East To West (2011) s01e01 Episode Script
Between Two Rivers
1 This is the untold story of the making of the modern world.
A fresh perspective, charting the spread of civilization across the globe.
From the dawn of mankind and the first cities and empires to the belief in one God.
We follow the flow of civilization from the Middle East, an extraordinary place that has been a vital link between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.
An economic, scientific and cultural centre of the world.
It will be an epic journey of discovery, from the East to the West.
Mount Nemrut in modern Turkey overlooks the ancient river Euphrates.
From here is a spectacular view of Mesopotamia.
At the dawn of mankind this land between the river Euphrates and Tigris was the cradle of civilization.
When you look across the horizon, you feel like the entire world is beneath you.
You can reach out to every side of the horizon.
From here you can see how the civilizations came together.
At the top of Nemrut, hidden beneath a huge man-made tumulus , is the 2000-year-old tomb of a King - Antiochus.
Antiochus was of Greek and Persian descent.
In homage to this mixed ancestry, he flanked his tomb with huge statues of Greek and Persian gods: the Greek gods, Zeus and Heracles facing west to Greece and the Persian gods Oromasdes and Vahagn facing east to Persia.
Antiochus' great monument symbolizes the meeting of Eastern and Western culture.
Its position, overlooking Mesopotamia, is a powerful reminder that civilization, as we largely know it, was born in this land between two rivers.
Before the birth of civilization, humans were nomads.
Tribes, scouring the landscape for shelter and food.
They lived by foraging and hunting.
But extraordinary new discoveries show that something dramatic happened around 12,000 years ago.
Hunter-gatherers roaming what is now southern Turkey did something remarkable.
Excavations in Turkey, at Gébekli Tepe show they stopped their wandering.
For the first time ever humans began to build on a monumental scale.
Changing the landscape.
All these earth mounds we see here are artificial.
They're not done by nature and they contain other monuments, monuments like that one we excavated here.
And these earthen mounds are sitting on top of a huge limestone ridge on its highest point, dominating the landscape here.
Inside these mounds, Professor Klaus Schmidt and his team are excavating enormous carved stone pillars - the first man-made monuments ever discovered.
Yeah, the pillars here are quite monumental ones.
Unfortunately the two central ones had been destroyed in ancient times.
The upper part is missing but we know the original height had been about five metres.
The stone pillars reveal that Stone Age man had a surprisingly high level of artistic sophistication This one we have a very fine example of the art of the Stone Age, with a high relief depicting a predator, maybe a leopard showing its teeth here, and the body of the animal, and below, a flat relief of a wild boar.
So we have three levels of art here, the cubic pillars, the T-shaped pillar, the high relief and the flat relief.
All together in one stone.
The discoveries at Gébekli Tepe have completely revolutionized our understanding of early man.
Long before they began to farm, hunter-gatherers paused to make their mark on their landscape.
The people who did it still had been hunter-gatherers - but they are meeting here, they are making festivals, feastings here, and now they have the manpower to produce the monolithic pillars, to transport them and to erect them here in these stone circles.
The building of Gébekli Tepe, the organization of labor and resources, the skilled workmanship involved, are proof of an extremely complex society 2000 years before man settled permanently to farm.
It has radically changed our understanding of the birth of civilization.
This kind of work is not a work done by everyone, it's a work for specialists.
Also to produce the pillars is a work for specialists, tor transportation, they had engineers tor such works.
So it means the hunter-gatherer society was much more developed than we expected before.
This previously unknown first chapter in man's long journey to civilization was discovered here in the Middle East.
The next chapter of this story saw permanent settlements - taking control of natural resources.
There's a key moment in the human experience where mankind no longer is just living hand to mouth - when men and women aren't just running after the natural world and begging it for succour.
Instead when men and women settle down, when they start to have fixed communities, they are for the first time really in charge of the world around them and this gives them an extraordinary footing from which civilization itself can grow.
This next vital step in mankind's journey also happened in this region.
Humans began to settle permanently and build houses and communities - starting over 10,000 years ago .
Evidence of this vital change has also been discovered in Southern Turkey, at Qatalhéyiik.
Qatalhéyiik was on a river.
It was a source of water and another vital component of life here - mud for building.
These ancient mud walls might look humble but they represent a key stage in civilization - the ability to build settlements.
Over 9000 years ago Qatalhéyiik looked like this - houses with ovens and rooftop entrances.
It's a story that's been pieced together by archaeology.
So what we've got here are a series of mud brick houses.
There's a house here and a house here, there's another one behind and one behind rne here.
The houses were built out of mud bricks that was collected off-site and they were generally sun-dried.
Here you can see a line of bricks - they're very long bricks but here you can also see the mortar.
The river by Qatalhéyiik didn't only provide mud for building.
It had another gift.
The rich soils proved very fertile.
People here had taken another revolutionary step - farming.
In the storage areas we find a series of clay-walled bins and here's the wall of one bin.
Within these bins we've found nuts, we've found pistachio nuts, almond nuts, we've found peas, wheat.
From there we can learn about what they were growing out in their environment, what they were farming.
The evidence is that the earliest crops and the domestication of animals began in Southern Turkey over 10,000 years ago and gradually spread through the Fertile Crescent east to Mesopotamia and west to the Mediterranean.
Farming and the settled communities that worked the land expanded through Europe and by 7000 years ago had arrived at its western edge.
The Eastern idea of agriculture transformed societies everywhere.
Agriculture produced a revolution in technology too.
This was the Neolithic Era, the New Stone Age.
Archaeologists have discovered the tell-tale signs of its highly effective technology.
On site we also find some of the tools that they would have been using.
So we find stone grinding tools that they may have crushed the wheat seeds up to make a kind of flour or crushed it up for a gruel.
And we also find obsidian tools - obsidian is a volcanic glass - which may have been part of a sickle.
And something like this may have been a hunting tool.
With agriculture and permanent settlement came more sophisticated technology - first pottery, tor storing and transporting produce, then metal and metalworking tor tools and utensils.
Farming was responsible for a revolution in society too.
It saw the careful organisation of communal projects like irrigation and harvesting, and it needed rules for the division, maintenance and inheritance of land.
The essence of the Neolithic is about domesticating environment and settling down in one place.
The Neolithic is the beginnings of our journey to where we are today.
An organized food supply could sustain a growing population.
People came together in ever-larger groups and man began to form the beginnings of what we now know as civilization.
And it was in the rich and fertile lands along the great rivers of the East where civilization was born.
If we start from East to West In China civilization's journey started by the Yellow River, and then continued by other rivers.
Also in India along the Indus and Ganges valleys we see the first artworks.
Rivers were the lifeline of civilization - from the Indus and Ganges in India to the Nile in Egypt.
Around 6000 years ago, between the two great Middle Eastern rivers - the Tigris and Euphrates - the world's first cities began to emerge.
One of the earliest cities was built on the western edge of Mesopotamia.
Mari, in modern-day Syria, was re-discovered in 1933.
Mari was a purpose-built city sited on the banks of the Euphrates.
The city was circular and was supplied with water by a central channel.
Mari was strategically placed to profit from trade routes between Mesopotamia and more distant sources of wealth.
Metals were brought here from Anatolia As well as other materials such as precious metals from Majan, Oman and Dilmun, Al-Bahrain, which are to the south.
They were all distributed from here to all of the East and other regions of the ancient world.
Mari grew rich through trade and agriculture.
But the wealth wasn't shared equally.
Instead a social hierarchy developed and at its head there was a king.
We are now in the throns hall of the Palace of Zimri-Lim which dates back to the second millenium BC.
On the opposite side is the base on which sat king Zimri-Lim's throne.
It was made of precious woods, gold, silver, and ivory.
In Mari, the past can speak directly to us.
Archaeologists discovered evidence of one of civilization's greatest inventions writing.
Thousands of inscribed tablets were found using text invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago.
It is perhaps in some ways the most momentous achievement which Homo Sapiens has come up with, the idea that you can make a set of signs on a surface which other people would recognise and from that, get the words of their language.
It's a momentous and most wonderful invention, the results of which are still crucial to us today.
Scribes used a cut reed pressing it into the surface of wet clay.
The reed made a line with a wedge at the end.
The scholars who deciphered the Sumerian texts gave it a Latin name - calling it cuneiform after the Latin "cuneus", meaning âwedge" it's fairly clear that the process of writing first got off the ground for administrative reasons where there was too much to keep control of in any other way.
The very earliest signs are what we call pictographs where you have a linear, rather infantile sketch of a given thing like a bird which looks like a bird and it means âbird But what happened in Mesopotamia and uniquely there, is that the early people who were experimenting with writing had the idea in their minds that you could draw a symbol - not for what it looked like but for what it sounded like.
And once this crucial step had taken place they very rapidly developed a whole range of signs which they could use to spell out the sound of their language.
It's impossible to overestimate the impact of the invention of writing.
It soon spread across the Middle East, quickly replacing pictograms and hieroglyphs.
And then it spread beyond to much of the rest of the world.
My Lord must pay close attention to this tablet.
The cuneiform tablets discovered at Mari reveal the scope of organisation required in the first cities of civilization.
How to lay siege to These administrative tablets show us that the society was really organized, it was not just a simple village.
It has to handle a whole city and the hinterland also.
So we know a lot about this society and specifically about those who were on top of this society, so the king, the priests and all this administration.
The tablets give us a great insight into their world.
But it isn't only writing that allows us to look back at this civilization.
One of the greatest treasures of Sumerian civilization is housed today in the British Museum - it's known as The Standard of Ur.
This object from Southern Iraq is just astonishingly beautiful.
It was made over 4500 years ago and although we don't know exactly what it was used for there is no doubting how precious it was.
Because if you just look at the materials that were used - there is lapis lazuli stone here, and red limestone and precious shells.
It clearly tells us a story.
And what I think this is, is this is a society that is working, everything is very ordered.
You have the men laboring in the fields at the bottom, then you have a procession oi fat animals being brought in - probably for some kind of religious sacrifice - there are goats and handfuls of fish and even cattle.
And then up at the top here is the court - there are men sitting toasting the king and clearly he is in control of the people beneath him.
It's actually a very peaceful and cultured scene.
But ii you go round the other side of this you find that reality is a little different.
Because here we have a terrible scene of war.
Here at the bottom you have men who are being trampled by charging horses as they pull their chariots.
You have naked men being brought in grovelling to the king who is standing with his staff.
So it's a cogent and visceral reminder that when you create a great civilization, this is a jewel that attracts thieves and there are always going to be others who want what you've got.
civilization brought rivalry and competition to the city kingdoms of Mesopotamia and that would lead to war and conquest.
A new age of Empire was beginning.
Mari was a rich target and was destroyed twice by rival powers.
First, over 4000 years ago, by the Akkadians, who created the world's first empire in Mesopotamia.
Then finally the Akkadians' imperial successors, the Babylonians, put Mari to the flame.
We have discovered the red traces of the fire on the walls.
We can see the level has been transformed by the heat and that was the end of Mari.
Mari and Sumerian civilization were destroyed but civilization itself survived and spread from its Mesopotamian beginnings.
From their mountain home in Anatolia, the Hittites created a 600-year-long civilization in a hostile landscape that had none of the natural advantages of the rich and fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia.
Here they built one of the largest empires of the ancient world.
Their historical achievement is that they were able to out-balance natural geographical obstacles by an enormous amount of control, social organisation and discipline.
They were able to build up an empire, controlling the majority of Anatolia, present-day Turkey, but also large regions of Syria, the Lebanon, the northern part of Lebanon - so in that time they were one of the global players in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The huge Hittite capital Hattusa housed a population of 50,000 people.
It was surrounded by massive outer walls with elaborately decorated lion gateways.
On the highest point in the landscape, the Hittites built an enormous monument to their achievement.
Visible from 12 miles away, it wasn't a defensive rampart but was built simply to house a ceremonial route.
The 3500-year-old structure is a testament to how far the people of the ancient world had come in their journey from hunter-gatherer to civilization.
This enormous artificial structure of Yerkapi is one of the most impressive buildings in Hattusa.
The whole building is, at the end, a massive statement, a stony statement of Hittite power, influence, civilization of what they are think they are themselves.
At its peak, the Hittite Empire rivalled Egypt for control of the Middle East.
But in the West a new power was emerging.
At the end of the second millennium, traders from Greece began to establish colonies along the coast of Asia Minor.
One place where these ancient Greeks ventured was the city of Troy.
The city rising above these plains was mythologized as a place where East met West in brutal conflict.
The Greek poet Homer immortalized it in the epic stories the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Although we may think of the stories of the Trojan Wars as just a legend or a myth, archaeologists have found Troy.
This is one of the most ancient entrances into the city.
We know that the Greeks really thought the Trojan War did happen here.
Homer's tale of the Trojan War reflects the real moment in history when the ancient Greeks began to expand to the older, more established civilizations to the east.
In the next centuries the city-states of ancient Greece grew in power and cultural influence.
Today, in the West, Ancient Greece is usually considered to be the home of civilization - where classical ideas and ideals of natural philosophy, literature and art were born.
But the place accorded to Greece in the history of civilization has obscured the East's contribution to the making of the modern world.
We can't ignore the importance of Greek civilizations but Greek civilization wasn't born on its own, it didn't happen spontaneously.
They accumulated lots of things from civilizations before them, repackaged them and presented them back to us.
Although they share a long history of civilization, East and West are more often characterized as rivals.
When you look at the history of the relationship between East and West, it could seem just like a catalogue of retribution and counter-retribution.
But actually the whole time these civilizations were learning from one another and their fates were inextricably linked.
Someone who rediscovered this Eastern legacy was a leader who was to change history Alexander the Great.
He came to Troy in 334 BC at the head of a Greek Army, heading east.
When Alexander the Great lands at Troy we're told that he slept with a dagger and a copy of Homer's Iliad under his pillow.
This was a man who was a new Greek going to conquer Eastern lands just as the heroes of the Trojan wars had before.
According to the Greek historians, Alexander made a special visit to Troy's temple of Athena.
When Alexander came here there would have been a temple to Athena here.
We have to use our imaginations a little bit because only some foundations remain.
The stories tell us that one of the things that he found in the temple were objects and relics that were said to date back to the Trojan war.
So one of the things that Alexander does in a symbolic gesture, is he takes off his own armor, takes some of this old Trojan war armor - possibly of Achilles - and puts it on instead.
And in doing so he's making a connection to the people that he thought were his ancestors.
Inspired by his visit to Troy, Alexander began his campaign of conquest in earnest.
He was intent on conquering the Persian Empire.
Forged 200 years before Alexander's time, it had grown to be the largest empire in the ancient world, spanning Asia, Africa and Europe.
Alexander won his first encounter with the Persians at the Battle of the Granicus River.
But the further he went the more he was to encounter the legacy owed to the East.
Miletus was typical of the mixed Eastern and Western influences Alexander discovered.
Miletus was in the Persian empire, but it was populated by Greeks who had lived on the coast of Asia Minor for centuries.
Extraordinary new discoveries here have thrown sharp new light on how East and West mixed.
Excavations are showing how Eastern ideas influenced the West.
Aphrodite was one of the greatest Greek goddesses.
In her sanctuary here archaeologists have discovered beautiful figurines given as offerings to the goddess.
From these, they have pieced together evidence showing the remarkable degree to which the Greeks in Miletus absorbed Eastern ideas even in their gods.
This is a very early piece, showing Aphrodite as a mighty goddess of vegetation.
And this is another one showing her as the mistress of animals.
These are all old, Near Eastern symbols.
The Aphrodite figurines discovered in Miletus are nearly all Eastern rather than Greek in style.
It seems clear that the Miletians' idea of Aphrodite came from the East.
The Aphrodite is of oriental origin and she came in this naked shape to the Greeks.
So they were taking up all these oriental influences.
Careful examination has shown that the Greeks of Miletus also learned how to make their goddess figurines from Eastern teachers.
These figurines are flat on the back.
These come from a mold, a negative, put the clay into it and wait until it dried.
They took it out and worked it over with a stick like this, doing the details of which we are it didn't come from the mold and then it was fired and it came out like this.
Making figurines in a mold is an Eastern technique.
The Greeks of Miletus combined it with their own technique of making figurines on a potter's wheel.
So we have a very neat idea of influences coming from the East and how they were adapted to their own, to their own tradition of the Greeks.
Greek colonies in Asia Minor like Miletus had a crucial role in transporting Eastern ideas to the West via Greece.
They are a starting place for the adventure of humanity Eastern cultures and civilizations travelled to the West via the Greek islands.
Knowledge and philosophical traditions from Greek islands spread to the rest of the world.
Alexander himself would find in his campaign against the Persian Empire, that East and West were inextricably mixed and what Alexander proudly took to be his own Greek civilization in reality sprang from an Eastern source.
After capturing the Greek cities of western Asia Minor Alexander struck East- defeating the Persians once more at the Battle of lssus.
Then he turned south, capturing Syria and Egypt, before venturing to Mesopotamia and finally defeating the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela.
Now Alexander readied himself to capture the ancient city of Babylon the jewel in the Eastern crown.
Taking Babylon was key to Alexander's dream of a world empire.
Once in a fertile landscape, Babylon lies 53 miles south of Baghdad in Iraq.
Some reconstruction of Babylon began in 1983.
The ancient city had an illustrious history.
One of the first cities of civilization, it had been a dominant power in Mesopotamia and had been the capital of the great Babylonian Empire.
The largest city on earth with a population of nearly 200,000 people, Babylon was a place of great wealth and architectural splendor.
Stories circulated throughout the ancient world about the glory of ancient Babylon but the reality must have been five times as impressive.
This was a city that was surrounded by a high wall, glazed with beautiful blue tiles.
Alexander entered Babylon through a ceremonial gate decorated with reliefs of aurochs and dragons, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.
From here a 200 yard ceremonial processional way, adorned with lions sacred to Ishtar, led into the city.
Nothing in Alexander's experience could have prepared him for the wonder of Babylon.
Reassembled from hundreds of thousands of fragments excavated at Babylon, the Ishtar Gate and processional way now stand in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.
Ishtar would have been familiar to Alexander.
He would have recognised in her the characteristics of his Greek goddess of love and war, Aphrodite.
Well, Ishtar was the most important goddess of the Babylonians.
We can get a feeling for her from the ancient sources in Mesopotamia.
And you look at the goddess Aphrodite, you might put them in the same category, they have the same status, they're always shown to be beautiful themselves and you could say that Aphrodite was as it were, the counterpart in Greek culture to Ishtar in Babylonian culture.
Ishtar had a starring role in one of the first and greatest stories of Mesopotamian literature - the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This piece of clay from the Library of Assyria is one of the bits of the story of the Epic' of Gilgamesh and the Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic example of what you might call a Hollywood story.
You have a hero, he has his adventures, there are monsters, there are beautiful women, there's treachery, there's friendship, there's adventure, there's the flood and everything all mixed up in one great narrative.
Ishtar decides she wants to seduce Gilgamesh and in this rather lively and funny description, Gilgamesh spurns her.
And here he lists in a wholes series of incriminating paragraphs the disastrous fate of her earlier lovers.
Gilgamesh's point is âIf I give in what are you going to turn me into? âI'll have nothing to do with it.
" She gets very angry.
To Dumuzi, the husband of your youth, to him you have allotted perpetual weeping, year on year.
You loved the shepherd, the grazer, the herdsman you struck him and turned him into a wolf so his own shepherd boys drive him away and his dogs take bites at his thighs And you have to imagine Ishtar slamming the door at the end of this conversation and walking out in a huff, exactly like in a movie.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature - dating back 1400 years before Homer.
The idea of a real person like Gilgamesh, mythologized in a cycle of stories, would have been very familiar to Alexander the Great.
The whole idea of the Homeric sources that people know so well measure up in a very intriguing way with this Babylonian example behind them.
You can see it's the same kind of literature in the same function.
They set us on the road of literacy and literature from really a very remote 5000 years ago it was already on the way.
People stopped writing in cuneiform script 2000 years ago and knowledge of it was lost to the world.
It was only in the 19th century, after the rediscovery of cuneiform tablets, that scholars deciphered the ancient texts.
As soon as we started to translate these cuneiform texts, we realised this was a rich and wonderful and sophisticated world - a world where there were great cultures, where belief systems were incredibly nuanced and various.
And in a way it's our fault that we don't understand the riches of the Eastern past.
It is all there for the taking - but for years we didn't know how to access it.
This was at a period in which the origins of Western civilization were thought to begin with the Greeks and Romans.
And the thought of having to rethink ancient history and really double the length of human civilization from beginning in about 500 BC with the Greeks, to beginning in 3000 BC, was just too much to contemplate.
And it's taken us 150 years or more really just to assimilate the doubling of human history into our own self identities.
Once cuneiform was translated, a whole new world of ancient Mesopotamian culture was opened up to Western scholars.
The fact is, of course, that Greek ideas did not come out of nowhere, and we can show nowadays, there's much more understanding of it, that certain portions of Greek, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and other disciplines, in fact embody traditions which were current in Babylonia.
Discoveries in Babylon also reveal that the ancient Greeks knew how to read cuneiform and had no difficulties in appreciating and assimilating the ancient learning of the East.
A cuneiform tablet found in the ruins of Babylon is remarkable evidence of the efforts of one Greek scholar to learn Babylonian.
What you have is your Babylonian school exercise on the one side, and then on the back you have a transcription into Greek letters of those signs.
So for example, we've got one which has words for âcanalâ, âbig canal", âsmall canal", âditch", âirrigation" - Babylonian words in cuneiform writing.
And on the back the Greek person who probably can never remember these signs and got fed up with trying to remember them has transliterated them to Greek letters on the back.
The very words in Sumerian and Babylonian are spelled out in Greek letters on the back as a crib.
It wasn't just Babylonian literature that the Greeks studied.
One of the East's greatest contributions to civilization was in the study of science.
One Greek familiar with Babylonian learning was Thales of Miletus.
Thales accurately predicted a solar eclipse.
It occurred on May 28, 585 BC.
Thales could only have calculated this eclipse by relying on the records of Babylonian astronomers.
Babylonian astronomers kept precise lists of eclipses, equinoxes and solstices from 747 BC 200 years before Thales predicted an eclipse.
They were driven by a compulsion to understand portents and omens and assuage their gods.
So all of these get recorded systematically night after night, month after month, year after year for over 600 years.
By Alexander's time all the omens had been collected together into an enormous series of observations and predictions.
And this tablet, which is the 21st chapter of the 70-chapter series, is all about solar eclipses.
And it was gradually through very long periods of observing the skies that scholars noticed that these events were not random at all and were not just the whims of the gods but were very sophisticated mathematical patterns, often very complex and often very long in duration.
And so by about the sixth or fifth century BC the Babylonians had changed their understanding of how the heavens worked.
It wasn't just the arbitrary messages from the gods but it really was a signal that gods had created a very deeply mathematical world.
Babylon's astronomers systematically observed their world, recorded their data and applied logic to what they found.
Their spirit of inquiry had already enthused Greek thinkers like Thales of Miletus but Alexanders arrival in Babylon accelerated the process of Greek absorption of ancient Eastern learning.
Alexander was fascinated by Babylonian astronomy.
And he had his historian, his reporter on the ground, translate as much of the Babylonian astronomical observations into Greek as he could, and to send them back to Macedon.
So, from the 4th century onwards we can point to many, many, very specific examples where we can be absolutely confident that individual Greek scholars had access to the writings of individual, named, Babylonian scholars, and that's really very exciting.
Babylonian inquiry and Greek logic formed a scientific method that transformed the world.
Greeks like Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy are commemorated for their role in this process but the astronomers of Babylon also deserve their place amongst the forefathers of science.
Every time we look at our watches we're doing something Babylonian, every time you read the horoscopes in the newspapers we're doing something Babylonian, every time we measure an angle we're doing something Babylonian.
There are some very fundamental everyday practices that we all do which are, we owe to ancient Middle-Eastern civilizations that we really just don't think about.
The Babylonians were brilliant mathematicians - they were the first to use angles, degrees, fractions, and equations.
They didn't count in our decimal system using 1O as a base - but used 6O instead - a method known as the sexagesimal system.
When you're a child and someone teaches you how to read the time, if you're an inquisitive kind oi person you ask yourself why on earth is there 6O seconds and 6O minutes, where does this 6O come from? This 6O comes from Babylonia.
From very early on in the third millennium, all calculations in ancient Mesopotamia were done on a sexagesimal system.
They never, like us, took ten fingers and used that tor their mathematical basis, they used the sexagesimal system.
6O is a more versatile number than 1O to base a numeric system on - as it is divisible by 2 and 5, but also by 3.
It's more flexible for complex astronomical calculations.
The 60-base system gave the Babylonians 6O seconds in a minute, 6O minutes in an hour, 360 days in a year, and 360 degrees in a circle.
One brilliant Babylonian idea was that the sky was a sphere that could be measured in 360 degrees.
The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, was founded in 1675.
Astronomers here tracked the movement of the stars and collected data to allow ships' navigators to calculate their position at sea Well, I think you can see traces of what was done way back then in the kinds of astronomy that was done at the observatory when it was first founded in the 17th century.
Like in Babylon thousands of years before, astronomers here divided the world into 360 degrees but put the Royal Observatory on the line of zero degrees.
It's known as the prime meridian.
Astronomers still use, and were using then, 360 degrees, dividing that into minutes and seconds to get more and more precise divisions in the sky.
And then also taking time measurements as the stars cross round the heavens to get a position of where they are.
The first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, John Flamsteed, mapped the skies and cataloged the stars just like the Babylonians, 3500 years before him.
And we can see inside this book, which is his Historia Coelestis, this is his life's work essentially from all the observations that he did.
We can see the list of the stars, the planets, the moon, and their positions as he observed them over many years.
Flamsteed inherited a tradition of observation that goes back through his predecessors, through the Renaissance, through Arabic scholars, back through the Romans, the Greeks, ultimately going back to the Babylonians as well.
The Babylonian numerical system also created the 12 signs of the zodiac.
They sub-divided those 360 degrees into 12 sections of 3O degrees and this chart here shows it very clearly.
Here we can see the triangles into those 30-degree segments, and each of the 30-degree segments is associated with a particular constellation that's appears near its middle.
So we have Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo Cancer and so on around here.
Extraordinarily, the symbols and names we still use for the stars go all the way back to the Babylonian astronomers of ancient times.
We have them, the names of the zodiacal signs written on hundreds and if not thousands of tablets but this little one here is particularly interesting to us.
Each line has a different zodiacal sign, all the way down here.
So this is the eighth, this is âScorpioâ written along here, there's scorpion, and then on the other side, here are the last tour and then a line underneath to show that's the end of the series, there are no more than 12.
So all the names of the zodiac are originally Babylonian.
Taurus the bull, it's called âthe bull of heaven" in Babylonian.
Leo is the lion.
The Babylonian zodiac was one of mankind's first attempts to find order and meaning in our apparently incomprehensible world.
And still now, everyone knows their star sign and we pretend we don't believe it but we all read our horoscopes sneakily anyway.
So the very idea that our fate is determined by the skies is something that has very, very deep roots in Babylonian thought.
Alexander the Great died at the age of 32.
By the time of his death he had become enthralled by his Eastern lands and his dying wish was for the people of his new empire - East and West - to unite and live as one.
Alexander's empire didn't last but the flow of knowledge continued.
One of Alexander's successors was King Antiochus, who built the tomb at the summit of Mt Nemrut, looking both east and west.
Hidden away being conserved is an extraordinary reminder of ancient Eastern knowledge.
Well, you know, something very special that was found on Nemrut which is the oldest astrological calendar in the world.
And when we look at it we can see a relief of a lion and some stars on it.
And we estimated that the exact date from the stars was 17 of July, 62 BC, and the time, the exact time is 16.
48.
And this is very special The Greek and Persian gods that flank the tomb are a symbol of Antiochus' mixed Greek and Persian ancestry.
Once again - it is a remarkable reminder of the synthesis of East and West achieved after the conquest of Alexander.
And how in the centuries after his death the West soaked up the rich and ancient cultures that flowed like a river from the East.
A fresh perspective, charting the spread of civilization across the globe.
From the dawn of mankind and the first cities and empires to the belief in one God.
We follow the flow of civilization from the Middle East, an extraordinary place that has been a vital link between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.
An economic, scientific and cultural centre of the world.
It will be an epic journey of discovery, from the East to the West.
Mount Nemrut in modern Turkey overlooks the ancient river Euphrates.
From here is a spectacular view of Mesopotamia.
At the dawn of mankind this land between the river Euphrates and Tigris was the cradle of civilization.
When you look across the horizon, you feel like the entire world is beneath you.
You can reach out to every side of the horizon.
From here you can see how the civilizations came together.
At the top of Nemrut, hidden beneath a huge man-made tumulus , is the 2000-year-old tomb of a King - Antiochus.
Antiochus was of Greek and Persian descent.
In homage to this mixed ancestry, he flanked his tomb with huge statues of Greek and Persian gods: the Greek gods, Zeus and Heracles facing west to Greece and the Persian gods Oromasdes and Vahagn facing east to Persia.
Antiochus' great monument symbolizes the meeting of Eastern and Western culture.
Its position, overlooking Mesopotamia, is a powerful reminder that civilization, as we largely know it, was born in this land between two rivers.
Before the birth of civilization, humans were nomads.
Tribes, scouring the landscape for shelter and food.
They lived by foraging and hunting.
But extraordinary new discoveries show that something dramatic happened around 12,000 years ago.
Hunter-gatherers roaming what is now southern Turkey did something remarkable.
Excavations in Turkey, at Gébekli Tepe show they stopped their wandering.
For the first time ever humans began to build on a monumental scale.
Changing the landscape.
All these earth mounds we see here are artificial.
They're not done by nature and they contain other monuments, monuments like that one we excavated here.
And these earthen mounds are sitting on top of a huge limestone ridge on its highest point, dominating the landscape here.
Inside these mounds, Professor Klaus Schmidt and his team are excavating enormous carved stone pillars - the first man-made monuments ever discovered.
Yeah, the pillars here are quite monumental ones.
Unfortunately the two central ones had been destroyed in ancient times.
The upper part is missing but we know the original height had been about five metres.
The stone pillars reveal that Stone Age man had a surprisingly high level of artistic sophistication This one we have a very fine example of the art of the Stone Age, with a high relief depicting a predator, maybe a leopard showing its teeth here, and the body of the animal, and below, a flat relief of a wild boar.
So we have three levels of art here, the cubic pillars, the T-shaped pillar, the high relief and the flat relief.
All together in one stone.
The discoveries at Gébekli Tepe have completely revolutionized our understanding of early man.
Long before they began to farm, hunter-gatherers paused to make their mark on their landscape.
The people who did it still had been hunter-gatherers - but they are meeting here, they are making festivals, feastings here, and now they have the manpower to produce the monolithic pillars, to transport them and to erect them here in these stone circles.
The building of Gébekli Tepe, the organization of labor and resources, the skilled workmanship involved, are proof of an extremely complex society 2000 years before man settled permanently to farm.
It has radically changed our understanding of the birth of civilization.
This kind of work is not a work done by everyone, it's a work for specialists.
Also to produce the pillars is a work for specialists, tor transportation, they had engineers tor such works.
So it means the hunter-gatherer society was much more developed than we expected before.
This previously unknown first chapter in man's long journey to civilization was discovered here in the Middle East.
The next chapter of this story saw permanent settlements - taking control of natural resources.
There's a key moment in the human experience where mankind no longer is just living hand to mouth - when men and women aren't just running after the natural world and begging it for succour.
Instead when men and women settle down, when they start to have fixed communities, they are for the first time really in charge of the world around them and this gives them an extraordinary footing from which civilization itself can grow.
This next vital step in mankind's journey also happened in this region.
Humans began to settle permanently and build houses and communities - starting over 10,000 years ago .
Evidence of this vital change has also been discovered in Southern Turkey, at Qatalhéyiik.
Qatalhéyiik was on a river.
It was a source of water and another vital component of life here - mud for building.
These ancient mud walls might look humble but they represent a key stage in civilization - the ability to build settlements.
Over 9000 years ago Qatalhéyiik looked like this - houses with ovens and rooftop entrances.
It's a story that's been pieced together by archaeology.
So what we've got here are a series of mud brick houses.
There's a house here and a house here, there's another one behind and one behind rne here.
The houses were built out of mud bricks that was collected off-site and they were generally sun-dried.
Here you can see a line of bricks - they're very long bricks but here you can also see the mortar.
The river by Qatalhéyiik didn't only provide mud for building.
It had another gift.
The rich soils proved very fertile.
People here had taken another revolutionary step - farming.
In the storage areas we find a series of clay-walled bins and here's the wall of one bin.
Within these bins we've found nuts, we've found pistachio nuts, almond nuts, we've found peas, wheat.
From there we can learn about what they were growing out in their environment, what they were farming.
The evidence is that the earliest crops and the domestication of animals began in Southern Turkey over 10,000 years ago and gradually spread through the Fertile Crescent east to Mesopotamia and west to the Mediterranean.
Farming and the settled communities that worked the land expanded through Europe and by 7000 years ago had arrived at its western edge.
The Eastern idea of agriculture transformed societies everywhere.
Agriculture produced a revolution in technology too.
This was the Neolithic Era, the New Stone Age.
Archaeologists have discovered the tell-tale signs of its highly effective technology.
On site we also find some of the tools that they would have been using.
So we find stone grinding tools that they may have crushed the wheat seeds up to make a kind of flour or crushed it up for a gruel.
And we also find obsidian tools - obsidian is a volcanic glass - which may have been part of a sickle.
And something like this may have been a hunting tool.
With agriculture and permanent settlement came more sophisticated technology - first pottery, tor storing and transporting produce, then metal and metalworking tor tools and utensils.
Farming was responsible for a revolution in society too.
It saw the careful organisation of communal projects like irrigation and harvesting, and it needed rules for the division, maintenance and inheritance of land.
The essence of the Neolithic is about domesticating environment and settling down in one place.
The Neolithic is the beginnings of our journey to where we are today.
An organized food supply could sustain a growing population.
People came together in ever-larger groups and man began to form the beginnings of what we now know as civilization.
And it was in the rich and fertile lands along the great rivers of the East where civilization was born.
If we start from East to West In China civilization's journey started by the Yellow River, and then continued by other rivers.
Also in India along the Indus and Ganges valleys we see the first artworks.
Rivers were the lifeline of civilization - from the Indus and Ganges in India to the Nile in Egypt.
Around 6000 years ago, between the two great Middle Eastern rivers - the Tigris and Euphrates - the world's first cities began to emerge.
One of the earliest cities was built on the western edge of Mesopotamia.
Mari, in modern-day Syria, was re-discovered in 1933.
Mari was a purpose-built city sited on the banks of the Euphrates.
The city was circular and was supplied with water by a central channel.
Mari was strategically placed to profit from trade routes between Mesopotamia and more distant sources of wealth.
Metals were brought here from Anatolia As well as other materials such as precious metals from Majan, Oman and Dilmun, Al-Bahrain, which are to the south.
They were all distributed from here to all of the East and other regions of the ancient world.
Mari grew rich through trade and agriculture.
But the wealth wasn't shared equally.
Instead a social hierarchy developed and at its head there was a king.
We are now in the throns hall of the Palace of Zimri-Lim which dates back to the second millenium BC.
On the opposite side is the base on which sat king Zimri-Lim's throne.
It was made of precious woods, gold, silver, and ivory.
In Mari, the past can speak directly to us.
Archaeologists discovered evidence of one of civilization's greatest inventions writing.
Thousands of inscribed tablets were found using text invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago.
It is perhaps in some ways the most momentous achievement which Homo Sapiens has come up with, the idea that you can make a set of signs on a surface which other people would recognise and from that, get the words of their language.
It's a momentous and most wonderful invention, the results of which are still crucial to us today.
Scribes used a cut reed pressing it into the surface of wet clay.
The reed made a line with a wedge at the end.
The scholars who deciphered the Sumerian texts gave it a Latin name - calling it cuneiform after the Latin "cuneus", meaning âwedge" it's fairly clear that the process of writing first got off the ground for administrative reasons where there was too much to keep control of in any other way.
The very earliest signs are what we call pictographs where you have a linear, rather infantile sketch of a given thing like a bird which looks like a bird and it means âbird But what happened in Mesopotamia and uniquely there, is that the early people who were experimenting with writing had the idea in their minds that you could draw a symbol - not for what it looked like but for what it sounded like.
And once this crucial step had taken place they very rapidly developed a whole range of signs which they could use to spell out the sound of their language.
It's impossible to overestimate the impact of the invention of writing.
It soon spread across the Middle East, quickly replacing pictograms and hieroglyphs.
And then it spread beyond to much of the rest of the world.
My Lord must pay close attention to this tablet.
The cuneiform tablets discovered at Mari reveal the scope of organisation required in the first cities of civilization.
How to lay siege to These administrative tablets show us that the society was really organized, it was not just a simple village.
It has to handle a whole city and the hinterland also.
So we know a lot about this society and specifically about those who were on top of this society, so the king, the priests and all this administration.
The tablets give us a great insight into their world.
But it isn't only writing that allows us to look back at this civilization.
One of the greatest treasures of Sumerian civilization is housed today in the British Museum - it's known as The Standard of Ur.
This object from Southern Iraq is just astonishingly beautiful.
It was made over 4500 years ago and although we don't know exactly what it was used for there is no doubting how precious it was.
Because if you just look at the materials that were used - there is lapis lazuli stone here, and red limestone and precious shells.
It clearly tells us a story.
And what I think this is, is this is a society that is working, everything is very ordered.
You have the men laboring in the fields at the bottom, then you have a procession oi fat animals being brought in - probably for some kind of religious sacrifice - there are goats and handfuls of fish and even cattle.
And then up at the top here is the court - there are men sitting toasting the king and clearly he is in control of the people beneath him.
It's actually a very peaceful and cultured scene.
But ii you go round the other side of this you find that reality is a little different.
Because here we have a terrible scene of war.
Here at the bottom you have men who are being trampled by charging horses as they pull their chariots.
You have naked men being brought in grovelling to the king who is standing with his staff.
So it's a cogent and visceral reminder that when you create a great civilization, this is a jewel that attracts thieves and there are always going to be others who want what you've got.
civilization brought rivalry and competition to the city kingdoms of Mesopotamia and that would lead to war and conquest.
A new age of Empire was beginning.
Mari was a rich target and was destroyed twice by rival powers.
First, over 4000 years ago, by the Akkadians, who created the world's first empire in Mesopotamia.
Then finally the Akkadians' imperial successors, the Babylonians, put Mari to the flame.
We have discovered the red traces of the fire on the walls.
We can see the level has been transformed by the heat and that was the end of Mari.
Mari and Sumerian civilization were destroyed but civilization itself survived and spread from its Mesopotamian beginnings.
From their mountain home in Anatolia, the Hittites created a 600-year-long civilization in a hostile landscape that had none of the natural advantages of the rich and fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia.
Here they built one of the largest empires of the ancient world.
Their historical achievement is that they were able to out-balance natural geographical obstacles by an enormous amount of control, social organisation and discipline.
They were able to build up an empire, controlling the majority of Anatolia, present-day Turkey, but also large regions of Syria, the Lebanon, the northern part of Lebanon - so in that time they were one of the global players in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The huge Hittite capital Hattusa housed a population of 50,000 people.
It was surrounded by massive outer walls with elaborately decorated lion gateways.
On the highest point in the landscape, the Hittites built an enormous monument to their achievement.
Visible from 12 miles away, it wasn't a defensive rampart but was built simply to house a ceremonial route.
The 3500-year-old structure is a testament to how far the people of the ancient world had come in their journey from hunter-gatherer to civilization.
This enormous artificial structure of Yerkapi is one of the most impressive buildings in Hattusa.
The whole building is, at the end, a massive statement, a stony statement of Hittite power, influence, civilization of what they are think they are themselves.
At its peak, the Hittite Empire rivalled Egypt for control of the Middle East.
But in the West a new power was emerging.
At the end of the second millennium, traders from Greece began to establish colonies along the coast of Asia Minor.
One place where these ancient Greeks ventured was the city of Troy.
The city rising above these plains was mythologized as a place where East met West in brutal conflict.
The Greek poet Homer immortalized it in the epic stories the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Although we may think of the stories of the Trojan Wars as just a legend or a myth, archaeologists have found Troy.
This is one of the most ancient entrances into the city.
We know that the Greeks really thought the Trojan War did happen here.
Homer's tale of the Trojan War reflects the real moment in history when the ancient Greeks began to expand to the older, more established civilizations to the east.
In the next centuries the city-states of ancient Greece grew in power and cultural influence.
Today, in the West, Ancient Greece is usually considered to be the home of civilization - where classical ideas and ideals of natural philosophy, literature and art were born.
But the place accorded to Greece in the history of civilization has obscured the East's contribution to the making of the modern world.
We can't ignore the importance of Greek civilizations but Greek civilization wasn't born on its own, it didn't happen spontaneously.
They accumulated lots of things from civilizations before them, repackaged them and presented them back to us.
Although they share a long history of civilization, East and West are more often characterized as rivals.
When you look at the history of the relationship between East and West, it could seem just like a catalogue of retribution and counter-retribution.
But actually the whole time these civilizations were learning from one another and their fates were inextricably linked.
Someone who rediscovered this Eastern legacy was a leader who was to change history Alexander the Great.
He came to Troy in 334 BC at the head of a Greek Army, heading east.
When Alexander the Great lands at Troy we're told that he slept with a dagger and a copy of Homer's Iliad under his pillow.
This was a man who was a new Greek going to conquer Eastern lands just as the heroes of the Trojan wars had before.
According to the Greek historians, Alexander made a special visit to Troy's temple of Athena.
When Alexander came here there would have been a temple to Athena here.
We have to use our imaginations a little bit because only some foundations remain.
The stories tell us that one of the things that he found in the temple were objects and relics that were said to date back to the Trojan war.
So one of the things that Alexander does in a symbolic gesture, is he takes off his own armor, takes some of this old Trojan war armor - possibly of Achilles - and puts it on instead.
And in doing so he's making a connection to the people that he thought were his ancestors.
Inspired by his visit to Troy, Alexander began his campaign of conquest in earnest.
He was intent on conquering the Persian Empire.
Forged 200 years before Alexander's time, it had grown to be the largest empire in the ancient world, spanning Asia, Africa and Europe.
Alexander won his first encounter with the Persians at the Battle of the Granicus River.
But the further he went the more he was to encounter the legacy owed to the East.
Miletus was typical of the mixed Eastern and Western influences Alexander discovered.
Miletus was in the Persian empire, but it was populated by Greeks who had lived on the coast of Asia Minor for centuries.
Extraordinary new discoveries here have thrown sharp new light on how East and West mixed.
Excavations are showing how Eastern ideas influenced the West.
Aphrodite was one of the greatest Greek goddesses.
In her sanctuary here archaeologists have discovered beautiful figurines given as offerings to the goddess.
From these, they have pieced together evidence showing the remarkable degree to which the Greeks in Miletus absorbed Eastern ideas even in their gods.
This is a very early piece, showing Aphrodite as a mighty goddess of vegetation.
And this is another one showing her as the mistress of animals.
These are all old, Near Eastern symbols.
The Aphrodite figurines discovered in Miletus are nearly all Eastern rather than Greek in style.
It seems clear that the Miletians' idea of Aphrodite came from the East.
The Aphrodite is of oriental origin and she came in this naked shape to the Greeks.
So they were taking up all these oriental influences.
Careful examination has shown that the Greeks of Miletus also learned how to make their goddess figurines from Eastern teachers.
These figurines are flat on the back.
These come from a mold, a negative, put the clay into it and wait until it dried.
They took it out and worked it over with a stick like this, doing the details of which we are it didn't come from the mold and then it was fired and it came out like this.
Making figurines in a mold is an Eastern technique.
The Greeks of Miletus combined it with their own technique of making figurines on a potter's wheel.
So we have a very neat idea of influences coming from the East and how they were adapted to their own, to their own tradition of the Greeks.
Greek colonies in Asia Minor like Miletus had a crucial role in transporting Eastern ideas to the West via Greece.
They are a starting place for the adventure of humanity Eastern cultures and civilizations travelled to the West via the Greek islands.
Knowledge and philosophical traditions from Greek islands spread to the rest of the world.
Alexander himself would find in his campaign against the Persian Empire, that East and West were inextricably mixed and what Alexander proudly took to be his own Greek civilization in reality sprang from an Eastern source.
After capturing the Greek cities of western Asia Minor Alexander struck East- defeating the Persians once more at the Battle of lssus.
Then he turned south, capturing Syria and Egypt, before venturing to Mesopotamia and finally defeating the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela.
Now Alexander readied himself to capture the ancient city of Babylon the jewel in the Eastern crown.
Taking Babylon was key to Alexander's dream of a world empire.
Once in a fertile landscape, Babylon lies 53 miles south of Baghdad in Iraq.
Some reconstruction of Babylon began in 1983.
The ancient city had an illustrious history.
One of the first cities of civilization, it had been a dominant power in Mesopotamia and had been the capital of the great Babylonian Empire.
The largest city on earth with a population of nearly 200,000 people, Babylon was a place of great wealth and architectural splendor.
Stories circulated throughout the ancient world about the glory of ancient Babylon but the reality must have been five times as impressive.
This was a city that was surrounded by a high wall, glazed with beautiful blue tiles.
Alexander entered Babylon through a ceremonial gate decorated with reliefs of aurochs and dragons, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.
From here a 200 yard ceremonial processional way, adorned with lions sacred to Ishtar, led into the city.
Nothing in Alexander's experience could have prepared him for the wonder of Babylon.
Reassembled from hundreds of thousands of fragments excavated at Babylon, the Ishtar Gate and processional way now stand in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.
Ishtar would have been familiar to Alexander.
He would have recognised in her the characteristics of his Greek goddess of love and war, Aphrodite.
Well, Ishtar was the most important goddess of the Babylonians.
We can get a feeling for her from the ancient sources in Mesopotamia.
And you look at the goddess Aphrodite, you might put them in the same category, they have the same status, they're always shown to be beautiful themselves and you could say that Aphrodite was as it were, the counterpart in Greek culture to Ishtar in Babylonian culture.
Ishtar had a starring role in one of the first and greatest stories of Mesopotamian literature - the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This piece of clay from the Library of Assyria is one of the bits of the story of the Epic' of Gilgamesh and the Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic example of what you might call a Hollywood story.
You have a hero, he has his adventures, there are monsters, there are beautiful women, there's treachery, there's friendship, there's adventure, there's the flood and everything all mixed up in one great narrative.
Ishtar decides she wants to seduce Gilgamesh and in this rather lively and funny description, Gilgamesh spurns her.
And here he lists in a wholes series of incriminating paragraphs the disastrous fate of her earlier lovers.
Gilgamesh's point is âIf I give in what are you going to turn me into? âI'll have nothing to do with it.
" She gets very angry.
To Dumuzi, the husband of your youth, to him you have allotted perpetual weeping, year on year.
You loved the shepherd, the grazer, the herdsman you struck him and turned him into a wolf so his own shepherd boys drive him away and his dogs take bites at his thighs And you have to imagine Ishtar slamming the door at the end of this conversation and walking out in a huff, exactly like in a movie.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature - dating back 1400 years before Homer.
The idea of a real person like Gilgamesh, mythologized in a cycle of stories, would have been very familiar to Alexander the Great.
The whole idea of the Homeric sources that people know so well measure up in a very intriguing way with this Babylonian example behind them.
You can see it's the same kind of literature in the same function.
They set us on the road of literacy and literature from really a very remote 5000 years ago it was already on the way.
People stopped writing in cuneiform script 2000 years ago and knowledge of it was lost to the world.
It was only in the 19th century, after the rediscovery of cuneiform tablets, that scholars deciphered the ancient texts.
As soon as we started to translate these cuneiform texts, we realised this was a rich and wonderful and sophisticated world - a world where there were great cultures, where belief systems were incredibly nuanced and various.
And in a way it's our fault that we don't understand the riches of the Eastern past.
It is all there for the taking - but for years we didn't know how to access it.
This was at a period in which the origins of Western civilization were thought to begin with the Greeks and Romans.
And the thought of having to rethink ancient history and really double the length of human civilization from beginning in about 500 BC with the Greeks, to beginning in 3000 BC, was just too much to contemplate.
And it's taken us 150 years or more really just to assimilate the doubling of human history into our own self identities.
Once cuneiform was translated, a whole new world of ancient Mesopotamian culture was opened up to Western scholars.
The fact is, of course, that Greek ideas did not come out of nowhere, and we can show nowadays, there's much more understanding of it, that certain portions of Greek, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and other disciplines, in fact embody traditions which were current in Babylonia.
Discoveries in Babylon also reveal that the ancient Greeks knew how to read cuneiform and had no difficulties in appreciating and assimilating the ancient learning of the East.
A cuneiform tablet found in the ruins of Babylon is remarkable evidence of the efforts of one Greek scholar to learn Babylonian.
What you have is your Babylonian school exercise on the one side, and then on the back you have a transcription into Greek letters of those signs.
So for example, we've got one which has words for âcanalâ, âbig canal", âsmall canal", âditch", âirrigation" - Babylonian words in cuneiform writing.
And on the back the Greek person who probably can never remember these signs and got fed up with trying to remember them has transliterated them to Greek letters on the back.
The very words in Sumerian and Babylonian are spelled out in Greek letters on the back as a crib.
It wasn't just Babylonian literature that the Greeks studied.
One of the East's greatest contributions to civilization was in the study of science.
One Greek familiar with Babylonian learning was Thales of Miletus.
Thales accurately predicted a solar eclipse.
It occurred on May 28, 585 BC.
Thales could only have calculated this eclipse by relying on the records of Babylonian astronomers.
Babylonian astronomers kept precise lists of eclipses, equinoxes and solstices from 747 BC 200 years before Thales predicted an eclipse.
They were driven by a compulsion to understand portents and omens and assuage their gods.
So all of these get recorded systematically night after night, month after month, year after year for over 600 years.
By Alexander's time all the omens had been collected together into an enormous series of observations and predictions.
And this tablet, which is the 21st chapter of the 70-chapter series, is all about solar eclipses.
And it was gradually through very long periods of observing the skies that scholars noticed that these events were not random at all and were not just the whims of the gods but were very sophisticated mathematical patterns, often very complex and often very long in duration.
And so by about the sixth or fifth century BC the Babylonians had changed their understanding of how the heavens worked.
It wasn't just the arbitrary messages from the gods but it really was a signal that gods had created a very deeply mathematical world.
Babylon's astronomers systematically observed their world, recorded their data and applied logic to what they found.
Their spirit of inquiry had already enthused Greek thinkers like Thales of Miletus but Alexanders arrival in Babylon accelerated the process of Greek absorption of ancient Eastern learning.
Alexander was fascinated by Babylonian astronomy.
And he had his historian, his reporter on the ground, translate as much of the Babylonian astronomical observations into Greek as he could, and to send them back to Macedon.
So, from the 4th century onwards we can point to many, many, very specific examples where we can be absolutely confident that individual Greek scholars had access to the writings of individual, named, Babylonian scholars, and that's really very exciting.
Babylonian inquiry and Greek logic formed a scientific method that transformed the world.
Greeks like Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy are commemorated for their role in this process but the astronomers of Babylon also deserve their place amongst the forefathers of science.
Every time we look at our watches we're doing something Babylonian, every time you read the horoscopes in the newspapers we're doing something Babylonian, every time we measure an angle we're doing something Babylonian.
There are some very fundamental everyday practices that we all do which are, we owe to ancient Middle-Eastern civilizations that we really just don't think about.
The Babylonians were brilliant mathematicians - they were the first to use angles, degrees, fractions, and equations.
They didn't count in our decimal system using 1O as a base - but used 6O instead - a method known as the sexagesimal system.
When you're a child and someone teaches you how to read the time, if you're an inquisitive kind oi person you ask yourself why on earth is there 6O seconds and 6O minutes, where does this 6O come from? This 6O comes from Babylonia.
From very early on in the third millennium, all calculations in ancient Mesopotamia were done on a sexagesimal system.
They never, like us, took ten fingers and used that tor their mathematical basis, they used the sexagesimal system.
6O is a more versatile number than 1O to base a numeric system on - as it is divisible by 2 and 5, but also by 3.
It's more flexible for complex astronomical calculations.
The 60-base system gave the Babylonians 6O seconds in a minute, 6O minutes in an hour, 360 days in a year, and 360 degrees in a circle.
One brilliant Babylonian idea was that the sky was a sphere that could be measured in 360 degrees.
The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, was founded in 1675.
Astronomers here tracked the movement of the stars and collected data to allow ships' navigators to calculate their position at sea Well, I think you can see traces of what was done way back then in the kinds of astronomy that was done at the observatory when it was first founded in the 17th century.
Like in Babylon thousands of years before, astronomers here divided the world into 360 degrees but put the Royal Observatory on the line of zero degrees.
It's known as the prime meridian.
Astronomers still use, and were using then, 360 degrees, dividing that into minutes and seconds to get more and more precise divisions in the sky.
And then also taking time measurements as the stars cross round the heavens to get a position of where they are.
The first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, John Flamsteed, mapped the skies and cataloged the stars just like the Babylonians, 3500 years before him.
And we can see inside this book, which is his Historia Coelestis, this is his life's work essentially from all the observations that he did.
We can see the list of the stars, the planets, the moon, and their positions as he observed them over many years.
Flamsteed inherited a tradition of observation that goes back through his predecessors, through the Renaissance, through Arabic scholars, back through the Romans, the Greeks, ultimately going back to the Babylonians as well.
The Babylonian numerical system also created the 12 signs of the zodiac.
They sub-divided those 360 degrees into 12 sections of 3O degrees and this chart here shows it very clearly.
Here we can see the triangles into those 30-degree segments, and each of the 30-degree segments is associated with a particular constellation that's appears near its middle.
So we have Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo Cancer and so on around here.
Extraordinarily, the symbols and names we still use for the stars go all the way back to the Babylonian astronomers of ancient times.
We have them, the names of the zodiacal signs written on hundreds and if not thousands of tablets but this little one here is particularly interesting to us.
Each line has a different zodiacal sign, all the way down here.
So this is the eighth, this is âScorpioâ written along here, there's scorpion, and then on the other side, here are the last tour and then a line underneath to show that's the end of the series, there are no more than 12.
So all the names of the zodiac are originally Babylonian.
Taurus the bull, it's called âthe bull of heaven" in Babylonian.
Leo is the lion.
The Babylonian zodiac was one of mankind's first attempts to find order and meaning in our apparently incomprehensible world.
And still now, everyone knows their star sign and we pretend we don't believe it but we all read our horoscopes sneakily anyway.
So the very idea that our fate is determined by the skies is something that has very, very deep roots in Babylonian thought.
Alexander the Great died at the age of 32.
By the time of his death he had become enthralled by his Eastern lands and his dying wish was for the people of his new empire - East and West - to unite and live as one.
Alexander's empire didn't last but the flow of knowledge continued.
One of Alexander's successors was King Antiochus, who built the tomb at the summit of Mt Nemrut, looking both east and west.
Hidden away being conserved is an extraordinary reminder of ancient Eastern knowledge.
Well, you know, something very special that was found on Nemrut which is the oldest astrological calendar in the world.
And when we look at it we can see a relief of a lion and some stars on it.
And we estimated that the exact date from the stars was 17 of July, 62 BC, and the time, the exact time is 16.
48.
And this is very special The Greek and Persian gods that flank the tomb are a symbol of Antiochus' mixed Greek and Persian ancestry.
Once again - it is a remarkable reminder of the synthesis of East and West achieved after the conquest of Alexander.
And how in the centuries after his death the West soaked up the rich and ancient cultures that flowed like a river from the East.