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- 6 months ago
Τα Πιο Παράξενα Αντικείμενα (Strangest Things)
2021 | Επ. 02.07 | HD
Καταχωνιασμένα μέσα σε μουσεία, εργαστήρια και αποθήκες ανά την υφήλιο βρίσκονται τα πιο αξιοσημείωτα και μυστηριώδη αντικείμενα στον κόσμο. Σήμερα, αξιοποιώντας νέες έρευνες και τεχνολογικά μέσα, μπορούμε να τα μελετήσουμε πιο διεξοδικά από ποτέ.
Γιατί η πήλινη κεφαλή ηλικίας 9.000 ετών περιέχει ένα αληθινό κρανίο; Πώς η παράξενη συσκευή που κατασκευάστηκε το 1950 ελέγχει τον καιρό; Βρήκε όντως τυχαία ένας αρχαιολόγος τον παλαιότερο χάρτη του κόσμου;
2021 | Επ. 02.07 | HD
Καταχωνιασμένα μέσα σε μουσεία, εργαστήρια και αποθήκες ανά την υφήλιο βρίσκονται τα πιο αξιοσημείωτα και μυστηριώδη αντικείμενα στον κόσμο. Σήμερα, αξιοποιώντας νέες έρευνες και τεχνολογικά μέσα, μπορούμε να τα μελετήσουμε πιο διεξοδικά από ποτέ.
Γιατί η πήλινη κεφαλή ηλικίας 9.000 ετών περιέχει ένα αληθινό κρανίο; Πώς η παράξενη συσκευή που κατασκευάστηκε το 1950 ελέγχει τον καιρό; Βρήκε όντως τυχαία ένας αρχαιολόγος τον παλαιότερο χάρτη του κόσμου;
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00:06Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:02Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:31Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:42Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:45και όμως δεν θυμάται ο ένας αυτός.
01:48Από το Μινομείο το δημοσιογράφη είναι αξιτήστεο σε μινούν καλύτερα.
01:58Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
02:22Why is a human head treated this way?
02:25How is it made?
02:27And who is the person beneath the plaster?
02:36The ancient city of Jericho lies in the Jordan Valley in modern-day Palestine.
02:42Jericho is famous to us, for one, the Bible, of course, the famous walls of Jericho.
02:47But actually, it's a very ancient place.
02:51One of the world's earliest cities founded more than 11,000 years ago.
02:57Athens doesn't exist for another 4,000 years. Or if we're talking about places like London, it doesn't exist for
03:01another 7,000 years.
03:04According to the Old Testament, the walls of Jericho collapse when the Israelites blow their horns.
03:11But in 1953, pioneering archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon and her team discover that the oldest walls of ancient Jericho date back
03:21far beyond biblical times.
03:23We're looking at an earlier walled settlement stretching back to around 10,000 years before present.
03:31In the ruins of this earliest settlement, they make an extraordinary discovery.
03:38This looked like a large cobble or boulder.
03:41But as it was excavated and emerged, it became clear that what they had was a reconstituted human head.
03:52A clay face has been sculpted onto the skull.
03:56They see a large hole where the nose is, which presumably is where a plastered nose would have been.
04:02There's dirt also coming out, which the archaeologists assumed was actually infill after the skull had been buried by surrounding
04:09dirt.
04:09And there's also a large hole in the back of the skull.
04:12It's unlike anything the archaeologists have ever seen.
04:17It's a skull which long ago was effectively brought back to life by the introduction of shell and earth.
04:28This strange thing is crafted by someone who died 5,000 years before the pyramids were built.
04:38Why do they rebuild a face on a human skull?
04:46The skull is sent to the British Museum for analysis.
04:50But 1950s technology has limitations.
04:55Early attempts to x-ray it showed only a cloudy mass.
05:01One thing they can see clearly is the large hole on the back of the skull.
05:06It's assumed to be burial damage.
05:09It's not.
05:12More than 60 years later, it's finally revealed how wrong that assumption is when the British Museum teams up with
05:20Imperial College to apply the latest CT scanning technology.
05:24We see cutting marks at the back of the head in this hole.
05:29It's clear that somebody had actually deliberately cut out this hole away from the skull, that it was carefully cut
05:35not to damage other areas of the skull.
05:37The interior of the skull is packed with earth.
05:41It was assumed to have fallen in after burial.
05:43But that turns out to be just as wrong.
05:46The scan showed that the soil within the skull had been carefully applied layer by layer to support the fragile
05:55interior bone structures of the skull.
05:58We now understand how this strange thing is made.
06:02Someone painstakingly cuts out a hole and packs this skull with soil.
06:07They even leave behind their finger marks, still visible 10,000 years later.
06:16Then they create the face.
06:18The plastering of the head would have taken perhaps some multiple applications to get it quite right and to mold
06:23the features, particularly the nose that would have likely been there, but also the eyes.
06:29We know they use shells from the Mediterranean that was about 60 miles away from Jericho.
06:34So clearly they're importing materials.
06:38So this is something that they really cared for.
06:40It's not something they just made haphazardly.
06:42They took some time in shaping this and putting in precious objects into the skull.
06:49But who could be important enough to deserve so much effort after death?
06:59The skull beneath the clay face reveals this was almost certainly a man and even his age.
07:07The older you get, the more your bone parts start to attach to each other.
07:13So from that you can deduce how old a person was.
07:16And in this case, the person was probably around 40 to 50 years when he died.
07:21And stripping back the dirt shows that he suffers at least one injury during his life.
07:28Examining their nose, which is twisted to one side, it was apparent that at one point in their life they
07:33had suffered from a broken nose.
07:34This skull tells the story of a short, hard life.
07:39But it also reveals something very, very strange.
07:46The head is unusually formed.
07:49This form of the head is not natural.
07:53The shape of the skull is distorted and the thickness of the bone varies more than a normal skull.
07:59Cranial distortion like this cannot happen after death.
08:05Somebody intentionally changed the shape of the head of the person by binding it and applying force to the head
08:13so it deformed.
08:15This can only be performed on an infant.
08:19To get a desired deformation of the skull, you have to do it very early.
08:24You have to start very early, one month after birth until six months after birth approximately.
08:30Tightly wrapped bindings slowly squeeze his soft infant skull.
08:36When the bones fuse at around two years, his deformed head shape is fixed forever.
08:45This unusual practice is known in a number of cultures.
08:50Cranial deformation has been practiced in many different times and places throughout the world.
08:56The head is often used as a way to make someone more prominent, to perhaps make them stick out.
09:02So it is a kind of cultural practice to make an individual become sort of distinct.
09:08This can be a mark of tribal allegiance, a sign of beauty, or elite social status.
09:18Whatever it means to the people of ancient Jericho, it tells us this man is special from birth.
09:25Who is he?
09:31Modern facial reconstruction techniques finally allow us to stare into his living face.
09:37So they're doing effectively what the ancients were trying to do with regards to the skull, which is recreate what
09:42the face actually looked like.
09:44But this time using laser scans and 3D printing to create a face.
09:49Modeling the missing lower jaw on other ancient Jericho skulls, muscle by muscle, through layer upon layer of tissue and
09:58skin, the face of a man appears.
10:02The process that begins with clay and shells nearly 10,000 years ago is finally complete.
10:11This is the face of someone very important to the people of ancient Jericho.
10:16And he is not alone.
10:21More than 50 other decorated skulls have now been found across the region, including 10 from Jericho alone.
10:31This curation of plastered skulls was undertaken much more widely than was previously thought.
10:40And they all share something in common.
10:44There is no body.
10:46Keeping the skull, not necessarily the rest of the skeleton, shows that the head had a great importance.
10:51It was treated in a very venerated way relative to the rest of the skeleton.
10:56Could this decorated skull be part of a religion?
11:00Some kind of skull cult?
11:07Most of the skulls found in Jericho were in places that were prominent in display.
11:11They're looking at the same direction.
11:13They often are near each other, so they're probably even put on a kind of a shelf or some kind
11:17of pedestal to show them.
11:20It seems that in ancient Jericho, these decorated skulls take pride of place, keeping their shell eyes on the living.
11:28Current interpretations suggest that these skulls, brought back to life through the addition of plaster, were part of a kind
11:38of ancestral cult.
11:40But why do the living of ancient Jericho create a cult of their dead ancestors in their own homes?
11:48The explanation may lie in Jericho's most famous innovation.
11:53It is one of the world's first cities.
11:57This is a period of great innovation for societies.
12:00They began to use ag culture, specifically domestication of different plants and animals.
12:06Some had decided to settle into villages, decided to live for long periods of time or even the entire year
12:12in one specific site, which was quite a novelty at this period.
12:15For the first time in history, large numbers of people call the same place home.
12:22But this means finding an entirely new way to live with each other, crowded in together behind the city's three
12:28and a half meter walls.
12:31They need a way to avoid conflicts developing between that other great invention of the city, neighbors.
12:38When humans begin to settle, they have to create a range of different cultural practices that allow them to succeed
12:44in this kind of lifestyle of where they stay in one place for long periods of time.
12:49Archaeologists suspect that the cult of ancestors this skull represents acts as a kind of social glue, connecting the citizens
12:57to their past, to their home, and most importantly, to each other.
13:03Venerating ancestors as a way of associating ownership and tying yourself to the land becomes a kind of cultural phenomenon
13:10and reflects a kind of practical understanding that you need to belong to the land and need to take care
13:14of the land.
13:15This dead man helps bind living people together in a whole new way, which makes this strange thing incredibly important.
13:26This decorated skull may have been central to the early success of one of mankind's greatest achievements, the city.
13:42Hidden among trees in a small forest near Rangeley, Maine, stands a strange machine designed to harness a powerful source
13:50of energy.
13:52Looks big and long, but also futuristic.
13:56According to its inventor, it can drill holes in the atmosphere and trigger tornadoes.
14:02This contraption effectively looks like a massive ray gun.
14:07Now, using the latest technology, we can examine it in unprecedented detail.
14:15This is the cloud buster.
14:18It was supposed to control the weather.
14:21It could make it rain.
14:24It could stop the rain.
14:26Just imagine being able to control droughts or control flood.
14:31But this isn't the only trick of this new form of energy.
14:35And as an added bonus, it could repel an alien invasion and improve your sex life.
14:43This energy seems to have the potential to change the world.
14:48If you could control this, you could make essentially anything you wanted happen.
14:52Who builds this game-changing weather gun?
14:56What is the source of its power?
14:58And could it actually work?
15:04The cloud buster is created in 1952 by Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
15:10Now, this is quite a contraption, this multiple-tube device mounted on a clinth and a swivelling mechanism so it
15:18can be pointed in any direction.
15:21It's got these metallic umbilical cables that kind of thread down.
15:25These are designed to channel energy that triggers a change in the atmosphere.
15:31So Reich's idea is that by attaching this umbilicus to a body of water and pointing the muzzles of the
15:40device at the correct direction in the atmosphere,
15:44it could draw this energy out of the sky and deposit it into the water.
15:52The movement of this mysterious energy out of the atmosphere would cause clouds to form and subsequently rain to fall.
16:03Who is the man who believes he can really control the weather with his astonishing cloud buster?
16:13Wilhelm Reich is not the kind of person you'd expect to dream up a world-changing weather machine.
16:20His interests begin not in physics or engineering, but in the mind.
16:27Reich was born in Austria in 1897, a time which was part of the Austro-Ingarian Empire,
16:32and he studied medicine at the University of Vienna.
16:36In the 1920s, Reich is a brilliant psychoanalyst and protege of the discipline's founding father, Sigmund Freud.
16:45He took a lot of Freud's ideas about people having these needs and these desires,
16:51and there's always this tension between what we need and whether that need is fulfilled.
16:55The more Reich digs into needs and desires, the more he focuses on Freud's ideas about the role of sexual
17:03desire in mental health.
17:05He believes that repressing sexual outlets can lead to neuroses.
17:09So his argument is that if you discharge these sexual urges, it will have a psychoanalytic healing effect.
17:18But Reich is just getting started.
17:21He gradually becomes convinced that sex is the sole cause and sole cure for almost any illness, mental or physical.
17:30This increasingly extreme interpretation of Freud's work doesn't go down well.
17:36By 1939, his ideas are considered so radical and so contrary to the general clinical practices of psychoanalysis that he
17:46is kicked out of the movement.
17:49And Freud's followers aren't the only ones Reich falls out with.
17:53He also falls out with the actual Reich.
17:58The third Reich.
18:01The Nazis assert that he is part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the health and well-being of Europe,
18:09and they order his books burned.
18:12Reich is forced to flee to the United States.
18:18And it's there that he creates the Cloudbuster.
18:24But how does he make the leap from upsetting fascists to upsetting the weather?
18:33In the 1930s, with the help of some very accommodating friends, Reich sets out to find a scientific explanation for
18:41the healing properties of sexual desire.
18:44So he took Freud's idea and tried to measure something, something bioelectrical or chemical or physical.
18:51As the friends get friendlier, Reich records an increase in electrical activity.
18:58He's certain it's evidence of some kind of previously unidentified bioelectrical energy.
19:05He names it orgone.
19:10Through an elaborate series of experiments, Reich convinces himself that he's rewritten the laws of the universe.
19:19Reich argues that the entire planet is covered with an envelope of this orgone energy.
19:26He even believes this explains the color of the sky, because his experiments suggest that when visible, orgone is blue.
19:36One of the questions that we always ask as children is, why is the sky blue?
19:41And of course, to a chemist, a physicist, this is all about the way in which light interacts with the
19:48molecules in the sky.
19:49And blue light is scattered much more than red.
19:54And so the result is that beautiful color that we see.
19:57But for Reich, it was something completely different.
20:01It was all about the orgone.
20:04For Reich, orgone is everywhere, in everything.
20:09It was responsible for stuff out in space like galaxies.
20:15But at the same time, it was also kind of channeled through people.
20:20It produced the life force.
20:25In 1940, Reich invents a device to harness the healing powers of this miraculous energy.
20:34He built what he calls an orgone accumulator.
20:37Reich claims that inside the wood and steel box, orgone is absorbed through the patient's skin to cure them of
20:45almost anything.
20:46And he started to conduct experiments and treatments using the accumulator box on patients who had cancer and schizophrenia.
20:57But Reich goes further, theorizing that orgone can literally change the world.
21:04And in 1952, he sets out to prove it by creating the Cloudbuster.
21:10Reich had made a lot of claims about what the Cloudbuster could do.
21:13But the key thing was the fact that you could take it anywhere, you could point it at the sky,
21:17and you could make it rain.
21:20It really has the look of something incredibly impressive that's designed to do something very important.
21:26Ending droughts definitely fits the category of important, if orgone really exists.
21:32This theory of weather control was that it was based on this idea of orgone energy, which, as Reich said,
21:38was everywhere and permeated everything.
21:42But the problem was that nobody was able to actually observe it.
21:47This is an uneasy fit with real science.
21:50For anyone who's trained in science, I mean, something which is undetectable, which cannot be measured, which cannot be quantified,
22:00I mean, you're really getting, you're stepping onto the edge of either magic or something perhaps even worse than that.
22:13But Reich is convinced he's right.
22:16And he sets out to prove the climate-changing power of orgone to the world.
22:24In 1953, there had been a drought that had been going on for months in Maine in the U.S.
22:30And in particular, the blueberry farmers were worried about their crop.
22:34Blueberry plants take seven years to mature.
22:37So a dead crop means years of financial hardship.
22:41The farmers are desperate.
22:44Enter Wilhelm Reich and his Cloudbuster.
22:47He wheels out his device.
22:50He connects it up to a source of clear, pure water.
22:55He points it at the sky.
22:57And they begin to operate it.
23:02And the next day, it rains.
23:11Official records confirm six millimeters of rain falls the following day.
23:17The blueberry farmers are very happy. Reich gets paid.
23:20For Reich, this is a triumph.
23:24There is clearly cause and effect.
23:28Does this prove the Cloudbuster works?
23:30Or has Reich just caught a lucky break?
23:33It sounds nuts.
23:36But can you really control rainfall?
23:41One of the key requirements in order to be able to make an actual raindrop is to have something, what's
23:49called a condensation nucleus, a little sort of starting point on which the drop can form.
23:55And so if you put tiny solid particles into the air, then they will be enough to actually start the
24:03formation of droplets which will then form to Earth.
24:06Scientists have tried deliberately depositing silver iodide or dry ice inside clouds to induce rain.
24:15It's called cloud seeding.
24:19And the jury's still out on whether it works.
24:24But that didn't stop the U.S. government from weaponizing it.
24:28In 1967, the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron conducts what's called Operation Popeye, the motto of which was make mud, not
24:38war.
24:38And their goal was to extend the monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, softening the roadbed and causing
24:46transportation problems in the movements of supplies from North Vietnam into the combat areas.
24:53It's impossible to know if it really works. After all, it can rain a lot in the jungle, pretty much
24:59whatever you do.
25:01But one thing we do know is this approach can only work if you add particles to the clouds.
25:08And that's a problem for the cloud buster.
25:11It doesn't blast particles into the atmosphere.
25:15In fact, it doesn't actually seem to do anything.
25:19The device has no buttons or trigger or on switch of any sort.
25:25You just point it at the clouds and that's that.
25:29So why does it rain on the blueberry crop?
25:33Maybe it's nothing more than the luck of the draw.
25:36Most of us can buy a lottery ticket.
25:40You might win once.
25:41What you need to do is to do it over and over again and really show that there are statistics
25:48there.
25:49And what Reich does is he tries it once and he sees what he wants.
25:56But the reality is that it tells him nothing.
26:00Despite the grand claims, there's no scientific evidence that the cloud buster works.
26:07But that doesn't stop Reich.
26:09His cloud buster is about to graduate from saving blueberries to saving the world.
26:19Reich goes on to test his experiments in the Arizona desert.
26:23Whilst he's operating the cloud buster, he notices that there is an increase in cloud cover and in humidity.
26:28And he attributes this to the power of the cloud buster and the orgone energy.
26:33Then the cloud cover mysteriously breaks up.
26:37But Reich has an explanation for this.
26:41And even by Reich's standards, it's pretty out there.
26:44Spotting a light over the Catalina Mountains, Reich becomes convinced that the Earth is under attack by aliens.
26:54He claims that they are releasing a substance called deadly orgone radiation.
27:01He writes that we are at war with a power previously unknown to man.
27:07Luckily, Reich has the perfect weapon to defeat the aliens.
27:12Armed with two cloud busters, Reich fights what he claims to be a climactic interstellar battle with the aliens over
27:21the skies of Arizona.
27:25Not the craziest idea ever floated in Arizona just for the record.
27:30But while Reich is busy fighting aliens, his work is attracting the attention of an even more powerful adversary.
27:41It's not aliens who finally come for Reich.
27:45It's the U.S. government.
27:47Reich is a committed socialist with a radical attitude to sexual freedom.
27:53He rings all the alarm bells for a government paranoid about the threat of subversives.
27:58He attracts quite a lot of negative media attention.
28:02The government turns Reich's work against him.
28:05Not the cloud buster, but his earlier invention, the orgone accumulator.
28:10He was presenting the orgone accumulator box as a legitimate medical device, which they argued he didn't have the evidence
28:18to back up.
28:19The orgone accumulator is banned.
28:23Unfortunately for Reich, one of his agents sells one of the boxes without him even being involved.
28:29And the FDA considered this to be a breach of the injunction.
28:34Reich is sentenced to two years in prison.
28:38And FDA agents destroy his accumulators and books.
28:43Over six tons of Reich's writing are collected and burned at a public incinerator.
28:49Any material related to Oregon is fair game, and it all goes up in smoke.
28:55Reich's reputation is ruined.
28:58I do think it's a real shame when someone who clearly has drive, vision, and a certain kind of intelligence
29:04gets lost in a hypothesis that's not being supported.
29:08Aged 60, the creator of the radical cloud buster dies of a heart attack while still in prison.
29:16But his ideas don't die with him.
29:20Something about them continues to attract people.
29:24The issue with pseudoscience is not that it's wrong, which it is, but that it's just right enough to be
29:32interesting.
29:32So of course it's true that if you have sexual desires that are not being met, this will affect other
29:38areas of your life.
29:39It's really not true that this is quantifiable in the same way something physical is.
29:44It's not true that there is an orgasmic energy flowing through the universe that controls all of these things.
29:50Reich's ideas reduce a complex world to a much simpler one.
29:56It's really nice to believe that there's just one energy that flows through the universe and that it's a source
30:01of everything and the solution to everything.
30:04When you have a really complicated, difficult world, you can understand the appeal of an answer that's both simple and
30:10enjoyable, even if it's not the right answer.
30:13Despite no scientific proof that Orgone exists, Reich's fans are still turning out online plans to build your very own
30:22cloud buster today.
30:24Just don't expect it to rain.
30:35Locked away in the vaults of the British Museum is a strange clay tablet.
30:40It took years to be deciphered and its importance understood.
30:46It's a map of the unknown.
30:50Now, using the latest technology, we can begin to decode this ancient artifact.
31:01This is the Babylonian map of the world.
31:06Well, this is technically speaking a map.
31:08It's so much more than that.
31:11It is the oldest map of the world.
31:15This map dates to more than 2,500 years ago.
31:19It stands roughly 12 centimeters high and 8 centimeters wide.
31:25Curious diagrams and cryptic text cover its surface.
31:30You've got living cities.
31:32You've got dead cities.
31:34You've got mythological places.
31:36You've got the notion of the end of the world.
31:44And at the heart of this map is a mystery.
31:48What do the symbols and writing mean?
31:52Why was it made?
31:55Is this really a map of the world?
32:03The map is discovered in 1881 in the lost city of Sepur, 27 kilometers southwest of modern-day Baghdad.
32:13It is part of a 70,000 tablet bonanza.
32:17And under this avalanche of finds, its significance is missed.
32:25This object was pretty much put to one side for eight years until its importance was discovered as one of
32:33the first maps of the world.
32:34The information on the tablet is in cuneiform, the oldest written language on Earth.
32:40And it reveals a lost civilization.
32:47In the center of the map is a hole, a device often found on cuneiform tablets.
32:55Above this lies a rectangle representing a mighty city labeled as Babylon.
33:01We know it's the city of Babylon because the other rectangle that runs through it is the Euphrates River.
33:08And Babylon was famous for being the city that was on both sides of the Euphrates River.
33:13When the map is made around 2,600 years ago, Babylon is home to 200,000 people.
33:20It is the largest city on Earth.
33:23And the location of the greatest wonders of the ancient world.
33:27The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
33:31The Ishtar Gate.
33:33And the Bible's Tower of Babel.
33:36So it's no surprise that this map of the world revolves around mighty Babylon.
33:42They're setting out their concept of their kingdom and who they are through the means of a map in which
33:49they place themselves in the center.
33:52And everything that isn't themselves on the periphery.
33:56Beyond Babylon itself, other features of this lost world appear.
34:01There are also just plain circles that fall in various places and these are ruins of ancient cities.
34:11There are mountains marked in the north in roughly the same location as the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey.
34:20A swamp in the south corresponds to the marshlands of the Euphrates and Tigris floodplains.
34:28But there is something strange about this tablet.
34:32Unlike maps as we know them, it has no scale, no measure of distance, no roads, no paths.
34:40The Babylonian map is not a map which will allow you to find where you are in the world.
34:47This map clearly isn't for navigation.
34:50So what is it for?
34:56The Babylonians do seem to have the knowledge and the skill that a map maker would need.
35:03We know that the Babylonians had surveying skills.
35:07So if you could make a more accurate map, but you make something which is rather less detailed and crude,
35:14there must be another reason for it.
35:17The answer to that may begin with the line surrounding this lost Babylonian world.
35:23The circle that goes around it called the Bitter River.
35:28By bitter, we're talking about the kind of salt seas.
35:32The map does not end at the bitter sea.
35:35It shows land beyond it.
35:37But it looks very different.
35:39The outer bodies of land are shaped like triangles,
35:44reducing as they head towards the abyss at the edge of the world.
35:50Some people have even said the way that they're presented as kind of triangles coming out
35:55represents the way you'd have seen the land approaching by sea.
36:03These are distant places outside the boundary of the bitter sea and beyond the lands of Babylon.
36:10Some of the labels say, oh, the sun never shone here.
36:14It was dark as night.
36:16And there were places where birds wouldn't fly.
36:21These may well be partially known places based on travelers' tales or handed down stories.
36:28They have it on the map and they've tried to map it up.
36:32It's something that you know is there, but you don't really have enough information to describe it or even kind
36:41of put it properly.
36:44Later map makers called such unknown lands terra incognita.
36:49In cartography, terra incognita is the land unknown.
36:55We often get the phrase,
36:58Here be lions.
37:00Here be dragons.
37:02In the absence of facts or first-hand experience,
37:06map makers use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
37:10It's amazing really because it's not just describing a place, but it's almost describing a philosophical concept of something that
37:21you don't know and therefore can't even imagine.
37:28The text on the tablet also includes references to strange wildlife.
37:33You have all different types of exotic animals, almost otherworldly creatures like gazelles and a scorpion man.
37:44And that kind of captures the idea that they're seen as these otherworldly mythic places.
37:50The heavily damaged text on the front includes references to legendary figures and the Babylonian creation myth.
37:59This map and the writing on the tablet are effectively a description of more than just the Babylonians' physical world.
38:06It's their cosmology.
38:08This is a strange blending of worlds, of the known world, of a mythological world beyond.
38:17But one theory suggests that this map could be more than just a description of a belief system.
38:24Could it have a more earthly purpose?
38:321,700 years before the map is made, Babylon is part of the first great empire on Earth.
38:40And at the center of everything is its ruler, the legendary Sargon the Great.
38:46The time of Sargon was a golden age.
38:50This goes back many centuries to around 2,300 BC.
38:55A multi-ethnic civilization stretched over a great breadth of land with roots by land and sea.
39:05This was potentially the world's first empire.
39:12But since then, Babylon has become just a pale shadow of its former greatness.
39:18It was no longer the golden age of Sargon.
39:22This region was no longer a world leader.
39:26Babylon had been conquered by Assyria and was in a perpetual state of revolt.
39:32It was ridden by conflict and civil war.
39:35Yet this map shows a Babylon-centric world view.
39:40That could be because the empire strikes back.
39:43They kick the Assyrians out of Babylon.
39:46By the 7th and 6th centuries BC, we do see a glimmer of change with a short-lived neo-Babylonian
39:54empire.
39:55In this period, Babylonian culture and arts blossom.
39:59And spectacular palaces and temples are built across the empire, particularly in Babylon.
40:06This era features the iconic king Nebuchadnezzar, who, of course, we all know, created the hanging gardens of Babylon.
40:16In the text on the front, the map talks of the Babylonian creator god, Marduk.
40:22And it suggests one of the distant triangular lands may be home to both Utnapishtim, their equivalent of Noah, and
40:31Sargon himself.
40:32It's like a golden hits of Babylonian mythology.
40:37One means of interpretation might be to say that this map served as a hearkening back to that age.
40:45Could its purpose have been to revive ideas of Babylon's lost golden past?
40:51It's tempting to connect it with the resurgence of Babylon in the 7th and 6th centuries, and this short, secondary
41:00golden age.
41:01And see it as an attempt to appeal to the glorious past of the area.
41:09That's consistent with what we know of the neo-Babylonian world.
41:15Archaeologically speaking, there's other evidence of the neo-Babylonian state using the past as a form of legitimation.
41:24We know they restore one of Sargon's great ancient cities, Ur, including its towering ziggurat.
41:32And they restore the Isagela, the great temple to Marduk in the center of Babylon itself.
41:41The neo-Babylonians certainly wouldn't be alone in using a glorious past to help shape the present.
41:48If we look, for example, at Mussolini in the 1930s, he used the Roman past and archaeology as a means
41:57of discussing Italian greatness and the Italian right to reconquer North Africa.
42:06More recently in history, we see Saddam Hussein doing the same thing in Iran.
42:13Could the Babylonian map also have been intended to draw a parallel with past greatness?
42:19Although it's a tempting theory and seems to fit, modern scholars are skeptical.
42:26The one thing we can say with some certainty is this ancient clay tablet shows us the world the map
42:32maker wants us to see.
42:36Much like the map of the world today and its projections, the relative size of continents, this is all guided
42:44by the priorities of the people who are drawing the maps.
42:49We just can't be certain what this map maker intended.
42:54Is this strange thing made as a map, as a cosmological guide, or as a piece of propaganda?
43:02What's so intriguing about this object is the fact that we probably won't ever know exactly what it was meant
43:12to be used for.
43:15Unfortunately, the Neo-Babylonian Empire that likely created it lasts less than a century.
43:21But this remnant of that short-lived period remains, the oldest known map of the world in existence.
43:33The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:34The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:37The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:40The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:41The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:42The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:43The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:45The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:50The Neo-Babylonian Empire
43:55The Neo-Babylonian Empire
44:02Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE