to the next world as to the theory that it's a portrait of krine it's difficult but it does seem to be that a pharaoh is being shown because he is wearing the so-called nemes headcloth which is generally a indicator of fonic status so whichever whoever is being represented here he he is in

in some some way anyway a pharaoh kean's son my serinus also erected a pyramid when he ascended to power though small smaller again covering only about half the area occupied by that of kops this pyramid is considered by many to be the finest of those at Giza my Serena's pyramid is interesting because it's half of its casing ston are actually Granite rather than Limestone and as far as one one can look at the detail of the building it's more finely built the sort of there are less rough edges if you like but it also really

marks the end of the Great Pyramid of period of pyramid building subsequent pyramids are far less wellb built and nowadays look little more than piles of rubble in quite a few cases so it's on size M Serena's pyramid is much smaller than the previous two but yeah the actual effort expended on various elements of it is probably equal to them although the Pharaohs continued to build pyramids all the great pyramids were built in in a space of just 100 years during the fourth Dynasty there was a distinct downwards turn in standards and size in the

following fifth Dynasty but however impressive the outsides of the pyramids were it was what they were to contain which most concerned those who first commissioned them for these tombs of such massive volume and weight were made to contain just a single body that of the Pharaoh [Music] ancient Egyptians worshiped many gods there were nine Chief gods among them n the goddess of the sky gbb the god of the Earth tefnut the goddess of water and Rah the Sun God but even he was rivaled in prominence by Osiris the god of the dead he was supposed

to have been murdered by the evil God Seth his brother oaris having been killed by his wicked brother Seth and the killing involved being cut up into a number of pieces oar's sister who was also his consort or wife Isis very much associated with magic and healing in Egyptian religion she then makes this Grand pilgrimage to gather together the parts of Azar's body and then create a whole by embarking Haring and mummifying the body the kingdom of ayus it was taught lay over the horizon to the west and under the Earth it was in this

place that the ordinary Egyptian citizen would hope his Spirit would reside after death the Pharaoh however was believed to be divine in fact he was believed to be Horus The God Who had brought ayus back to life and who had killed the evil Seth for him eternity lay According to some in ruling over the kingdom of ayus and according to others in the heavens with Rah the Sun God but like aerus it also lay in mumification mumification was intended to preserve the body forever the reasoning behind this seems to be connected with a view that

for the spirit to survive intact in the afterworld the body had to remain intact on Earth as well as a conduit if you like the origins of the idea that you needed to do this to a body seems to go back to what happened to bodies in prehistoric times when they were interred in the hot sand of Egypt the hot sand naturally desiccates dries out the bodies and one suspects that that when the Egyptians noticed that after they started building proper tombs and putting the bodies in Chambers rather than in the sand they started to

Decay there may have been some thought hang on if of nature is making is is drying out these bodies and preserving them does that mean there is something important about that drying out for the [Music] afterlife all wealthy Egyptians were mummified and if they were not wealthy then they were buried naked on their sides facing the west and sand would dry the body preserving it as effectively the body of the Pharaoh was laid out on a boat beneath a canopy with a lamp burning in its bow two professional mourners representing Isis and nephus would stand

in attendance then the body would be taken down the Nile to the final resting place at Giza which he himself had commissioned the Great River whose nourishing floods had sustained his life and provided the means by which the stones of his morum had been transported from the quaries now served him one more time the short Journey up the Nile represented the journey that the Pharaoh would shortly make to Heaven eventually the boat in which this journey was taken would be dismantled and buried by the Mory Temple at at the base of the pyramid facing west

it would wait to take the Pharaoh on his final voyage to the kingdom of azaris the next 70 days would be taken up with mummification by priests of the Guild of imers the remains were then washed and infused with Natron and then each part was separately bandaged the ancient Egyptians used this naturally occurring salt Natron to dry out the body artificially and then wrapped it in L bandaging and used other various ingredients to create a preserved body the entrails the heart liver stomach and intestines were kept in four canopic jars on which were carved the

heads of the Gods thought to protect these organs after the mummy had been laying in a wooden coffin the priests performed a religious ceremony called the Sak they believed that this enabled the pharaoh's car his Spirit to re-enter the mummified [Music] body like the Vikings many centuries later the Egyptians believed in supplying the dead for their Journey to the new world the burial ch Chambers in the pyramids were provided with jewelry incense and clothes food or even Stone representations of food were often left the Pharaoh would need sustenance for his journey in fact thereafter priests

would regularly leave offerings of food at the pyramid to provide for the pharaoh's car the Egyptians have quite a complex set of beliefs about the nature of the body and the spirit first of all the personality is split into multiple parts so it's very different from this Western idea of the body being the the corporeal element and the spirit being just one thing so for instance uh not only do you have the the bar and the car which are the ones that people are most familiar with the Egyptians also have other spiritual components such as

the the ark which is the transfigured part of the personality when uh it attains Union with Osirus uh the CH the Shadow and the name there there are many many other parts of it the priest's next ceremony was that of opening the mouth these involved statues of the Pharaoh sculpted by the Royal sculptors on lines laid down in the official book of the artist their creation as well as their final use was a matter of religion when the statue was completed the name of the Pharaoh was inscribed on its base and at this point it

was believed to become the Pharaoh himself the ceremony for which they were produced again followed the myth of ayis as each statue is touched on the mouth by a priest taking on the role which they believe to have been played by Horus so the pharaoh's car enters it giving his Spirit multiple resting places it was only on completion of this ceremony that the the Pharaoh's coffin was carried through a tunnel into the depths of the pyramid where the burial chamber had been prepared lowed into the sarcophagus covered by the great Stone lid which was then

sealed the mummified remains were left to take their place in eternity some believed that the Pharaoh ascended to heaven and to Rah but others maintained that as the Pharaoh had been Horus on Earth in heaven he became a zarus a new Horus a new Pharaoh would rule over The Mortals on Earth while the old Pharaoh azaris would guard them from his fortified tomb we know that from as early as the ancient Egyptians were constructing what we called tombs they were using security measures to try and keep the tomb robbers out but ultimately the fortification proved

inadequate not a single one of the pyramids remained completely unpl Ander and the evidence seems to suggest that they were plundered pretty soon after the burials were actually deposited in there plundering the pyramids has gone on uh into recorded history so so for instance in medieval times the cffs who were ruling Egypt blew up parts of the pyramids because they believed they were filled with gold and then in the 19th century when European collectors start getting very interested in Egyptian monuments that's when large scale uh looting goes on the Egyptians continued to build pyramids to

house their Pharaoh's sacred remains as well as complex necropoli such as those at Memphis D thieves and most famously in the Valley of the [Music] Kings but none of these would rival the pyramids at Giza for scale or endurance all of these structures were filt with one purpose in mind to cheat the passage of time and defeat death as aaras had yet if the almighty pharaohs failed to cheat death they did in their commissioning of the pyramids at least leave the Legacy the pyramids probably more so than any other Monument of the past seem to

have gripped the human imagination they were a tourist attraction in even in ancient Egyptian times and of course the Pharaohs elves would have absolutely welcomed this because the whole idea in Egyptian belief was if your name survived on the lips of the living you survive for eternity people I think are still fascinated by the pyramids because they are so enormous and because they are so old and people are still studying these structures because we actually know so little about them there is still so much to learn about the pyramids and that I think is why

people continue to be mystified by them or inspired by them and very importantly are still studying and researching those pyramids but the pyramids it must be remembered were emphatically not the work of just one man there were astronomers Architects Engineers not to mention the legions of laborers who were needed to to complete each massive project and it is perhaps these people as much as their ruler who live on to some extent in the weathered ravaged remains of the Great Pyramids it is perhaps their car which inhabits the stone [Music] [Applause] [Music] even today Rome is

a city which fascinates US with its mixture of the sophisticated and the Romantic the sacred and the profane [Music] This Modern bustling city is also the place where the Treasures of the Renaissance stand side by side with the Stark edifices of musolin Italy and in amongst it all are reminders of the great civilization which stood on the same Seven Hills the beginnings of that Civilization are shrouded in legend in the twin brothers Romulus and Remis who were nursed by Wolves but who grew up to found the great City in 753 BC archaeologists now believe that

Rome began around 3,000 years ago as a collection of wooden huts on Seven Hills beside the river tyer but however humble its Origins may have been the city which developed would become over the following 1,000 years so sophisticated in its social structures and so effective in its political and legal ordering that it would take over the known world and prove the basis of the culture which the West still calls its own in a very real sense when we look at the treasures of ancient Rome we are looking into our own beginnings [Music] you think of

all the things we've got from Roman culture its language Latin uh its law um tremendous amount of our uh artistic and Architectural Heritage um is ultimately derived from the Roman world and of course ancient Rome as the heart of that ancient world is um potentially The Source uh for everything that we understand to be classical [Music] civilization Romulus so The Story Goes founded the city on the Palatine Hill in 753 BC a small village in a not very prepossessing location with its Marketplace on marshy ground between the Palatine and the capitaline hills grew to be

the birthplace of of modern civilization it was not a quick nor an easy transition and the Marshal History of Rome is marked at its outset by many defeats at the hands of the other Italian tribes of the time but their persistence paid off and by the thir Century BC the Romans had conquered most of Italy this brought them into conflict with the [Music] Greeks it was the Conquering of the more advanced people that propelled the Romans into becoming great cultural as well as great martial imperialists the Arts and Sciences of Greece flowed into Rome medicine

astronomy literature rhetoric and of course [Music] architecture the Romans had the largest Empire that um the Western world has really ever known in terms of the physical extent of it and in the sense that they conquered the whole of the the world in terms of peoples and places they also uh conquered nature to some extent you think about Roman roads Roman aqueducts Roman Harbors they were changing the shape of the whole of the the landscape cutting roads through mountains making tunnels cuttings taking water over land so therefore making Rivers making solid structures in the sea

but you can also see it if you actually look at the city of Rome itself because although Rome started off as a city on seven famous Hills but also perhaps another uh three or four not all of these Hills are now anything like the shape they were when the Romans began particularly something like the Palatine Hill has been leveled on the top it's been extended on the sides the building of di mission's Palace for example involved cutting Away part of the hill to create the sunken Stadium but also building up and terracing out towards the

Forum and the sort of views and panoramas that we get today are largely a result of Roman reshaping the whole Palatine Hill the view from the Palatine Hill is perhaps the best preserved of its features a feature of course which owes its existence to no human architect [Music] in the distance the original occupants of the royal palaces would have been able to see the temple of Jupiter on the capitaline hill and in the valley below they would have seen the Roman [Music] Forum well the Forum uh actually is an origin simply an open space in

the valley bottom between um three of the major Hills of Rome it is a sort of rather marshy inlet from the Tyber which separates the Palatine Hill the capitaline hill and the quirinal hill and as such it it was a sort of communal meeting place it parts of it on the fringes seem to been used as Cemetery but the the main sort of central part gradually grew up um as a Marketplace and as um a political Center the excavations which have been carried out there it's the one area in Rome which has actually been consciously

excavated for archaeological purposes it was excavated towards the end of the last century between about 1880 and 1910 um there were concerted efforts to actually expose the Roman forum and what we have on the ground now in fact as as ever with the rest of uh Rome is its Final Phase rather than its [Music] Beginnings the remains of this site have been excavated and have stood the test of time whereas the Palatine has not although the Forum was founded with Rome in the 8th Century BC those ruins which can be seen on the site are

like those of the Palatine mostly of a much later date for instance what remains of the Temple of Saturn The God Who was father to Jupiter the chief Roman God he whose Temple sat on the capitaline Hill are six ionic pillars which date from its rebuilding in about 370 [Music] ad there is nothing left of the original which was built in 497 BC [Music] likewise the Temple of Vester the goddess of the halfth was first built in the 6th Century BC as no more than a wooden Hut but the remains we can see here date

from the 3r century ad it was here that the great symbol of Rome's endurance was tended the Eternal Flame its maintenance was entrusted to the Vestal Priestess and the sacredness of their vacation was such that each was expected to swear an oath of Chastity and to keep it on pain of being buried alive the remains of their house can also be seen although again the traces of this building dating from after 64 ad hide those of the much more ancient building which would have sheltered the first of the Vestal virgins Beyond this can be seen

the most famous of the the treasures of ancient Rome and this is no solemn place of worship dedicated to a god or deified man nor is it an arch erected to celebrate some Triumph by a great emperor it is a monument to the Romans ability to enjoy themselves and enjoy themselves in ways which would turn the stomachs of most people today [Music] [Applause] [Music] commissioned in 72 ad as the flavian amphitheater and built in the grounds of Nero's Golden Palace the Coliseum was completed in the reign of Titus in 80 ad that any of it

remains is a wonder that despite being used as a quarry throughout the Rena period it is still a mighty structure is a miracle [Music] it is oval in shape some 200 M long and 150 M wide it was made of concrete and Stone half a million tons of it more than the weight of the Empire State Building and faced originally with marble the Coliseum required 100,000 cubic M of travertine Limestone that comes from about 17 kilm to the northeast of Rome from place called tiv and this would have been brought by water down the ano

and into the tyer and then landed uh on the docks perhaps the other side of the Palatine it then had to be brought by cart through the streets and that's just one of the many materials that went into building the Coliseum the Coliseum consists of several stories of arched entrances and windows enclosing an arena which is some 75 M by 50 and would have contained seating for 50,000 Spectators the seats were carefully numbered and were allocated according to rank Senators sat in the first tier citizens in the second the common men in the third and

women who were not members of important families had to share the fourth tier with the men whose job it was to hold in place the giant awning which once covered the arena protecting The Spectators from the sun when Titus dedicated the coliseum in 81 ad he celebrated by paying for entertainment 9,000 animals 5,000 of them Wild species such as lions bears tigers and even rhinoceroses were slaughtered in gladiatorial contests The Coliseum is often in popular view um merely a place for for rather bloodthirsty entertainment but it is a it is important to remember that um

uh the very uh organization of these gladiatorial shows um animal wild animal hunts had a very serious religious um function the origins go back into the Republican period in Rome um gladiatorial games were held on the occasion of um important funerals or funerals of important men and uh continued throughout the the rest of the Imperial period to be held um especially on the occasion of um Imperial uh funerals private individuals could if they were very wealthy also organize um gladiatorial Gaines as part of uh funeral celebrations but um the Coliseum would be used principally for

one major Festival in December which was the point at which the magistrates of the city changed over it's the whole yearly cycle of um political and uh religious existence in the city that um the incoming magistrates would pay for a set of games in the Coliseum and the ritual itself uh was thought to be both um hardening as it were it was meant to it was a shocking experience to see um people killed but it was meant to be bound up with the idea that Roman society as a whole required that sort of ability to

confront death an interesting and surprising detail of these games is that they seem to have involved female Gladiators when the Roman writer Marshall wrote a book celebrating the games he noted that Noble tradition tells how Hercules slew the lion in The wastes of the Nan Valley let the ancient tale be reduced to silence after your show Caesar we can say that we have seen such Deeds performed by a woman's [Music] hand there is however no evidence that the Coliseum was ever the venue for the sacrifice of Christians to the Lions today the underground passages where

animals were caged are exposed to the air originally a wooden floor would have Lain over these which would have been covered with sand to resemble Solid Ground and to soak up the blood there is a saying that when the Coliseum Falls then so will Rome despite the ravages of time and of lutters for its marble the great Amphitheater still gives an impression of solidity and of endurance but perhaps the old saying is behind the several attempts one still being contemplated today to restore it to its ancient Glory most of what remains on the Palatine Hill

dates from much later than the ancient period indeed today the 16th century Villa of the farasy family with its fountains Grotto and Gardens must be negotiated before the older ruins can be reached but even these date from the later Republic or early Empire rather than from the earlier time before 9 BC when Rome suffered the tyranny of [Music] Kings the Palatine Hill was the site of Imperial residences indeed the word Palace is derived from it however there is little left and nothing which could be called palatial time has not been merciful to the buildings which

once housed the most powerful men in the world the earliest traces of settlement on the site of Rome um have been found on the Palatine Hill which the Romans themselves thought of as being the initial focus of settlement the palatin hill is the one closest to the river it's very uh naturally defensible and up there on the top excavations uh have found the post holes of a series of Huts dating from the 9th to the 8th Century BC um the Huts would have been quite large they're um they're about 8 m by 4 M um

so a size of Hall um walled with wood and bottle and orb um and thatched with uh Reeds but the Romans themselves interestingly in their later tradition they actually preserved one of these Huts as a monument to the what they saw as the original settlement on the Palatine that even in the 4th Century ad tourists to Rome could go and see um The Hut of Romulus as they called it ironically it's not the house of a man which has survived best but that of a woman the Kaza delivia or the house of Livia named after

the infamous and Powerful wife of Rome's first emperor in the 1 Century BC lies just behind the unexcavated Palace of her son Tiberius who became the second emperor in Roman society women had very few rights and were considered to be second class citizens even women of Imperial birth were not officially allowed much responsibility but un officially they sometimes wielded an influence which was the next best thing to direct power it was a feature of a time to marry for status to marry people from a right background uh to marry to give you a sort of

Alliance but uh these alliances shifted it's interesting to see how Caesar marries and ven remarries there's that extraordinary but very telling moment when he divorces pompea because of her involvement in a scandal over the bonadea a scandal with Clodius and says Caesar's wife should be above suspicion that seems very strange to us wouldn't have seemed at all strange in the Roman world where reputation mattered so [Music] much Olivia was thought to have been a schemer and to have employed guile cunning and even poison in her attempts to secure the future of her son her husband

or ERS who ruled for 41 years from 27 BC to 14 ad was known for his skill as an administrator and for his peaceful tenure which saw the beginning of the paxar Mana in which the Roman Empire was at its most secure and which lasted for several decades at the end of the 1 Century BC and the beginning of the 1 Century ad real change came about in the transition from Republic to Empire Augustus himself following a long period remember of Civil War when very little building was brought to fruition instigated a whole new program

of Civic reconstruction he was rebuilding the state morally politically but also physically very famous quote from the biographer suetonius that Augustus had boasted he found Rome a city of brick that is mud brick and left at a city of marble he was very consciously rebuilding a city to fit the image of the capital of the [Music] world the Jewish Egyptian historian Pho commented in 38 ad that the whole human race would have been destroyed had it not been for one man Augustus who ended Wars set every city at Liberty civilized all unfriendly Savage tribes and

safeguarded peace but as tacitus pointed out in 110 ad he also slowly eroded the power of the Senate bringing to the role of Emperor the powers of an autocrat this laid the path for the tyrannis which were to follow [Music] him everybody had an agenda Pomp's agenda was to get land for his troops Caesar's agenda was to try and get a decent Province rather than the woods and Glens of Italy and cis's agenda was to get a command get a glory to establish himself as a Frontline figure in in Rome the Senate's agenda or their

opponents in the Senate's agenda was to stop them there was this Perpetual struggle to prevent any individual from getting to be Augustus was also a great patron of the Arts Virgil Horus and ID all flourished under his patronage although the last of these eventually fell from favor and was finally exiled Virgil's Great Masterpiece the anid was dedicated to the Emperor who like the poem's hero anas was said to be descended from the goddess Venus enas was also the founder of the Roman people and Virgil intended his characterization to embody the qualities of purposefulness and service

which he knew Augustus valued the other change that Augustus brought out was that after his Reign only the Emperors were able to build temples or other major public structures if you think about the famous buildings they are the Forum of Augustus The Forum of traan the BS of carala all of these major buildings are named after to the Emperors or the temples their rebuilding the Temple of cast and Pollock Temple of antoninus and FAA the pantheon itself are all buildings built by for the Emperors no other individual leaves his name on a building after the

time of Augustus [Music] it was a very rigid career structure at Rome you did take the offices at particular ages or assume after those particular ages as as you could but a lot of the game was I suppose to use those offices and then the general ships and the governor ships that came after them to win as much Fame as much Glory as possible it's I suppose almost a sort of Fame equivalent of a free market economy almost the assumption that in a free market economy people will try and get as much money as possible

will try and maximize their own profit and the state will benefit at Rome you try to get as much Fame and Glory along the way as you as you could and the state would benefit from that as well the Forum was the focus uh of uh not only most um Civic aspirations in the city of Rome itself but it also um pretty soon reflected Imperial Ambitions as well what we see now is largely product of one man's Ambitions in particular and that's Julius Caesar in the middle of the 1 Century BC and his successor the

uh first Roman Emperor Augustus because in typical Roman way uh Power was expressed in terms of building public building and they took over Rome's political Center The Forum and transformed it into their a monument to their own power the great Basilica Julia was built the porticus of gas and Lucius uh what we call the Bazil Kali Amelia um the um Temple of Castor and Pollock uh was uh um rebuilt and um even more importantly under Augustus um a great Temple of uh deified Julia Caesar uh his own adoptive father uh was set up at one

end of The Forum um matched by A Great temple of Imperial Harmony at the opposite end of The Forum uh a new Senate House was built uh a new orus platform was built um it became essentially a sort of dynastic Monument to the Roman emperors and the basis on which they claimed power augustus's stepson Tiberius became emperor in ad14 and was by all accounts equally as effective as Chief administrator His Image was fatally Tarn however by the fact that he misused the power which Augustus had brought to the position of emperor in pursuit of more

selfish ends most sensationally he's believed to have indulged in bizarre lusts and habituated a holiday Palace on the island of Capri which became notorious as a sight for his sexual experimentation this along with his awkward and pimply appearance and his propensity for drunkenness did not make him popular and his death in 37 ad was greeted by cries of fro Tiberius in the [Music] Tyber it was during his Reign that in the Roman province of Judea the leader of the Jewish cult Joshua Ben Joseph was executed by [Music] crucifixion tiberious probably never heard of The Man

Called Jesus the Christ in Greek and even if he had would not have imagined that eventually his cult would become the dominant religion of the Roman people after the great Jupiter and Neptune and all the other pagan gods had begun to be [Music] forgotten the sight of his mother's house is relatively small and simple next to the sprawling magnificence of the Palace of demission which dates from the end of the first century ad demission was perhaps the cruelest of Rome's tyrannical Emperors and was responsible for the most bloody of the persecutions of the Christians it

is perhaps apt that he came to one of the bloodiest ends to befall a Roman emperor when he was murdered by an ex-slave in 96 ad during the last uh 3 centuries BC the The Forum gradually got more and more architecturally enhanced as I say that um as Rome took over the rest of the Mediterranean in particular the Eastern Mediterranean and all the Greek cities they imported back to Rome the models that they could see out there this marvelous public architecture in stone and the Roman Forum was one of the major focuses uh of um

this new imported architecture and they built great basilicas and puses and the temples got rebuilt and everything got ever more uh luxury uh architecture all of these sacred buildings lie along what was called the Via Sacra nearby on the Forum was the site of the Temple of Castor and Pollock the twin Gods credited with fighting on the side of the Romans in their battles against the Latins in the 5th Century BC the temple was dedicated to them in the 5th Century BC but the six Corinthian columns which remain are from 6 ad The Splendid in

tablature which surmounts it is however an addition dating from the time of the mighty Augustus further along the road the much younger Temple of Julius Caesar has fared even less well the temple where the Mortal remains of the famous dictator were brought where Rome's first first great conqueror and Empire Builder was cremated where he whose avowed aim was to outshine Alexander the Great was deified by his successor Augustus is now no more than Rubble the thing to remember particularly about Rome is that by the end of the 1st Century BC with the first Emperor Augustus

it was the largest city in the ancient world uh it had well over a million people perhaps very very more a million people um it was at least twice the size of its nearest rival um this made it a very special place and it makes us it makes it a very remarkable archaeological site um it's a place where the RO the the Emperors uh essentially expressed every ambition they ever had about their own power and about the power of the Roman [Music] Empire later Temple remained places of worship long after the old gods and deified

Emperors to which they were first dedicated had been forgotten or ignored on the Via Sacra stands the Temple of the deified Antonius pasus and Fatina which dates from 141 ad but which since the 11th century has been a consecrated church the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda only the porch and freeze of the original Temple remain if a building could find another use and most notably as a church it stood a stronger chance of survival and a number of very important Roman buildings have been protected in this [Music] way another such in the Forum is

the curier which stands much as it was rebuilt in 283 ad this was originally the meeting place of the Roman senate but owes its remarkably good condition to its conversion to use as a place of Christian worship the senators were a body whose power and influence were linked to the magnanimity of whoever was Emperor under trun for instance they were valued and used as counselors and are safeguards for the public good but in the time of Caligula Tiberius is disastrous successor they were no more than puppets it is said that Caligula even added his favorite

horse to their number Christianity became the dominant religion of the Romans only after it was adopted by an emperor in the 4th Century that Emperor was Constantine it may be that constant 's worship of Christ was merely a development of his earlier Devotion to The Cult of the Sun God but Legend has it that before the battle he fought against maxentius over the milvan bridge in 312 ad he had a dream in which he saw the sign of [Music] Christ the battle he subsequently fought was successful and maxentius was forced to abandon his position and

was driven into the river Tyber whatever the manner of his conversion it had real consequences for the Christians of the Roman Empire who were recovering from one of the cruelest of their persecutions under [Music] Dian the Basilica of Constantine dominates the east of the Forum this massive structure begun by maxentius in about 306 ad but finished by Constantine was amongst the last great buildings to be constructed in Imperial Rome the Nave is thought to have reached a height of 40 m a whole new series of forums were built subsequently the old Roman Forum was not

the only one for the hold of the later History of Rome um and they all of them in their way took their model from the uh original Forum these are the ones where um all the great ceremonies of state would take place um Imperial funerals were were staged you name it any sort of major expression of uh political and social um and religious activity in Rome still was focused predominantly um or took place by way of the Forum as the Emperors conquered more territories the the the great triumphal procession for instance which started on um

beside the Tyber down on the plain of the field of Mars uh the God of War proceeded up into the forum out of the Forum and then back into the forum on its way up to the capitaline hill The Forum was integral to um to later Roman ceremony as much as it had been in the uh in the earliest days uh but it was transformed architecturally into an expression of uh the the great might of the Roman Empire [Music] looking down on the Forum from the Palatine Hill as the Imperial family would have done its

East entrance is marked by the Arch of Titus Titus was Emperor for Just 2 years and was a man of dangerous charm and like tiberious Nero before him of strange lusts like Tiberius but unlike Nero he also seems to have been a good administrator and a skilled Soldier this latter quality is celebrated in his arch this was originally erected in 81 ad to celebrate the capitulation of Jerusalem to Imperial forces and is famous for its two reliefs which inaugurated a type of illustration new to Roman sculpture on one side can be seen Titus riding in

his triumphant [Music] Chariot on the other another part of the triumphal procession carries the booty off from the Temple of Jerusalem looking outside the Forum the arch of Constantine can be [Music] seen in marked contrast to the Arch of Titus this one symbolizes the transition of Rome from Pagan stronghold to center of Christianity it was commissioned by the senate in honor of the first Christian emperor [Music] it's covered by old reliefs cul from older edifices monuments to hrin traan and Marcus aelius the freezes which date from Constantine's own time are feeble by [Music] comparison the

Empire by this time was changing and Rome's days as ruler of the world numbered [Music] [Music] one of the greatest desecrations ever committed by a 20th century politician against an ancient Legacy must have been that committed by musolini against the fory imperiali this site contained the remains of forums built outside the main Forum after the time of Julius Caesar as the expansion of the Empire called for for more administrative activity at its Center these were covered by buildings in the Renaissance but uncovered again in 1924 when musolini cleared the area in preparation for a wide

avenue the avenue would have given him the opportunity to hold military parades which could employ the impressive Coliseum as a backdrop he hoped no doubt that this would imply that the Empire that he hoped to establish was one which would reflect that of Italy's ancient ancestor ERS musolini paved over much of the forums and proceeded with the building of his Avenue now a main route through the city and never free of traffic Chief among the surviving Treasures is Tran's column which holds a set of narrative reliefs spiraling up it these magnificent illustrations tell the story

of Rome's Wars against and eventual victory over daia now modern Romania in 106 ad they're famed for the realism of their detail trun who ruled from 98 to 117 ad was considered one of the good Emperors and was famous for getting on well with his senators and for the diplomacy he showed in all his dealings but the best preserved of the ancient Treasures to be found in Rome lies a little way off from The Forum the Palatine Hill and the Coliseum nestling and the narrow streets around the Piaza de la Rotonda the pantheon is like

a giant tree trunk which betrays its age through its exposed [Music] Rings originally this location would have been the camp as marous and would have been equally as crowded with offices public BS and temples entering its doed interior would have been like stepping from chaos into Serenity this awesome building spans the centuries not as a dead Relic but as a living building constantly maintained constantly [Music] growing it was built as a pagan Temple by the emperor hadrien in 126 ad perhaps not surprised in L because it is the best preserved all Roman buildings anywhere in

the Roman world the pantheon has been the subject of the debate ever since the the Renaissance it's particularly unsatisfying to trained architectural eyes because there seems to be a misfit between the porch the part you go in through and the circular domed interior it's also enigmatic in terms of its function our literary sources are ancient sources hardly mentioned at all it may have been dedicated to all the gods hence Pantheon it was also certainly used by hadrin as an audience chamber it's certainly not a temple in the normal Roman sense of the word because it's

circular and domed and because its light comes through this central part it's also been invested with a certain Cosmic significance and a lot of debate is really concerned to what extent there is some sort of grand order in the design of the pantheon what's more interesting to me of course is that this was until the 19th century the largest single doed space anywhere it's larger by a few feet than the Dome of St Peters in Rome and the Dome of Christopher Ren St Paul's in London Pantheon is remarkable on many many different uh scores apart

from being the largest concrete dome in the Roman world uh it's also the best surviving uh Roman building we have it's situated right in the middle of um the field of Mars so the pantheon which looks out onto all this uh this space would be the sort of place where the emperor could um sit in state surrounded by statues of the Gods and his ancestors uh in the niches all around the walls um and the whole Court in the popular mind hadrien is best remembered for the wall which spans the ancient border between Britain and

calonia a practical rough brick structure along which Roman soldiers would Patrol nothing could be more different than the pantheon truly Hadrian's great gift to the world originally it was built by a gripper in 27 BC hadrien had this structure demolished however and after building the redesigned Pantheon remembered AG gripper's original building by carving His Name Across the new one's front for centuries this led to confusion over the identity of the pantheon architect and its date it is a stunningly impressive structure today despite missing the bronze which would have originally lined its roof the bronze beams

which had once supported the porch roof went to St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican requisitioned by Pope Urban VII for bernini's balduino in medieval times it was converted into a church and later its porch became a marketplace where poultry and then fish were sold as late as [Music] 1845 most importantly it survived over the centuries the ground level surrounding it has risen so that when one comes across it entering the Square from the winding streets it appears squat short but very broad it would not have done so at the time of [Music] course the Dome

span is larger than that of St Peter's Basilica it's Oculus lets in just the right amount of light to give the interior an ethereal quality at the rear can be seen freezes from the Basilica of Neptune which adjoins it but elsewhere are Christian chapels and tombs Italian kings are buried here and so are artists including the great Renaissance painter Raphael this building takes us vividly back to ancient Rome and shows us its best side the Tranquil opposite to the blood and guts entertainments held in the Coliseum the center of calm in the midst of a

bustling City and perhaps a sight of reflection at the heart of an Ever growing ever Waring [Music] Empire it is perhaps heartening that so many of Rome's archaeological Treasures the remnants of buildings erected by her great rulers some who were good but many who were bad have survived we in the west are fortunate to be able to claim this sophisticated civilization to be our own offering up its Tales of history and showing us the origins of our cultured and civilized world [Music] h [Music] h [Applause] [Music] [Music] in the first century ad the area around

the Bay of Naples served as a holiday Resort where the ancient Romans could either visit the town of herculanum on the coast or travel further Inland to the town of Pompei the area it seems was used mainly by wealthy Romans Pompei itself had impressive civil buildings Sports Arenas theaters and temples in herculanum Villas line the Bay of Naples decked out with fine furnishings in their Prime these Villas must have been an incredible sight today the sad remains of these once thriving towns lie silent and mournful under the Italian Sun Pompei and herculanum were destroyed by

a huge huge natural disaster a violent volcanic eruption which inomed both towns in Ash and Brock but that same disaster has also preserved a unique picture of life in ancient Rome nearly 2,000 years ago one of the great things about Pompei as well as being a a superb archaeological story it was also almost a terrific detective story as well because there was so much we did know about Pompei but until this Century there were also a great deal of unresolved Mysteries Pompei was uh founded on the end of um natural outcrop actually an old lava

flow from vvus which came down um very close to the mouth of a river which um formed a natural Bay on the Bay of Naples and it would look as if the first uh moves to to settle Pompei permanently uh were taken in the 6th Century BC when natural catastrophe strikes it is often unexpected and brings with it terrible consequences the unexpected eruption of Mount fuus was one of the most violent natural disasters of all time at noon on August 24th ad79 the peak of vuia suddenly erupted a horrifying crash shook the Earth violently as

the crater split open a column of Ash Rock and Smoke was thrown over 15 miles up into the atmosphere daylight turned to Darkness as the thick cloud mushroomed blocking out the Sun at once the people of Pompei and herculanum were thrown into panic and confusion [Applause] it seems that only a few people died in the initial eruption but the next day thousands were in tuned in Pompei taken by surpris by the powerful explosive flow of Red Hot Rock and Ash the red hot ash and debris from the volcano when it comes tumbling down the side

of the mountain is almost gel together so it becomes a kind of liquid like a river it flow down over the mountain and through the city and it was this that did this destruction in pom it had begun like any other Summer's Day the sky was clear and the sun Shone brilliantly the shimmering water of the Bay of Naples was calm and turquoise blue the lush green slopes of Vesuvius provided the dramatic backdrop for the summer scene people were going about their daily business and the rich safe town of Pompei hummed with activity Roman mythology

suggested that volcanoes were gateways to the underworld but the people who lived in the Bay of Naples region thought that vuia was simply a large Hill vvus had been silent for almost a thousand years how could the population possibly know that a Savage disaster was about to consume this thriving prosperous and apparently secure Roman town therefore no one knew or recognized the significance of the warning signs over the previous few days there had been some minor Earth Tremors all local sources of water had dried up as morning broke on August 24th ad79 the weather was

excellent people moved on with the business of their daily [Music] lives the market stalls were open Tradesmen had removed the shutters from their shop fronts and were busy selling their merchandise the bars served snacks and wine and the Bakers offered freshly baked bread the doors of the public baths were open for business women filled jars with water from the public fountains as the morning passed without event families and friends gathered to eat lunch together then Vesuvius erupted the huge explosion Drew people out into the streets as they stood a gasp looking at the volcano the

burning Rock Ash and pmus poured out of the crater the sun vanished and Pompei was plunged Into Darkness chaos broke out as people panicked and fled for the next 12 hours there was a constant heavy downfall of scorching pmets and Ash it buried pomp and herculanum under 6 ft of debris the traditional explanation is that all those who died at Pompei were buried under the Fallout from the volcano it was only after close studies of the 1980 eruption of mounts St Helens that the real truth about the fate of Pompei became graphically clear we owe

our knowledge of the events that terrible day to two letters which have survived for nearly 2,000 years they were written to the historian tacitus in a. 104 by plenny the younger he was the nephew of plenny the Elder admiral of the Roman Mediterranean Fleet which was based at myum to the north of Naples Ply's letters vividly describe the eruption and tell us how his uncle died on the beach at sa ey plenny the Elder was a keen scientist and wished to see the results of the eruption at close hand so he ordered a ship to

be rode across the bay hoping to save as many people as possible he left his nephew behind at myena the rough seas and falling Rock made it difficult to land so plenny ordered the ship to row to stabia at the south of the bay while trying to reach the shore plyy the Elder was overcome by poisonous fumes and died at the time of the explosion plyy the younger left us a very detailed record of the events first of all he describes the initial explosion which we now know was probably the result of the pressure underneath

the volcano and what's very interesting is that he subsequently describes the collapse of the The Cloud of a Ash and smoke and how it sweeps over the landscape young plen tells us after several violent Tremors he feared that his house would collapse he persuaded his mother that they should leave as the Tremors continued next he witnessed what would become known to science as a hirro clastic flow in which he described an ominous Thick Smoke spreading over the Earth like a flood which followed behind us plenny and his mother escaped into the fields but were surrounded

by Darkness all they could hear were the screams and whales of the men women and children when the daylight returned two days later it revealed a chilling scene almost all the southern end of the bay had been buried the whole Center of Mount vvus was blown out by the eruption and where the sides had collapsed a vast new crater had been created the enormous cone of Theus was now just a stump the slopes of the volcano where Lush Woods Vineyards Olive Groves and Villas once stood was now A Wasteland Earth Quakes and tidal waves had

destroyed buildings and all the remains were covered in a thick layer of Ash Pompei represents the ideal archaeological site it is actually a a complete assemblage um of buildings and their contents and uh all manner of references to particular individuals within a known context and that's really the appeal of pay with the added Advantage even that it it was actually stopped at a particular Moment In Time at Pompei the tops of ruined buildings were the only visible reminder that it ever existed soon even these were taken to be used to build new shelters for the

homeless Mount Vesuvius remained active for another, 1300 years until around 1400 coating Pompei with layer after layer of volcanic debris the puzzle for scientists was always to explain why so many of the citizens died and why the mangled bodies were found on top of the ash which filled the streets and not buried beneath after all the people could simply have fled indoors to avoid the Falling Rocks and most would have survived lava from volcanoes flows slowly and it is fairly easy to avoid so it could not have been that which killed the inhabitants recently scientists

have discovered heard that what actually killed them was a sudden and violent torrent of burning hot rock and Ash which flowed over Pompei that's why we find that a lot of the bodies are actually on top of the preliminary Ash and rock from the first eruption because when that was thrown into the air and rained down on Pompei it was fairly easy to avoid that all they had to do really was to go indoors to avoid the Fallen Ash but when people on the second day were hit in the streets that's when the bulk of

the people were killed that's why we find so many bodies that have been dismembered and mangled in such a severe way about 5,000 people died at Pompei 1/4 of its estimated population the survivors probably fled on the first day of the eruption those who remained behind were sealed in with the rest of the town like a time capsule Ash and rock surrounded their remains soil concealed the site and plants and shrubs and trees grew among the ash at the time of the eruption the citizens of Pompei enjoyed an era of thriving development and Peace by

ad79 the town had become a prosperous commercial center with an industrious creative and growing [Music] population the prosperity of the town is reflected in the SP spendid public buildings The Forum was the religious political and economic center of the Roman Resort Market stalls stood along covered doorways where customers haggled over Goods at the South End Of The Forum were the council offices and the Law Courts the North End was dominated by the temples of Jupiter Loris and vpan the wool and cloth markets the main Market the Fuller building of umia and the office of weights

and measures formed the commercial center of the [Music] Forum nearby were other public buildings including a sports ground the Temple of Isis and the Temple of Jupiter micosis in the area near a second Sports ground was the vast Amphitheater uh one of the most interesting um aspects of Roman civilization is this fact of living in cities and the nature of Roman towns and Pompei has a theater an Amphitheater uh Basilica it has all the features of of uh that make up this the the sort of model Roman town the public baths were built on main

roads these formed an essential part of daily life some roads had a more commercial nature with shops and taverns also a semi- rural area with Vineyards and Gardens survived in the center of the town almost all of the remaining areas of the Town were residential rooms facing the street could be let out as shops or taverns sometimes whole houses were transformed into laundries bakeries or small factories rich and poor families and businesses lived and worked in very close proximity Estates on the fertile slopes of vuia grew grapes olives cereal vegetables and animal food or reared

animals Pompei needed its own Market Garden to keep up supplies of food pompei's other main industries were the production of wine and Woolen cloth many pompeians made their living either manufacturing items for export or importing other items from abroad some agricultural produce such as wine and olive oil was exported as far as North Africa while Pottery was imported from Southern France thanks to pompei's thriving sea port sea traders operated a complex network of contacts with the Orient Africa and Asia from the moment of its foundation uh to the moment of of its destruction its primary

function as a city was a support for the um area this is one reason actually why uh Pompei was probably not rebuilt after the eruption it could have been salvaged it wasn't that deeply buried but it's very possible that its harbor that its Port its actual reset was destroyed in the eruption the people of Pompei seem to have found a great deal of time for leisure rest and relaxation the town certainly had a variety of activities on offer the great theater showed comedies and tragedies to Spectators who were protected from the Sun by covers and

sprinkled with scented [Applause] water the second main venue was the odion which was used for concerts poetry recital and [Music] lectures the enormous Ampitheater held the games and had a capacity of 20,000 people who took their places according to a strict social hierarchy the games included such spectacles as Gladiator fights animal Jewels or hunts and possibly Chariot racing the Gladiators were incredibly popular they lived and trained in the nearby Barracks 63 people died there in the eruption in their duels most Gladiators were killed on their first appearance those who survived won respect freedom and wealth

in the centuries following the eruption people slowly returned to live in the area establishing New Towns and Villages but pom's time capsule was to remain undiscovered until the 18th century one of the most famous sites of Pompei are the plaster cast bodies these are not actual bodies they are made from the molds of Impressions left by bodies buried in the ash this process reveals an astonishing amount of detail clothes shoes and facial expressions these terrified and tortured faces of those who died in the eruption have been preserved for almost 2,000 years the reason for the

excavations at Pompei was that archaeologists and historians could use the discoveries to piece together a picture of the town the town's people and life in the Roman Empire so why did the tragedy strike Pompei could the town's death have been avoided Vesuvius lies on the fault line that also includes the nearby volcanoes Etna and Stromboli depending on the activity of these plates a volcano can lie dormant for many years volcanoes occur at weak points in the Earth crust where the pressure of of the mol rock beneath forces its way through the surface in most instances

volcanic eruptions are relatively harmless because lava moves very slowly and people generally have time to avoid it where it gets dangerous is where there's a pressure beneath the Air's surface which results and and effectively a huge explosion and that's what's happened at Pompei prior to ad79 Theus had been totally inactive for almost a thousand years but inside the Earth the pressure grew and molten rock known as magma collected in the volcano's chamber eruptions occur when the pressure under the plate is strong enough to force the magma through weak spots in the Earth's crust when this

magma reaches the surface its path may be free in which case it would flow slowly down the sides of a mountain or it may be blocked in which case there can be a huge eruption the eruption of Vesuvius in ad79 showed the consequences of such a blockage when dormant magma deposits of the crater and shaft May cool and solidify forming a plug if the magma cannot escape the pressure eventually smashes and explodes the plug out blasting Ash and fragments thousands of meters into the air this is what happened at Pompei there were warnings that would

have alerted modern scientists Earth Tremors and the natural sources of water running dry due to the rise in ground temperature are just two Clues which warn of an eruption but how were the residents of Pompei in ad79 to know the significance of these things it was when Mount St Helen in Washington erupted in 1980 that the answers to these Mysteries were revealed as the scientists watched from a safe distance they witnessed a previously unknown phenomenon as the sides of the volcano exploded a wave of rock and Ash spewed out of the crater like the flood

that plenty the younger had written of after ad79 it traveled at 100 mph at a temperature of 200 100° Centigrade scorching and smashing everything in its path for those that had pondered the fate of Pompei all the pieces fell into place today at Pompei much of the site remains unexcavated archaeologists now use modern technology and equipment to sip The Remains for the last Clues to the Past preservation and conservation experts work on mosaics and paintings protecting them from the weather and restoring them to their best condition under the ash Pompei had been safe but the

wind rain eruptions and earthquakes have continued the destruction of the Town preserving the uncovered ruins is just as vital as continuing the excavations Pompei unfort L is a ruin and uh just like any ruin um it's likely to become more ruinous the more uh time it spends exposed to even quite normal weathering the problem with the modern environment that is also full of pollutants the other thing is that tourists themselves are quite a a challenge to the to the structure of the town the numbers of people who walk through the remains each year uh which

run into their hundreds of thousands can also bring considerable amount of damage which it is a major task to protect Pompei so that future Generations have the benefit of learning about the town and of life in the Roman Empire it is also important that these future Generations learn about the death of Pompei the busy Italian city of Naples lies in the shadow of vvus but the volcano has been silent for over 50 years but as Pompei proves this does not mean it is not active Naples today is densely populated the weather and work are good

people are happy and getting on with their daily business it is a modern-day reflection of Pompei and just as vulnerable the ruins of the Magnificent capital of the Aztecs today lie near the Cathedral of Mexico City in the 15th and 16th centuries this Great temple was the seat of both religion and politics of the mighty warlike Aztec people subject and Allied cities would visit the temple regularly the Aztec God wielopole had promised his people a place where they would be the masters of a huge Empire in order to recognize this place they had to find

an eagle perched on a cactus holding a serpent in its beak they would then know that this was to be the special place where they would be Lords and where their great Capital tanos Tian would be built today this site is known as Mexico City the Mexico of the modern world looks with pride upon the symbols of its ancient past the colors of the Mexican flag green white and red display at the center the eagle perched upon a cactus [Music] the Great temple of the Aztec was originally a humble temple built in honor of both

their God waple and chalok God of rain but as the Aztec nation grew in importance and wealth the building became more impressive painted in bright colors erected in what was considered to be the center of the mighty Aztec empire [Music] the roots of Aztec civilization reach deep into the past long before the birth of Christ an Aztec culture was already emerging a hieroglyphic writing had been developed and their astronomers had begun to use the 52-year calendric cycle which formed the basis of Aztec religion even at this early date the ritual ball game which became Infamous

throughout meso America was being played long before the Aztec appeared the central part of Mexico was dominated by the city of tiaka only 45 kilm away from the site which was later to become the Aztec capital to hakan was a great City the sixth largest city in the world at that time 600 AD it remains one of the most impressive sites of the ancient [Music] world it covered more than 13 Square [Music] km at its Center was an area of palaces and flat topped pyramids of which the so-called pyramids of the Sun and Moon are

particularly outstanding extending the length of the city was the road known now as the street of the Dead which was more than 5 kilm long as Francisco zapa Alvarez [Music] explains I think which it does was the most important Avenue here at totian because uh a lot of people from other areas uh the tonak possible uh sapo and uh some atics came to this area to offering presence to the gods the first constructions uh the Monumental constructions we think which was built during the first century after Jesus Christ see uh we think which the first

temple builted was the Temple of the sun then the Temple of the Moon and they built the street of the Dead the population here we think which was around 120,000 people [Music] various buildings depict gods and goddesses who would later be worshiped in Aztec times [Music] the mural paintings of tiot Tu wakan illustrate the importance of religion water Earth and sea life are often represented Reuben Cabrera a Mexican archaeologist who has worked at tiot wakan since 1980 explains the paintings in a Palace built close to the site as Pro Ma [Music] a remarkable stylistic feature

of the tiaka murals is their symbolistic [Music] [Music] complexity what is interesting is the repetition of images throughout the temples giving us an insight into religious practices and [Music] thoughts in about 650 ad toota Quon was overthrown but remained as an important religious Center as it was believed that the Gods had assembled there to create the [Music] sun M Zuma the last Aztec ruler made frequent pilgrimages to this site the Aztecs also held dear to themselves the Traditions passed down to them by their predecessors the toltech whose achievements were attributed to ketzel kattle their great

priest ruler shortly before 1200 ad the toltech state collapsed and the valley of Mexico became home to a succession of half Civilized Tribes known collectively as as chichim the last of the Barbarian tribes to enter the valley of Mexico was the nle speaking Group which we now know as the atics although they refer to themselves as the mexa or the tanota today all that we know about the early days of the azex has been passed down to us in the form of Legends it it is rumored that the early Aztecs discovered the god Wopat in

a cave on a hillside they then began a journey on his command to his birthplace at katek building temples in his honor whenever they stopped the birth of wheit sople the war God is important as he was considered to be a manifestation of the Sun to them he represented the son's Eternal fight against the powers of Darkness a never-ending struggle reenacted daily just as whapley was born to combat his brother and sister so the sun rises each morning to do fresh battle with the stars and moon and put them to flight to help wheel latley

as the son in his daily struggle it was necessary for man to provide the god with the most precious food that he can offer his own blood as Dr Elizabeth badano explains we know about human sacrifice thanks to the descriptions of the 16th century frers who kept very meticulously records about human sacrifice the most important frer who recorded everything he saw in terms of religion was Bernardino the sagon who came to Mexico in 1539 we know that human sacrifice was important to keep the universe in equilibrium but also we know that human sacrifice was the

most precious offer we had to give to the gods children were also sacrificed there were three paradises to which The Souls of the victims went to so the god of rain had special sacrifices as well but the method of disposal of the body varied so on the left hand side we find decapitation we have several offerings containing decapitated heads with we find decapitated individuals both male female and children but on the side of talok we usually have children the children cried before Human Sacrifice took place and the more they cried the better the omen for

rain the more rains the better uh the season would be sacrifice was of Paramount importance to the Aztecs for without the nourishment of human hearts and blood it was thought that the sun would stop moving the heads of the sacrificial victims were displayed in skull racks [Music] these were architectural platforms carved on all sides seen here at the Great temple of the Aztecs where two 140 different skulls are painted with Stucker they were horrific monuments which celebrated success in battle and intimidated their enemies the tradition of having skull rcks dates to about 700 or 800

ad in Mexico in the state of guaka uh at the site called LA coyotera but the atics actually made it their own you find skull racks they picted in um the chroniclers of the 16th century they even the heads of the spanias were displayed and we have manuscripts showing the heads the seate head of the spanias including horse heads because the natives had not seen horses before this particular example conveys ideas of Fame Glory Prestige and power um although this example is a sculpted one real skull rcks were placed next to the temples the temples

had um real heads the flesh decayed and the SK actually stayed behind the hearts of the sacrificial victims were placed in vessels called kuali Eagle [Music] vessels the Great temple of the Aztecs was considered to be the center of their their universe and a bustling City soon grew around its steps Avenues were built in a highly planned grid formation and at its Heyday the city of ten kitan was known to have over 200,000 inhabitants until recently most of the Great temple was known to us only through documentary sources in 1978 a Mexican archaeologist and his

colleagues Unearthed the remains of the temple itself and caused a massive Resurgence of interest in the Aztec [Music] civilization the first has disappeared but the second dates back to 1390 which is the one we see today virtually [Music] complete the later constructions were enclosed within successively larger [Music] buildings these pyramids are dedicated to both the tribal God waple the Sun God and to the Rain God [Music] Shaak the temple represented the mythical place of we salach's birth Kopek a serpent Mountain which is why the site is surrounded by walls representing snakes [Music] the Great temple

was as tall as the present-day Cathedral of Mexico City and it was here that thousands of human sacrifices were made behind us is the Great temple of the atics the left hand side is the Temple of wiy Lai the tribal god of the atics the god of w on the right hand side you have the Temple of talok the god of rain both are of equal importance of same size of same dimensions both share the main Precinct at the Great temple the Temple of WIIL laosi is recognized by the sacrificial Stone called tesk in na

the language spoken by thetics the sacrificial Stone here is important because at Major festivals and rituals Human Sacrifice took [Music] place on the other side at the entrance to the Temple dedicated to chalok God of rain is a sculpture of a reclining man holding a vessel on his stomach the sculpture is known as Shak M A Divine messenger between the priests and the gods it was here that human hearts and blood were placed as [Music] offerings both shrines were originally decorated inside and out we can still see pillars with paintings symbolizing the god of rain

a band of gogg eyes typical of chalak painted in black on a white background below These Eyes is a horizontal band painted in blue followed by two red bands according to archeologists the lower part of the pillars area was painted with black and white vertical bands which may represent rain little can be said about the third construction stage of the Great temple except that during the excavations archaeologists found eight lifesized sculptures representing standard bearers leaning against the steps leading to the Temple of [Music] wheatle a staggering 6,000 objects were excavated at the temple many of

the tribute of objects came from different parts of the [Music] Empire these offerings include a large number of objects associated with chalak such as fish shell and [Music] coral there are also several skeletal remains of children and adults dedicated to their Warrior God [Music] offerings containing fish from the Gulf Coast coral and shells can still be seen along with Effigies of the god of fire shutle incense and artifacts of many sorts from all over meso Amica [Music] the atics and the ancient Mexican peoples wrote their books in bark paper we find this type of material

still being produced in the state of Guerrero in Mexico it's very much painted in the traditional style hand painted these manuscripts were called codices and we have 14 pre-colombian codices nowadays we have another excellent example called codex mosino or codex mendosa this manuscript was first put together by the first vice Roy of New Spain Don Antonio de Mendoza in the colonial period it's particularly important because it illustrates three aspects of Mexican history the first section deals with the history of the atic rulers from the first ASC ruler to the last the second section deals with

the tribute how tribute was paid to the atics how much how often and in what form the third section of the manuscript deals with as aspects of education for the children you will find that the parents were scolding the children sometimes bringing them close to a fire of chilies so that the children inhale the chili smell and got a bit of a cough sometimes the aexs force the children to sleep outside to sleep in mod in wet mod there are other aspects as well as for instance how many tortillas were children allowed to eat a

day depending on the age the boys were usually trained the Arts or the crafts of the father welled girls stayed with Mother at home sometimes the girls were taught how to cook how to weave and these codex is particularly useful to reconstruct how the Aztecs lived how they brought the new baby's home the uh function of the Midwife what they did when a baby was born how they announce the birth of a baby boy or a baby girl the Aztec rulers of tanos tiitan became part of a Triple Alliance with rulers of nearby States net

saak cotal was a great ruler of neighboring T coko who ruled from 1418 to 1472 he was contemporary with the Aztec ruler moaz Zuma he favored law engineering and the art and made Tex Coco the seat of the highest court and the center of artistic activity here encouraged the construction of an extensive system of aqueducts to bring water from Mountain Springs to the towns and agricultural Terraces of the Foothills Neta Coy's great palace is not visible nowadays but his pleasure Gardens on the nearby Hill of tcot zingo offer traces from the past the hill once

stood Within in the view of the lake and though the water has retreated The View remains impressive here in the 1430s netak coyot collected a zoo of strange animals perhaps the first in the new world and a garden of unusual plants an aqueduct carried water from the mountains into a reservoir ornamented with B reliefs and from there it flowed by streams and canals All Over the Garden filling the lakes and the bathing pool cut into the living [Music] Rock he built elaborate stairways in [Music] rock sitting in netwa C's Stone Throne on the hilltop one

gets a MAG magnificent view of his Royal Vantage the king must have watched the traffic of the fishing boats below him though now the lake has given way to Farms as he listened to the sounds of crowing roosters and bird song the remains of the basins can be seen But there are no waterfalls bird cages and flower beds which gave the king such Delight [Music] an Aztec water system can still be seen at SOA milco which inle means place of the fields of [Music] flowers today it is a bustling tourist attraction where vendors display their

goods from brightly colored barges much as they did in yester years [Music] [Music] what one of the most important forms of cultivation in the valley of Mexico was chinampa agriculture a form of intensive cultivation on segments of land artificially constructed in Lakes properly maintained they can produce several crops a year and will remain fertile for centuries without having to lie fallow so chimco is the area called the floating gardens by tourists so chimil is known because of the astec canals the ASCS used to travel and used to sell their products alongside the canals the canals

went as far as tenos Tian the present Great temple of the aex was part of the lake shore of tescoco this area had two types of water fresh water as well as salt water during mumma's r rain during the rulership of Muma and Neta coyo they decided to built a dam to divide the salt water from the fresh water this was a very important Aqueduct which divided water for people to drink as well as to cultivate the land the land is very fertile people used to get three crops and it even yielded as far as

four crops sometimes a year they cultivated Maze amaran and they also cultivated different flowers it's still the richest area in Mexico City where people buy and sell flowers the area is Rich because people can live on water as well as in atic times people depended on Hunting as well as fishing people trapped birds and fish with their Nets and harpoons but they could also get frogs eggs Lara and all kinds of insects that were edible people depended upon maze cultivation and Maze was and is still the staple food in Mexico many dishes were derived from

maze such as tortilla [Music] tamales envelopes of steamed maze stuffed with Savory vegetables or meat and atle a sort of porridge canoe traffic linked the entire Lake system of the valley of Mexico the flow was predominantly into tanos Tian and consisted largely of food stuffs and other Provisions Not only was canoe trans Port more efficient but in many instances the water route was shorter than the land Roots another important crop is the Agave or mag Cactus the plant was a source of fiber for clothing netting ropes and bags the spines were used as needles as

Tomaso Antonio explains the popular name of the plant is magay and its botanical name is agav at this age we must C the leavs from the middle of the plant because when the magay blooms the magay dies see so before the blooming we'll C the leaves and then with this kind of round knife we'll scratch the heart of the plant every day to irritate it and then the magay will produce a liquid which is very sweet and so we call it honey water then the honey water is taken off by sooking out with this kind

of G this a local G which we call aot with this aot we Su out the use the honey water saw the honey water see then this honey water will drink it so or we'll put it into wood barrels and we let it ferment for 24 hours 24 hours later the honey water will turn to a liquor a a pre Colombian liquor which is called it pul the pul will contain a 6% of alcohol like beer for instance and the magay produces the honey water during six months he produces a gallon a day half gallon

in the morning and a half in the afterno and out of the leaves out of the mag leaves the ancient cultures they got also the first paper that they us it to write on they got the parchment paper mhm see I should write I'll write something so you will see it is a writing pap paper MH look from each Leaf the ancient cultures they got to parchment paper they got one sheet inside look it was the first paper that the ancient culture used to make the the codices mhm and the parchment is strong there is

one inside and another outside MH you obtain two sheets from each leaf and under the outside parchment paper they discover also the first soap the first soap that the ancient culture used for washing this the pr colian soap and the point of the leaf was also very useful either as an narrow head or they discover also the first needle and tread the first needle already treaded because out of the fibers they weave they made clothing out of these fibers mhm they got the needle and Trad in one piece MH look at it KN and thread

together and for the dying to put color on the fibers they us it also natural colors for instance with a rose leaf they got instant permanent dying mhm look at it and the color won't wash out the Color [Music] Stay when the first Spanish moed off the coast of Mexico in 1517 their initial intentions had been to secure further lands for the Spanish crown and to spread the word of God it was Cortez one of the early conquistadors who fueled by Tales of riches and gold embarked on an arduous Journey to the interior to find

the legendary Aztec capital controlled at the time by the mighty ruler Muma CZ was an educated man who was trained as a lawyer in salaman so he was not an ignorant person like Bizarro was for the case of South America Cortez was also a good Diplomat he was the perfect maavan who could play tricks on politicians on route their treatment of the local tribes was often brutal and suppressive but to the Spanish their actions were Justified with a secure knowledge that God Almighty was on their side and that conversions to the Christian faith were being

made with religious fervor Cortez met with the enemies of montazuma and convinced them to join him in his move on ttit landan the most powerful of these were the TX khans who had reached a peaceful agreement with the Spanish following a series of standstill battles and had agreed to help the Spanish defeat the mighty Aztec rulers the two leaders finally met face to face for the first time moaz Zuma however believing corz and his party to be Gods welcomed the Spaniards into his City accommodating them in great palaces and treating them with the reverence reserved

for the most important guests when Cortez arrived in Mexico in 1519 the Mexicans thought that ketal kle was coming back to claim his seed he had left Tula on a year one read which was exactly the same date when Cortez arrived in the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1519 the natives were familiar with this myth of ketal CLE a Beed man who was coming back when he arrived he found some spanias who were familiar with this myth and in fact he was helped by spanias to conquer Mexico he was also very much much aware of

the fact that the natives weren't familiar with horses so he scared the population with horses with gun power the Mexicans weren't familiar with these particular fire weapons and they were petrified relationships were soon to sour when the spaniard's true intentions of seizing gold became apparent Cortez had shocked the watching Aztecs when he ordered his troops to throw figures representing Gods down the steps of the Great temple moaz Zuma perhaps convinced by the Omens of evil believed that the newcomers would be triumphant and was soon taken prisoner Muma himself in a way defeated his own people

because he was a prisoner of his own beliefs he realized that the Europeans were human beings but he was still stubborn thinking that perhaps it was ketal K the Mexicans were upset about the fact that he was still fighting with the idea and it was his own people who actually killed him it there is one description in which he comes out his balcony and he he stoned by his own people the formal attack on the capital of the aztech Empire began on April 28th 1521 and for the desperate Aztec Defenders there could never be any

real match against the attacking army with more than 900 Spaniards thousands of Indian allies 86 horses 50 cannons and 13 ships the once great City soon fell and the mighty Empire soon crumbled for the few survivors who remained any hopes of retaliation were destroyed when European diseases such as chalera and smallpox against which they had no resilience took hold and the once bursting population of the city became a subdued dwindling Fe the conquest was successful also because they had fire weapons they had horses and they knew the tactics of War the Indians were not playing

a war they were not familiar with the kind of war the Spanos were familiar with the ancient Mexicans were used to conquer and find people to sacrifice to their gods but they weren't used to just kill people for the sake of killing people they had to different and opposing ideas as to what war [Music] was this marked the end of the tanos titlan and the beginning of New Spain fortunately the language is still spoken in certain parts of Mexico [Music] the vocabulary has not all gone in fact theat words have been blended with the Spanish

and the influence of the Aztec continues today Mexican Spanish is sprinkled with words of noal origin some of which especially those for Foods tomato chili chocolate have entered English and other languages as well atic life is far from dead is still alive the language is spoken now is spoken in several modern states of Mexico the clothing in several States is still very much the same long skirts a belt holding the skirt triangular item called kesal over the shoulders with which was worn without a blouse in prehispanic times but nowadays is worn with a blouse the

male have changed their clothing but the female are still keeping ancient traditions in certain villages in Mexico the food is very much still pre-colombian we can trace recipes such as mole the chicken cooked in chocolate sauce and chilies that is still part of the Mexican tradition tortillas are eaten every day and the way of life in certain Villages is still pre-colombian in orientation there are certain rituals which were carried out in atic times such as beheading quail and dropping the blood onto the Earth to feed the Earth that's still being carried out in the state

of pbla particularly in San Pablito so there are many rituals which still are kept the use of the hummingbear as a charm object is still carried out Aztec dance is thriving keeping alive the traditions of yester year [Music] the Great temple today lies in Ruins but remains a reminder to the times when it represented one of the greatest powers on Earth as the Aztec poem has it for a as long as the world endures the power and Glory of tanos tlan Will Survive [Music] all [Music] [Music]