Kind: captions

Language: en

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I first started studying antiquity here at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford 25 years
ago.

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This is the oldest public museum in the world, so it seemed like the perfect place
to try to piece together the story of mankind.

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Back then it was much dustier and more down-at-heel, but now it's had this amazing
£61 million refit.

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It doesn't just house objects of beauty; it's an object of beauty in itself.

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Then when I was studying, one of the things that I was taught was that the ancient
world ended in around about 390 AD,

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basically with the outlawing of paganism, and then, magically, modern history was
born.

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Our first film explores a city that sits right on the cusp of that epoch-forming
moment—

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the city of Alexandria.

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Alexandria was built on a dream, the idea that all knowledge could be stored in one
place,

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and the caretakers of that knowledge would have extraordinary power.

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The dreamer was Alexander the Great, and he physically laid out the footprint of
the city by scattering

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barley flour in the sand.
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The men that came after him then invited in the greatest architects and engineers
from the known world to make his vision flesh.

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Alexandria was a buzzing place.

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It was heaving with philosophers and scientists, with high priests and power
brokers.

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And there's one person who sits right at the heart of that story.

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She's an unsung hero, or, rather, a heroine. This is somebody who should be a
household name, and yet somehow,

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she's been relegated to the footnotes of history.

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She's a scientist and a philosopher — a woman called Hypatia.

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And since I'm a fan of women, I'm going to give her an airing.

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So although it might seem rather perverse in a season that ranges right across the
ancient world, we are going to begin at the end.

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It's the dog days of the fourth century AD, and the glories of the ancient world

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come tumbling down in a tumult of prejudice and power grab, religious martyrdom and
fire.

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Welcome to the beginning of the modern world.

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Just imagine a city that housed all the knowledge of the world, all the
mathematical and scientific

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treatise, all the works of literature and the flights of philosophical fancy,

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a place where writers and artists and scientists met to debate and to pioneer
thought.

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Just think of what ideas and inventions that city would produce,

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what power its knowledge would bring to its rulers.

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Just think of what would happen if that wealth of knowledge was destroyed, burnt to
the ground or scattered to the winds,

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a terrible moment when civilization itself stopped in its tracks.

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This sounds like some kind of science fiction fantasy.

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But this was a reality, and this was the real place where it happened, a city where
its secrets are hidden

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beneath the sea and beneath its streets.

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This is the city of Alexandria, and this is its extraordinary story.

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Although we might think that Athens and Rome were the greatest cities in antiquity,

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for my money, that claim could well go to Alexandria.

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For over 2,300 years, the city has occupied a key junction between the Eastern and
Western worlds.

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Lying in Egypt at the top of the Nile Delta on the coast of the Mediterranean,
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today it's a sprawling place, and every inch is jam-packed with activity.

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But curiously, the ancient city is conspicuous by its absence.

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The modern city here really buzzes with life, but it can be a bit hard to get a
handle on ancient Alexandria.

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You could spend weeks here without realizing that this was once home to what was
really a roll call

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of the great and the good of antiquity.

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Because it was here that Alexander the Great was buried.

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It was here that Cleopatra seduced Marc Antony and Caesar, and this was the home to
one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

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Piecing together the scattered jigsaw puzzle, I'm going to explore the incredible
story of this extraordinary city,

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where the Pharos lighthouse shone its beacon out over spectacular theatres, temples
and colonnades,

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monuments as grand as anywhere in the ancient world,

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[...] uses a human scale, it's more than 30 meters high.

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which combined the best of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian design to create a dynamic,
hybrid culture.

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We're mixing and matching. We're being purely Alexandrian. We're taking what we
want, sticking it together. We're open to everything.
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And most importantly, where intellectual advances, new philosophies, new sciences,
were a driving force of the city.

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And that's what makes this place so special.

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Although Alexandria was immensely wealthy,

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it didn't just sponsor grand monuments; it put an absolute value on wisdom.

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Because wisdom meant power. And it was Alexandria's ultimate ambition to become the
most powerful city on Earth

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by capturing all the world's knowledge within its walls,

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an ambition which stemmed from its very beginnings and the vision of its founder.

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By ancient Egyptian standards, Alexandria was a relative new build. It was founded
only 2,300 years ago,

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halfway in time between the pyramids and us.

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The fourth century BC was a kind of in-between time of history.

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Golden-age Athens had dimmed, and Rome was still a provincial backwater.

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But a very unlikely corner of northern Greece was about to have a huge impact.

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From there was going to come a man who would be a real player on the world stage.

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In fact, it was somebody who was going to change the world order.
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That man was Alexander the Great.

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Great, because Alexander's achievements were truly outstanding.

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From provincial Macedonian beginnings,

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he united the Greeks as a nation, defeated the Persians, and set about creating the
largest empire the world had ever seen.

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From northern Greece, his territories stretched out across the Mediterranean, deep
into the Middle East and towards North Africa.

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Alexander was prodigiously ambitious. By the age of 24. he was already cutting a
swathe through the territories of the known world.

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But he could not rest easy until he'd laid his hands on the really big prize —

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Egypt.

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Because this was one of the most admired and envied countries in the whole of
antiquity.

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The Nile River which watered the land gave it fast agricultural wealth,

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creating the manpower and resources to cover the land in glorious artworks and
engineering triumphs.

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Even the Greeks, who thought they were culturally superior to everyone else and
described anyone who wasn't Greek as barbaroi, 'barbarians',

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respected Egyptian achievements.

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The Greek father of history Herodotus said that nowhere else in the world were
there more marvellous things,

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more works of unspeakable greatness.

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Such a rich prize was irresistible to Alexander. In 332 BC,

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he invaded Egypt and overcame the Persians, who'd dominated the Egyptian people for
the past two centuries.

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But to seal his victory, he now had to win over the hearts and minds of the
Egyptian people,

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whose unique religion and culture had been rooted in the land for over 3,000 years.

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By the time Alexander arrived in Egypt, this pyramid was over 2,300 years old.

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But the locals here didn't think of it as some kind of antique curiosity,

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because this is where a god-king had been buried. The Egyptians believed that it
pulsated in a sort of sacred power.

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Confronted with a culture so alien to his own,

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Alexander didn't underestimate the challenge that faced him.

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He realized he'd have to come up with an ingenious approach to get the Egyptians
onside

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and accept his new, Greek rule.

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Typically, when it comes to making sense of the story of Alexandria, the clues to
how he did this

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are buried deep beneath the desert sands.

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So had we been walking down here in Alexander's day, what would we have seen?

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PROF. IKRAM: You would have seen something quite different.

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It would have been far grander. You would have had these limestone, beautifully cut
blocks, and you would have

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inscription, and there would have been a big processional way lined with sphinxes.

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So it would have been quite glamorous, not quite what it is now.

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I mean, was it typical to have things

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underground like this?

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For the ancient Egyptians, yes. In the underground stuff is a good place for
rebirth and resurrection and anything secret,

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so they used it a great deal.

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HUGHES: Oh, it's suddenly pretty atmospheric.

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IKRAM: Yes.

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HUGHES: And that's what Alexander had to get to grips with —

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a culture which not only believed in life on Earth, but which was obsessed with
life after death.

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Wow.

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Wow, I knew there was a sarcophagus down here, I had no idea it was this size!

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IKRAM: It is absolutely enormous.

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It's sort of, three meters by five meters, and it weighs more than 60 tons, and
it's made of absolutely solid granite.

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HUGHES: Oh, it's got glyphs on it.

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IKRAM: Yep. Yep, here, see?

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You can just make out- this is in fact the name of who it belongs to.

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It's "Hapi" in glyphs, and it actually were turned into "Apis" by the Greeks.

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And so it's Hapi, which is the great bull god, the Apis bull.

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And this is his sarcophagus.

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HUGHED: So it's a bull buried in here?

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IKRAM: Yeah, it's a bull.

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HUGHES: I just presumed, cause it's so kind of glorious, it would be a human.

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IKRAM: No,
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it actually is a bull burial because this was a sacred incarnation of one of the
Egyptian gods.

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And so he was very clear after his death.

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And here it says, "Apis, son of- beloved son of Osiris, may he be given life,
eternity, and prosperity" and so on.

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And here's his name one more time, so you really knew to whom it belonged.

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I mean the Egyptians do do that in their religion don't they, they mix up animals
and men very happily.

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IKRAM: Very much so. For the Egyptians each god had a totemic animal.

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So they're always closely allied, which is very different from the Greeks.

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HUGHES: And so how did Alexander deal with that very alien

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landscape when he arrived here?

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IKRAM: Alexander was brilliant. I mean he, instead of coming in and saying "tch,
you all are fools",

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he instead said, "ah, I am part of this whole thing", and he came and he made
offerings to the Apis, he gave money and

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lands to the temples. The Egyptians thought, "wow, one of us!

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We love him!" And then, in a just brilliant move,

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he also visited a temple where he was hailed as the son of a chief Egyptian god.

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So he was supposed to be the divine ruler on Earth,

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which fits into the Egyptian belief system that their pharaoh is divinely born and
a god on Earth. And so there was,

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Alexander as a pharaoh, really, and the Egyptians loved him.

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Alexander was canny. By choosing to embrace Egyptian customs rather than just stomp
on them,

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he managed to effect a very sympathetic kind of regime change.

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The Egyptian people didn't think of him as one of them, but one of us.

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Yeah, he had done remarkably well. He realized his grand Egyptian dream.

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And now he was being celebrated here, not just as a conqueror or a king,

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but as a true living god.

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But even that wasn't enough for Alexander.

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He didn't just want to be another in a long line of pharaohs,

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he really wanted to dominate the country, and that meant creating a new city that
would bear his name for all time.

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But first he had to find a suitable location.

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The ancient Egyptians had always looked inwards, their key cities centering on the
Nile.

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But in this,

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Alexander differed.

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He also wanted his new city to look back towards his Greek homeland, and outwards
towards his new empire.

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And it was said that he had a very illustrious figure to guide him on his way.

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The ancient author Plutarch tells us that Alexander was drawn to this very spot, a
place called Pharos,

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by a prophetic dream.

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"Then in the night, as Alexander lay asleep, he saw a wonderful vision.

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A venerable man with shaggy hair and a beard appeared to stand by his side and
recite these verses:

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'Now there is an island in the much dashing sea in front of Egypt. Pharos is what
men call it.'"

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Alexander believed that the mysterious visitor was none other than Homer himself,
the great epic bard,

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and as well as being a hard-nosed politician, he was an incurable romantic.

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And so, he took his advice, and this is where he came to found his city.

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But the barren stretch of coastline Alexander encountered couldn't be more
different from today's hectic metropolis.

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When Alexander got here, Pharos was still just an island and there was a tiny
little settlement here. And the coastline of

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Egypt was very jagged, which meant it was very difficult for boats to land.

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But Alexander had a grand plan to link Pharos to the mainland, and so he built a
causeway

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running all the way across, almost a mile long,

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and he extended this spit here to create a man-made harbour.

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This would become the busiest port in the world,

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the gateway to one of the richest and most multicultural cities on Earth.

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And that was only part of the dream.

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Alexander and his successors, the Ptolemies, ravened for knowledge,

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knowledge that would give them the power to trade, to build, to conquer.

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Their ambition: for Alexandria to become the intellectual engine room of the
ancient world.

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Ancient Egypt,

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land of the mighty pharaohs, living god-kings, whose people built fantastic
monuments in their honour.

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A civilization which had been a key player in the region for over 4,000 years.

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In the fourth century BC, the Greek Alexander the Great conquered this land,

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winning over the Egyptian people and making it his own,

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creating a new city in his name,

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Alexandria.

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Starting from scratch,

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Alexander envisaged a unique model city

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strictly laid out on an innovative grid system,

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where Greek and Egyptian culture came together to create one of the richest places
on Earth.

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Today so little is left above ground, to get a sense of the ancient city, you have
to descend deep beneath the modern metropolis

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into a city of the dead.

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I mean, they're fantastic, aren't they?

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CLEMENT: Well, this is, it's, you know, typically Alexandrian. We've got- there's a
mishmash of different styles.

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Got- You know the, the, the

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Medusa up here, early Greek, the Agathodaimon, Greek,

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but then Egyptian elements. The frieze up there of

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copperheads and little solar disks on top. All of the Egyptian tradition.

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And this was just the tomb for one family?

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CLEMENT: Well, one family, we presume. We're not sure. There's three sarcophagi in
there.

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No bodies were ever found.

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The tomb robbers got here long before the archaeologists.

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HUGHES: They might not have left any bodies,

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but they've got some pretty lifelike guardians to the tomb.

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CLEMENT: Well, archaeologists over the years have presumed the statues on either
side of the entrance

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represent the owners of the tomb, but what's interesting about them is, if you look
at the head of this middle character over here,

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the face is detailed, the hairstyle is pure Roman, Graeco-Roman tradition, and yet
the body, you know, stiff, one leg forward, arms to the

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side, typical of Egyptian stature.

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It's quite ugly in a way, the way the two have been stuck together though.
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Oh it's not particularly well done, no, but that's part of the charm of this place,
is,

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we're taking, we're mixing and matching, we're being purely Alexandrian, we're
taking what we want, sticking it together,

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we're not melding, creating a new art form. We're just, we're just, we're open to
everything.

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We're very receptive, and there's a great example

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just inside the- the doorways here to the left, you get another really good example
of it as well.

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HUGHES: Oh, yes!

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CLEMENT: Cause this is the Anubis figure.

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HUGHES: Yeah.

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CLEMENT: Anubis was the Egyptian god of embalming, the dog-headed figure, but look
how he's dressed.

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He's dressed as a Roman soldier, but with his Egyptian head guarding

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whoever's buried within this tomb.

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HUGHES: It is, it's fantastic. It's just like top and tails, isn't it?

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As you said he's got a very Egyptian head and then this kind of Roman body with his
little, little...

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CLEMENT: And his little kilt.

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HUGHES: Roman skirt.

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CLEMENT: Yeah, that's mix-and-match.

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HUGHES: Yeah. The only thing I think though is that, throughout the ancient world
you do get this exchange of cultures. You know, in classical Athens,

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you've got Eastern cults, and the Romans are very good at taking on the East as
well, so why is Alexandria particularly good at it?

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I think because Alexandria was a new town and it had to sort of, it had to create
its own legitimacy.

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It was a new town on a very very ancient land which had a certain weight within the
ancient world as well.

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I mean, Egypt, the Greeks were in awe of Egypt.

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So there was all this sort of cultural baggage here already.

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But

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they also brought with them, their, their,

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their notions of Hellenic culture, of Greek culture, and by doing that, it draped
us off the mantle of Egypt,

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but at the same time brought with it its, its Greek notions.

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It was also an extremely wealthy town, and it's a port town, and they're always
open to influences.

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HUGHES: What you have to remember

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is that this was no ordinary city.

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It hadn't grown up organically at the Bronze Age or the Classical Age like so many
of the great cities of antiquity.

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This was, if you like, a kind of a high-minded new town, the brainchild of

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a visionary and highly educated man.

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From the age of 13,

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Alexander had been taught, day in day out, by the great philosopher Aristotle

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and a spirit of inquiry was imbued in every cell of his body. And when he founded
Alexandria

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he passed that spirit on into the very DNA of the city.

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This was a place where knowledge was as valuable a currency as grain or gold.

241
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And in a precious archaeological oasis in the heart of the city, Kom el-Dikka,

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archaeologists have begun to find the evidence to prove it.

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A Polish team have been working on a discovery which reveals exactly where
Alexandria's ideas were played out.

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KULICKA: Here we are in the, one of the lecture halls. Probably it was one lecture
from the complex of the university.

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HUGHES: It's really interesting, so you've got the lecture rooms right on the main
street?

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KULICKA: Yes, it was the center of the social life in the late antique Alexandria.
And now, here, here,

247
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we are here, three rows of benches in the classrooms.

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HUGHES: Mhm.

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KULICKA: And the, the benches devoted for the students.

250
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And here we have the main chair, topmost seat for the, probably for the teacher.

251
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HUGHES: You can just imagine how intimate this lecture hall would have been,
seating just 30 students studying law,

252
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rhetoric, and science.

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KULICKA: And here we have a single block of stone.

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Probably this is kind of platform or kind of podium for the students' declamation.

255
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HUGHES: So, oh okay, so the students have to

256
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KULICKA: Yes.

257
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HUGHES: do a kind of demonstration?

258
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KULICKA: To the opposite side, to the teacher.

259
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HUGHES: So, I'm going to be a teacher. So if- [laughs] So if I'm sitting here, so
I'm the teacher,

260
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very comfortably, on your steps, and then the student would be there, giving their
paper or presentation.

261
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KULICKA: Yes, exactly.

262
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HUGHES: Did it get hot here?

263
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KULICKA: You know, this, the lecture house were covered, probably by the

264
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flat roof. We don't have any indication, but probably the auditorium could be high
as

265
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up to 5,5 meters, as the level of the columns.

266
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HUGHES: How many teaching rooms like this are there?

267
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KULICKA: So far we've found 20 lecture halls. Probably it was much bigger.

268
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HUGHES: These teaching rooms were a hothouse of knowledge in the very heart of
Alexandria.

269
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This was, in a way, a city of ivory towers. It was buzzing with provocative and
cutting-edge ideas.

270
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Its rulers had wanted to acquire the intellectual tools to unlock the mysteries of
the universe

271
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to allow them to rule the world.

272
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It was where the mathematician Eratosthenes proved that the earth was round and
accurately measured its circumference,

273
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where a thousand years ahead of his time, Aristarchus suggested that the Earth
moved around the Sun,

274
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and where the greatest minds and most extraordinary thinkers began to map their way
through the stars.

275
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Now I've got to confess that Alexandria has got a particular allure for me for one
reason,

276
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and it's a rather wonderful and mysterious woman called Hypatia.

277
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Now Hypatia ran her own philosophy school here, and by all accounts she was quite
extraordinary.

278
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Hypatia was born in around 350 AD, and the very fact she was a woman in a world
dominated by men

279
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makes her achievements doubly exceptional.

280
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For over 40 years she made groundbreaking advances in algebra

281
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and revolutionised astronomy,

282
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and correspondence from a fellow philosopher really sums up just how much she was
valued.

283
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It's a collection of letters written to her by one of her former students called
Synesius.

284
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The language used is very very intimate, so you get a real sense of her character
and just how

285
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respected she was. Synesius says for instance

286
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that nothing in the world is more wonderful than her and that even in Hades

287
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she is the only thing that he'll remember.

288
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Actually, she's been remembered by some others too.

289
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A crater on the Moon's surface bears her name,

290
00:24:52,359 --> 00:24:58,319
a journal of philosophy is called Hypatia, and she's just been immortalized in a
new film —

291
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'Agora'.

292
00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:07,559
Imagine Hypatia working late into the night,

293
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the famous Alexandrian streetlamps burning outside,

294
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her staring up into the night sky for inspiration.

295
00:25:16,179 --> 00:25:22,739
She was a philosopher in the true sense of the word, in that she was a philosophos,
a lover of wisdom.

296
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What's really interesting about Hypatia though, as with so many of her Alexandrian
colleagues,

297
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is that she didn't just deal in abstract thought but she had a very
298
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practical application for her ideas, and for instance used her mathematics and her
geometry to redesign this

299
00:25:40,120 --> 00:25:43,260
amazing gizmo. It was really a kind of

300
00:25:43,260 --> 00:25:49,260
multifunctional instrument, the sort of iPod of her day, if you like, only in her
day it had a much more

301
00:25:49,480 --> 00:25:54,120
romantic name, cause this was called an astrolabe.

302
00:25:54,130 --> 00:25:57,030
Literally that means a "catcher of the stars".

303
00:26:09,620 --> 00:26:15,969
One of the things that was worked on here in Alexandria and perfected was this
amazing instrument, the astrolabe. You're clutching one.

304
00:26:15,970 --> 00:26:16,660
EL-MIKATY: Yes.

305
00:26:16,660 --> 00:26:18,820
HUGHES: What did it allow people to do?

306
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EL-MIKATY: The astrolabe has many functions: telling the time of the day, telling
your latitude, your altitude,

307
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it can measure the height of mountains, it can measure the width of rivers,

308
00:26:29,860 --> 00:26:32,050
but I'll tell you how to measure the time of the day.

309
00:26:32,300 --> 00:26:33,020
Okay.

310
00:26:33,020 --> 00:26:38,830
Now here is the astrolabe, and here is the pointer, this is what we call the
pointer. We align these two holes,

311
00:26:39,080 --> 00:26:46,059
pointing to a star, okay. When we align these two holes like this, pointing, we get
a reading with the pointer right here.

312
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We take this reading here. Which is a letter, an Arabic letter, but for them, it's
a number, okay. We take this number,

313
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we turn the astrolabe, and we have the spider here.

314
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We point the pointers here to the number that we have taken from the back.

315
00:27:02,330 --> 00:27:07,959
And when we point it to here, we get the reading. You see that pointer here? It
will point to the degrees,

316
00:27:08,480 --> 00:27:14,500
the degrees that the sun has risen or the, the star has risen from the horizon,
okay?

317
00:27:15,800 --> 00:27:23,080
360 degrees is equal to 24 hours. So each one hour is 15 degrees.

318
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So if we have here number of degrees, I can know the time of the day.

319
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HUGHES: It's a very powerful instrument because it allows you to do all kinds of
things when if you know the, like, night sky,

320
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you know your latitude, if you know the height of a mountain, you can explore or
you can trade.

321
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EL-MIKATY: It has actually changed the way they functioned.

322
00:27:54,620 --> 00:27:59,920
Alexandria did sponsor pure reason, pure thoughts, ideas just for ideas' sake,

323
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but it was also an immensely busy and practical place. The astrolabe, for example,
was very beautiful,

324
00:28:06,500 --> 00:28:10,989
but when it was applied it allowed men to trade and to travel and to conquer.

325
00:28:11,660 --> 00:28:18,609
The whole city was very enterprising and outward-looking, and that ethos was
directly in line with the vision of its founder.

326
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Alexander had created a unique city, a central point between East and West

327
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where the greatest thinkers not only explored pure thought, but applied their ideas
to become real players on the world stage.

328
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The scale of Alexandria's intellectual ambition was immense: to house within its
walls all knowledge,

329
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and with that knowledge make its rulers the most powerful people on Earth.

330
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Although ancient Alexandria is virtually invisible, the ghost of its presence is
there in the layout of the modern city.

331
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I tell you, what is very exciting,

332
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Because the modern city is laid out on the ancient grid plan, when you walk down
these streets, you are physically walking in the footsteps

333
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of Hypatia and all those other fantastic philosophers,

334
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and that feels like a very good place to be.

335
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As a cultural melting pot with intellectual ambition, ancient Alexandria became a
unique environment

336
00:29:44,940 --> 00:29:48,500
for scholarship, a place where the extraordinary thinker Hypatia,

337
00:29:48,899 --> 00:29:55,489
schooled in Greek thought, could also draw on Egyptian wisdom and Babylonian
science to help her map the stars,

338
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where a wealth of traditions from around the world combined,

339
00:29:59,820 --> 00:30:04,730
enabling the greatest thinkers to make scientific advances achievable nowhere else,

340
00:30:05,700 --> 00:30:09,830
creating a new Egypt and a model for society in the future.

341
00:30:19,410 --> 00:30:27,379
One of the great characters of medical history came to Alexandria, he was a man
called Galen, and even though he'd travelled right across the eastern
Mediterranean,

342
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it was the cosmopolitan conditions of this city that allowed him to make quite
extraordinary

343
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:39,560
advances. In fact, it was here he made scientific breakthroughs that wouldn't be
bettered for another 1,500 years.

344
00:30:45,080 --> 00:30:49,020
So what are these treasures that you're removing from the tubs here?

345
00:30:49,020 --> 00:30:51,600
BAINBRIDGE: They're a variety of things. There's a

346
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brain of a horse,

347
00:30:52,980 --> 00:30:53,600
HUGHES: [sighs]

348
00:30:53,700 --> 00:30:55,590
BAINBRIDGE: and this one with,

349
00:30:55,590 --> 00:30:56,760
with a spinal cord attached,

350
00:30:56,760 --> 00:30:57,860
HUGHES: Ooh, oh!

351
00:30:57,860 --> 00:30:59,320
BAINBRIDGE: is a, that's a dog.

352
00:30:59,320 --> 00:31:05,540
HUGHES: It's lovely. So I hope you'll notice I'm a very strict vegetarian, this is
not sort of- this is way beyond my life experiences.

353
00:31:05,540 --> 00:31:07,720
BAINBRIDGE: That's alright, I'm, I'm not expecting to eat them.

354
00:31:07,720 --> 00:31:08,620
HUGHES: Good.

355
00:31:08,840 --> 00:31:14,420
Just explain to me, cause you're a veterinary anatomist, so why have you got a
particular interest in Galen?

356
00:31:14,670 --> 00:31:18,379
BAINBRIDGE: It's really because of the brain, because I think Galen was the central

357
00:31:19,140 --> 00:31:21,410
mover in the history of studying the brain.

358
00:31:21,410 --> 00:31:24,379
He was the first person who realized what it was and what it did.

359
00:31:24,780 --> 00:31:27,600
And why was Alexandria such a key city for him?

360
00:31:27,600 --> 00:31:31,720
In the European part of the Mediterranean world, there were taboos, and then
eventually laws,

361
00:31:32,340 --> 00:31:36,980
against chopping up dead people, dissecting dead people, which made life very
difficult for him.

362
00:31:36,980 --> 00:31:39,829
So he had to use animals like these,

363
00:31:40,290 --> 00:31:44,449
where really what he wanted to know is, he wanted to know about what was going on
in humans.

364
00:31:44,450 --> 00:31:49,670
And this was much easier in Egypt because the Egyptians have much more of a
tradition and partly, because of

365
00:31:49,980 --> 00:31:56,900
mummification, have much more of a tradition of dealing with parts of dead human
people and perhaps not worrying about it so much.

366
00:31:56,900 --> 00:31:59,810
HUGHES: But the brain was not any particular importance to the

367
00:32:00,060 --> 00:32:05,329
Egyptians. I mean, cause, there are stories of them, when they're doing the
mummification of them pulling the brain out through the nose, for instance.

368
00:32:05,330 --> 00:32:07,010
BAINBRIDGE: Yeah, we don't know whether, it's Herodotus

369
00:32:07,010 --> 00:32:11,359
who said that, we don't know whether that's actually true. You'd need an enormous
nose to get a brain out through.

370
00:32:12,210 --> 00:32:15,620
But it's certainly true the thing that the Egyptians and the Greeks had in common,
neither

371
00:32:15,620 --> 00:32:19,790
of them thought the brain was very important, until Galen came along. Aristotle
said

372
00:32:19,790 --> 00:32:24,320
it was probably just the radiator for the heart. The heart creates all this heat
and the brain is just a way of

373
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radiating it away out of the body.

374
00:32:27,200 --> 00:32:29,060
And so why was Galen different? How

375
00:32:29,060 --> 00:32:31,720
did he come to realize that there was something else going on?

376
00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:33,980
BAINBRIDGE: Because he looked at the brain. You look at the human brain,

377
00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:39,190
you look at animal brains, and he said, well if you look at them, they're
incredibly complicated.

378
00:32:39,290 --> 00:32:45,310
He said for example, here's the cerebrum at the front with all its folds, and
here's the cerebellum at the back with its even finer

379
00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:51,669
folds. You look on the inside, and you see it's even- There's the brainstem down
there. It's even more complicated.

380
00:32:51,980 --> 00:32:57,280
So it's got all these different bits, so this doesn't look like something that's
just there to radiate heat away.

381
00:32:57,280 --> 00:33:02,680
He said it must be doing something more complicated than that. The other thing he
noticed about it was

382
00:33:02,990 --> 00:33:07,390
first of all, if you look at the brain, it has the senses attached to it. If you

383
00:33:08,570 --> 00:33:13,179
dissect a brain... I'll get this out. This is a sheep brain with the eyes

384
00:33:13,910 --> 00:33:14,960
still attached.

385
00:33:14,960 --> 00:33:16,080
HUGHES: Yeah, lovely. Thank you.

386
00:33:16,080 --> 00:33:17,710
BAINBRIDGE: And that's the important thing.

387
00:33:17,710 --> 00:33:23,889
He said, well, the brain is connected to the special senses by these large thick
nerves.

388
00:33:23,890 --> 00:33:25,730
He said that must mean something, and

389
00:33:25,730 --> 00:33:33,040
he had this wonderful phrase used where he said, the brain is surrounded by the
special sense organs as if they are the servants and

390
00:33:33,040 --> 00:33:35,040
guards of the great king.
391
00:33:35,330 --> 00:33:41,409
So he'd already elevated the brain to being in the position of a king in control of
the special senses.

392
00:33:41,810 --> 00:33:45,759
HUGHES: I'm glad he added a bit of poetry to something fairly disgusting-looking
like that.

393
00:33:46,100 --> 00:33:51,489
BAINBRIDGE: And so he demonstrated that not only that it's the brain where all the
sensory information comes in, but also

394
00:33:51,490 --> 00:33:58,000
each end, it's where all the nerves radiate out to the body to move the body. So
he's really showing the brain takes the information in,

395
00:33:58,640 --> 00:34:03,369
processes it, puts it out again. Really the brain is where you think, it's where
where you are.

396
00:34:03,530 --> 00:34:06,440
And really he was the first person to show that.

397
00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:08,620
That is immensely important.

398
00:34:08,620 --> 00:34:14,590
I mean, if you prove just how powerful the brain is, that's going to revolutionise
what people think about the human body,

399
00:34:14,590 --> 00:34:16,880
and, I mean, all sorts of things, the human soul as well.

400
00:34:16,880 --> 00:34:20,769
BAINBRIDGE: Mm. He completely changed the way we think about the body and
especially the brain.

401
00:34:31,119 --> 00:34:35,399
Alexandria created a buzzing environment where men like Galen and women like
Hypatia

402
00:34:35,619 --> 00:34:39,719
could meet like minds and begin to reveal the workings of the universe,

403
00:34:45,200 --> 00:34:47,260
because these thinkers weren't working in isolation,

404
00:34:47,540 --> 00:34:51,249
and that's possibly Alexandria's greatest achievement.

405
00:34:51,649 --> 00:34:56,378
It had created an environment where great minds could gather to discuss and develop
their ideas,

406
00:34:57,139 --> 00:35:02,019
the largest store of knowledge the world had ever known.

407
00:35:04,430 --> 00:35:08,169
Like so much of ancient Alexandria, its libraries have long since disappeared.

408
00:35:08,869 --> 00:35:16,838
But modern Alexandrians have begun to acknowledge their amazing heritage with a new
state-of-the-art library capturing its predecessor's spirit.

409
00:35:19,040 --> 00:35:26,709
There have been collections of texts and books in other ancient cities, but the
ambition of the library here was quite extraordinary.

410
00:35:28,220 --> 00:35:36,099
Alexandria wanted to be the repository of all knowledge on Earth, and so a copy of
every single book in the world

411
00:35:36,380 --> 00:35:38,380
was to be stored here.

412
00:35:44,300 --> 00:35:46,300
Every work of literature,

413
00:35:46,310 --> 00:35:48,310
tragedy, comedy, and poetry,

414
00:35:48,800 --> 00:35:54,849
every history, every scientific treatise from maths to medicine, physics to
astronomy.

415
00:35:55,250 --> 00:36:00,399
And not just Greek texts, but works from around the world, in Hebrew, Latin,

416
00:36:01,040 --> 00:36:03,040
Babylonian, and later, Arabic.
417
00:36:04,040 --> 00:36:07,869
Even today, putting together such a collection would be quite a feat.

418
00:36:08,210 --> 00:36:10,929
But this was the age before mass publishing.

419
00:36:11,390 --> 00:36:14,530
Each work existed as a handwritten papyrus,

420
00:36:14,810 --> 00:36:19,569
and that scroll might be the only copy of that papyrus in the whole world.

421
00:36:21,750 --> 00:36:29,360
Today the majority of the few fragments that remain now survive not in Alexandria,
but another bastion of learning —

422
00:36:30,540 --> 00:36:32,540
Oxford University.

423
00:36:36,540 --> 00:36:39,740
How many of these texts would there have been in the libraries?

424
00:36:39,740 --> 00:36:43,009
OBBINK: I reckoned half a million. Everything from

425
00:36:43,770 --> 00:36:49,640
Homer, the e- some of the earliest Greek papyri were texts of the Homeric poems,
the Iliad and the Odyssey,

426
00:36:50,370 --> 00:36:52,370
to Plato,

427
00:36:52,620 --> 00:36:54,919
philosophy, written in Greek on papyrus,

428
00:36:56,100 --> 00:36:58,100
to, in the later period,

429
00:36:58,650 --> 00:37:00,650
Arabic, and even earlier

430
00:37:01,260 --> 00:37:03,260
Hebrew.

431
00:37:03,260 --> 00:37:07,580
The scale of ambition is extraordinary. So how, physically how did they get the
work into the city?

432
00:37:08,130 --> 00:37:11,239
OBBINK: They were sending people out to all parts of the

433
00:37:11,940 --> 00:37:18,890
Mediterranean. They had a list of the nine canonical lyric poets that they wanted
their works of and they sent people to

434
00:37:19,230 --> 00:37:22,040
the festivals where their works had been composed,

435
00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:23,280
Olympia and Delphi,

436
00:37:23,280 --> 00:37:28,189
and they borrowed the official copy of the Athenian tragedies from the Athenians,

437
00:37:28,440 --> 00:37:31,429
so that they could make a copy of it, then they refused to give it back.

438
00:37:31,430 --> 00:37:37,490
So they were in some ways acting like antiquarian book collectors, in other ways
acting like

439
00:37:38,180 --> 00:37:42,940
an institution building up a fundamental collection for scholars to work on.

440
00:37:42,940 --> 00:37:45,020
But if you've got this massive volume of work,

441
00:37:45,020 --> 00:37:48,260
how are they keeping tabs on it, or, how are they organizing it?

442
00:37:48,260 --> 00:37:50,100
They developed a system,

443
00:37:50,660 --> 00:37:55,140
which was really the invention of the modern book catalog. The Alexandrian scholar
Callimachus

444
00:37:56,070 --> 00:38:00,679
invented the first book catalog, which simply had an entry for author, title,
genre,
445
00:38:01,530 --> 00:38:06,259
type of work, in this case comedy, and also the total for the number of lines,

446
00:38:06,600 --> 00:38:12,649
at the end. Scribes were paid by the number of lines they copied. So here you can
see the name of the comic poet

447
00:38:13,560 --> 00:38:14,580
Aristophanes.

448
00:38:14,580 --> 00:38:15,860
HUGHES: Thank you, just about make it out.

449
00:38:16,710 --> 00:38:21,260
Steph- it's uh, yes, Stephanos. And in Alexandria are they mainly

450
00:38:21,750 --> 00:38:24,560
copying material or are they actually adding to it?

451
00:38:24,600 --> 00:38:27,200
Are you getting new scholarship there as well?

452
00:38:27,200 --> 00:38:29,870
Absolutely. They're constantly commenting on them.

453
00:38:29,870 --> 00:38:34,130
This is a copy of Plato's Republic in which there's ti- a tiny hand has been

454
00:38:34,440 --> 00:38:38,990
writing a marginal commentary into the margin explaining and correcting

455
00:38:39,840 --> 00:38:45,679
the text, so you get the feeling of a kind of buzzing high above readers and
scholars working and

456
00:38:45,750 --> 00:38:46,980
operating on the text.

457
00:38:46,980 --> 00:38:49,010
HUGHES: So impressive, isn't it? So you've got the genius of Plato,

458
00:38:49,010 --> 00:38:52,100
and you've got somebody else centuries later adding their own ideas.
459
00:38:54,030 --> 00:38:59,209
Access to information enabled the Alexandrians to revolutionize scientific thought.

460
00:39:01,050 --> 00:39:08,300
But they also studied theology. It was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Bible was
first translated into Greek.

461
00:39:12,700 --> 00:39:18,420
By understanding a wealth of cultures and beliefs, they had the power to master and
control.

462
00:39:23,970 --> 00:39:28,069
They were so intent on obtaining all the knowledge in the world that laws were
passed

463
00:39:28,260 --> 00:39:34,639
so that no book could leave the city, and even ships entering its harbour were
searched to see if new texts could be found

464
00:39:34,710 --> 00:39:36,980
to be added to its famous library.

465
00:39:40,650 --> 00:39:43,789
The modern Library of Alexandria has got over half a million books,

466
00:39:43,799 --> 00:39:47,209
which is actually almost exactly the same number as they had in the ancient
library.

467
00:39:47,819 --> 00:39:52,759
But what it also got here is this mega computer, which every few days

468
00:39:53,160 --> 00:39:55,940
saves all the information on the World Wide Web.

469
00:39:56,819 --> 00:40:03,048
In the 21st century, we're just so used to that ease of access to information where
everything is stored electronically.

470
00:40:03,270 --> 00:40:08,659
But in the ancient library, they often held the single existing copy of a book,

471
00:40:08,960 --> 00:40:13,300
so just imagine, if that was lost, you'd lose those ideas forever.

472
00:40:17,280 --> 00:40:20,400
And tragically, that's exactly what happened in Alexandria.

473
00:40:21,560 --> 00:40:25,300
Knowledge had made the city an intellectual powerhouse of antiquity.

474
00:40:25,640 --> 00:40:29,500
It had made thinkers like Hypatia powerful forces within the city.

475
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:37,000
It was an environment where new thoughts could flourish and evolve, where anyone
from anywhere could voice their ideas.

476
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:44,880
So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point, some ideas would come into
conflict, and for the ancient world,

477
00:40:45,280 --> 00:40:51,600
Alexandria, its libraries, and for Hypatia herself, the result would be
catastrophic.

478
00:41:08,980 --> 00:41:10,980
By the end of the fourth century AD,

479
00:41:11,590 --> 00:41:14,189
Alexandria had been flourishing for nearly 700 years,

480
00:41:14,950 --> 00:41:19,200
producing extraordinary thinkers like the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia.

481
00:41:21,670 --> 00:41:26,399
It was an immensely powerful city second only to Rome in might.

482
00:41:26,740 --> 00:41:32,459
Yet its power wasn't built on military force, but on the strength of ideas and the
ambition

483
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:35,480
to house all the knowledge in the world,

484
00:41:38,080 --> 00:41:42,980
and that included beliefs from the latest school of thinking, the fledgling
religion

485
00:41:43,260 --> 00:41:44,660
Christianity.
486
00:41:45,540 --> 00:41:49,280
Alexandria had always attracted in cutting-edge thought and men who were at the top
of their game,

487
00:41:50,050 --> 00:41:52,590
so it should be no surprise that from the first century AD,

488
00:41:53,020 --> 00:41:57,959
the key leaders of a new religion should want to come here to play out their ideas.

489
00:42:01,750 --> 00:42:03,750
Only a few years after Christ's Ascension,

490
00:42:04,089 --> 00:42:10,288
the Gospel writer Mark came to Alexandria to spread the news, bringing Christianity
into Africa.

491
00:42:11,079 --> 00:42:16,169
As one of the most forward-thinking places on Earth, with its tradition fusing
Eastern and Western cultures,

492
00:42:17,349 --> 00:42:20,399
Alexandria was an ideal place for Christianity to gain a foothold.

493
00:42:26,349 --> 00:42:33,028
But reconciling a multi-faith environment with a religion whose followers believed
exclusively in one God

494
00:42:33,579 --> 00:42:36,028
proved a testing challenge for the city.

495
00:42:36,760 --> 00:42:40,260
St. Mark himself died at the hands of pagans for preaching his faith.

496
00:42:41,170 --> 00:42:43,859
It was a foretaste of the violence to come.

497
00:42:44,589 --> 00:42:49,589
Yet, for centuries, Christians and pagans did manage to live alongside one another,

498
00:42:50,289 --> 00:42:52,289
happily, productively.

499
00:42:53,260 --> 00:42:57,839
The very early Christians spent a great deal of time and energy trying to square

500
00:42:58,150 --> 00:43:04,470
pagan and Christian thought. For instance, one of the most prolific early church
fathers who lived in Alexandria

501
00:43:05,170 --> 00:43:09,359
said that the works of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were

502
00:43:09,970 --> 00:43:13,949
science tinged with piety, as long as they were righteous.

503
00:43:14,589 --> 00:43:22,199
Now in a world like that, where Christianity is just another stream of thought,
then Hypatia has a very secure place.

504
00:43:23,020 --> 00:43:27,509
But the problem came when the Christians wanted not just spiritual,

505
00:43:27,520 --> 00:43:36,840
but temporal power, and then all that tolerance and piety becomes muddied with
power politicking.

506
00:43:36,849 --> 00:43:38,589
And fortunately for Hypatia,

507
00:43:38,589 --> 00:43:43,229
she'd come into conflict with one of the greatest political operators of the day.

508
00:43:45,350 --> 00:43:50,289
Hypatia herself wasn't anti-Christianity. Many of her students were in fact
Christian.

509
00:43:50,720 --> 00:43:55,659
But the problem came when a new bishop, Cyril, was ordained in the city.

510
00:43:57,530 --> 00:44:04,959
Cyril not only wanted spiritual authority, but power on Earth, and he didn't want
to share it with pagans.

511
00:44:05,780 --> 00:44:09,550
His arrival would change the face of Alexandria forever.

512
00:44:11,420 --> 00:44:15,879
POLLARD: You walk into somewhere like the Caesareum, and you see
513
00:44:15,880 --> 00:44:21,970
what originally would be built as a, as an Egyptian and Greek temple, with all the
heads removed from the statues.

514
00:44:22,190 --> 00:44:27,100
And the cult statue has gone, and in its place, you have a huge cross looking down.

515
00:44:27,100 --> 00:44:32,229
And you see how people like Cyril could change a world. He is a man seeking power,

516
00:44:32,230 --> 00:44:36,580
and he wishes to gain control, not just of the religious state,

517
00:44:36,580 --> 00:44:42,129
he wants to really run a theocracy, be in charge of everything. Hypatia is a
wealthy, educated

518
00:44:42,980 --> 00:44:46,179
pagan. To him, that means witch.

519
00:44:48,920 --> 00:44:55,180
He puts around rumours about all of the objects she makes for astronomy. Her
instruments, clearly they're used for divination.

520
00:44:59,390 --> 00:45:05,230
They're for finding out what will happen in the future. It is black magic, and as
such she has to die.

521
00:45:06,140 --> 00:45:13,720
HUGHES: And in one contemporary account, we learn that it was Hypatia's work with
the astrolabe in particular that sparked hatred against her.

522
00:45:19,430 --> 00:45:23,619
Spurred on by one of their leaders, the blood of the Christian mob was up.

523
00:45:27,290 --> 00:45:32,979
They started to seek Hypatia out through the city, and found her driving through
these streets on her way home.

524
00:45:38,270 --> 00:45:42,039
They dragged her out of her carriage and ripped off her clothes.

525
00:45:42,799 --> 00:45:46,809
For a highborn woman like her, this would have been a terrible public disgrace.

526
00:45:47,599 --> 00:45:49,808
But then things got even uglier.

527
00:45:50,569 --> 00:45:57,699
They pulled her into the Caesareum, which had been a temple and then recently
converted to a church, and they're picking up anything

528
00:45:57,700 --> 00:46:02,919
they could find. We're told they were ostraca, which were probably broken pots or
broken roof tiles.

529
00:46:03,410 --> 00:46:05,920
They started to flay her alive.

530
00:46:07,339 --> 00:46:15,068
Once she was dead, they pulled her body limb from limb and then they took her
dismembered body parts to the edge of the city,

531
00:46:15,619 --> 00:46:17,619
where they burnt them on a pyre.

532
00:46:21,170 --> 00:46:24,040
In effect, this was a witch's death.

533
00:46:37,170 --> 00:46:41,959
Hypatia's tragedy was the tragedy of Alexandria.

534
00:46:50,550 --> 00:46:53,600
The destruction of its spectacular monuments,

535
00:46:56,300 --> 00:46:59,619
the desecration of its extraordinary libraries.

536
00:47:00,650 --> 00:47:08,530
And with that, the heartbreaking demise of the wealth of knowledge, which had made
it great for over 700 years.

537
00:47:12,470 --> 00:47:14,420
There are few lines,

538
00:47:14,420 --> 00:47:22,060
desperately sad, written by a pagan who was wandering through the streets of
Alexandria watching the world he knew crumble around him.

539
00:47:27,530 --> 00:47:31,479
'Is it true that we Greeks are really dead and only seem alive,
540
00:47:33,470 --> 00:47:37,839
and in our fallen state we imagined that a dream is life?

541
00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:43,299
Or are we truly alive and is life itself dead?'

542
00:47:44,740 --> 00:47:48,520
For some, Alexander's dream was becoming a living nightmare.

543
00:47:50,540 --> 00:47:52,540
After centuries of onslaught,

544
00:47:52,720 --> 00:47:58,460
only 1% of Alexandria's vast book collection has survived into the modern world.

545
00:48:09,400 --> 00:48:14,100
Rather bizarrely, one of the survivors of Alexandria's destruction has ended up
here.

546
00:48:14,300 --> 00:48:17,320
It's that massive lump of red granite,

547
00:48:17,720 --> 00:48:24,880
the obelisk that we very affectionately now call Cleopatra's Needle. It was brought
here from Egypt in 1878,

548
00:48:24,880 --> 00:48:28,360
but in its heyday, it stood just at the edge of the Caesareum,

549
00:48:28,370 --> 00:48:31,629
so it was only a stone's throw away from where Hypatia was killed.

550
00:48:41,200 --> 00:48:46,269
I think that in many ways Hypatia was an incarnation of Alexander's dream.

551
00:48:46,670 --> 00:48:49,569
She was living proof that knowledge is power.

552
00:48:50,299 --> 00:48:57,309
She was immensely knowledgeable, and therefore the extraordinary city that she
lived in allowed her a huge amount of influence.

553
00:48:57,650 --> 00:49:00,700
But the key word here is extraordinary,
554
00:49:01,250 --> 00:49:04,959
because Alexandria was a city less ordinary.

555
00:49:10,230 --> 00:49:16,250
Perhaps its ambition, that dream to acquire and to caretake all the knowledge of
the world was just

556
00:49:16,590 --> 00:49:18,590
too perfect to last.

557
00:49:21,150 --> 00:49:27,020
We should bear that in mind, because it is of course a very modern dream. I mean,
after all, that is what the World Wide Web does.

558
00:49:27,390 --> 00:49:32,929
And so when we know that Alexandria failed and as a result a whole epoch failed,

559
00:49:33,510 --> 00:49:35,719
we should take a very careful note.

560
00:49:40,640 --> 00:49:46,359
For that reason we mustn't bury the memory of Alexandria, but celebrate it.

561
00:50:01,760 --> 00:50:09,520
And Bettany Hughes is back at the same time next Wednesday on More4 exploring how
Egypt's two greatest pharaohs built their way to immortality.

562
00:50:09,680 --> 00:50:12,909
Just what drove them to construct pyramids on such a massive scale?

563
00:50:13,460 --> 00:50:21,340
Well next tonight, Tony Robinson's at Stonehenge, where what we thought we knew is
about to change again, in a Time Team special.