Birth of Europe: Episode 2

and how it became the birth of Europe [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] nothing makes people feel smaller more incidental to the scheme of nature than a mountain [Music] [Music] and now that people have discovered how mountains are created their geology seems great beyond comprehension the force for example that carved the summit of the Matterhorn into a gigantic spearhead was the weight of a pile of ice hundreds of meters higher than the highest [Laughter] [Music] and to make the mountain required continents to collide when moving continents push up mountains they also push out metals the materials by which humans transformed themselves from a pack hunting animal to a creature that could among other things fly to the moon continents drift because they're floating on molten rock something we on the topside only see when the land splits and lava spews out like blood from the wounds as the heat comes to the surface it can concentrate molten metals into nearby cracks and the rocks to form seams of ore and while the land pulls apart in one place it piles up in another here for instance is how the Alps were made if you reverse geology by 160 million years back as far as the early days of the dinosaurs you see a Europe that's mostly underwater then Africa moves north on a collision course the ocean floors pushed up the seas recede and the southern edge of Europe is jammed backwards the resulting crumples are the Alps Italy Corsica and Sardinia have bent sideways causing splits eruptions and volcanoes then melting IceCaps raised the sea once more to set the coastlines of the Europe of today and it was not just the map which was formed in this way that crunch with Africa was also to shape the destiny of peoples pieces of Africa and the seafloor in between was shoved right up onto the European landmass don't blush this mountain in Switzerland is African so a most of the mountains in Austria the limestone the light band of rock in this peak above martini in Switzerland was formed like all lime stones under the sea to the south of Europe as Africa pushed up it was folded on itself like a rock in a carpet and dumped on top of the granite mass of the continent amazing as this is it's more interesting to humans that the same processes enriched the continental rocks with seams of metal tin and lead silver and gold halfway up a cliff on Switzerland's vice horn there's a clear boundary between European rock and former seabed the upper rocks the green ones contain copper distilled beneath an ancient ocean it was concentrated by volcanic heat into ores green malachite and blue as your eyes it took humans the best part of their existence as a species to recognize the potential of these ores but when they did the graduation from the age of wood and stone was decisive and rapid humans were farmers dense and partial to low flat land but metals are found in mountains if the discovery was ever going to be made it would have to happen where flat lands and mountains meet these mounds in Bulgaria called tells are the remains of prosperous farming villages of 8,000 years ago nearby are seafloor rocks one of the largest tells called Corona vu has now been excavated to leave a cross-section like a cliff and as far as the nesting be eaters are concerned a cliff is what it is but in fact they're digging burrows among the broken pottery of a village as a horizontal cross-section can reveal [Music] [Applause] [Music] when people first settled here and built these modern wattle homes they were farmers the first farmers in Europe an inventive industrious culture with a curiously punctuated history [Music] their lives would carry on uneventful II for a few generations and then some sudden catastrophe an earthquake or a fire would destroy everything [Music] then they would rebuild on top of the ruins of the past starting another layer another new chapter the future archaeologists to explore now at the bottom level they're lifting the dust off floors beside the oldest road in Europe when karela ver was first settled 8,000 years ago its inhabitants were farmers attracted here perhaps drawn to settled in Europe by the rich local soils the huge pot holes in the cobbled street are the rubbish pits dug by later generations that cliff 13 metres high contains 4,000 years of villages built one on top of the other not only did the Koran opens obliged the archaeologists by having periodic calamities and successive three buildings they gave each layer a distinctive marker a new advanced in the art of pottery at the bottom is the first European model plain terracotta [Music] at the next level useful new shapes appear the next a fine black finish witnesses progress in firing techniques higher and there's wonderful artistic expression higher still and the Potters are using burnished graphite and something else happens it's about 6500 years ago and Europe has entered a new age set in a handle made of chicken bone this a tiny oil made of copper [Music] behind the tail of korenev oh stand hills oceanic rock the farmers have known for centuries about the strange greenish rocks in these hills they even mind them here at I burn ah but it wasn't until their control of fire and reached a certain sophistication that they could discover in the native copper they also found there a very interesting property by repeatedly heating and hammering it you could make it into a new shape unlike a fine tool made from bone it wouldn't break a sharp copper or could be used for stitching leather native copper wasn't plentiful but where it existed it wasn't hard to find they were usually a telltale green or blue outcrops of malachite [Music] and people were already familiar with these colored rocks they'd been using them as jewelry for at least a thousand years beads were laborious ly carved and drilled one by one if the advancing techniques of pottery provided the means for metalwork it could have been self ornamentation that provided the motive malachite is a compound of copper carbon and oxygen thrown on a fire intensified by a bellows it gives off green flames when it's heated more it disappears into the embers somehow after the hath cools the malachite has stopped being erupted the ability to change stone to metal must have seemed like sorcery and the early Smith's must have had a certain social mystique not to save power in Europe 6500 years ago the tool and most common use the one the average man would have had on his belt was probably the stone axe which was used for practically any heavy duty job from tree felling to carpentry stone axes were hard to make particularly when the hole for the handle had to be drilled by means of bow bone and Sam so when coppersmiths made their next discovery I could make axes as if by magic they gained even more custody applying their skills with pottery they used a container to heat the metal the stone axe could be a thing of beauty and a mark of prestige but now it had a competitor Kocher a soft metal couldn't be made as sharp as stone but hammered copper was sharp enough and a copper axe had the beauty of novelty [Music] and of course was a greater status symbol the demand for copper soon drew miners into other parts of Europe where only hunters have previously ventured to the mountains I drug the Glover in Yugoslavia generic alps rocks that had started their existence on the ocean floor were dug out and carried down to the smelting Hoth's malachite veins were pursued deep into the mountains [Music] the earliest mines were dug by building a fire against the side of the shaft and then pouring cold water on the rock [Music] this caused the surface to crack and the stone could then be broken further with mores prized out with antlers and the best or sorted out by color copper transformed society in a way that can be seen among the farming villages beside the Black Sea here the archaeological layers pile up meter on meter the centuries with very little change and then suddenly a blossoming [Music] another metal appears and surpasses copper in value if not usefulness recently discovered graves at Varna in Bulgaria contained the earliest treasure found in Europe gold ornaments may have been bartered for copper tools Commerce was not new but such treasures brought great status this is no longer a simple agricultural society and this chieftain no farmer the bracelet is made from a type of shell spondylus that isn't found in the Black Sea it comes from the Aegean and it was probably traded by way of the Bosphorus for this societies copper this man died owning at least one and a half kilos of gold he was a powerful chieftain at the start of an age of new dimensions in rank and wealth copper tools from the mines of retina glava and the smelting hearth of Varna Coronado were traded throughout what is now Bulgaria and then spread further east to the steppes of Moldavia and north to the Carpathian Basin Slovakia and the Baltic coast all the way to the Jutland Peninsula then in the way of minerals ever since the copper ores ran out most of the metal had been buried with its owners or been traded away whatever copper the currency of prestige was gone that was five and a half thousand years ago and a whole society may have collapsed because of exhausted mines after Africa had collided with Europe created the Alps and put sea-bottom malachite in mountainsides something else happened ice advanced from the north covered the mountains and began to carve them as glaciers cut away the upper layers of rock they laid bare the lower sections of the copper deposits when the ice retreated these ores could be found in the higher remoter mountains but the sulfur in them made them gray and metallic they didn't look like malachite people not only had to learn to recognize this as copper but they had to learn to burn off the sulphur before smelting it the green flame in the end was probably the giveaway and in the new seams was found the occasional or of arsenic that coincidence plus the inspiration of some unknown metallurgical genius led eventually to a mixture of copper and arsenic and a much better metal arsenic finally gave copper the cutting edge it lacked it was in the Middle East of the first are cynical copper was smelted and in the caucuses of the new ores and the new technology met up and the marriage gave birth to new tools by a new process the two-piece mold it's brought a real advance to the concept of mass production molds could be made from a pattern and used again and again and in them could be cast axes with a long cutting edge and a deeper shaft home axes for use in battle Sonia and sharper than anything made of pure copper not just symbols of power but weapons of war among the early customers were the tribes from the steppes north of the Black Sea who had achieved a new and remarkable mobility by domestication the horse [Music] horses were the key to a wandering way of life and in the Caucasus Mountains a culture of coppersmiths now had rich minds and the skills to mass-produce the finest weapons in the world [Music] it was not long before the horsemen from the steppes discovered them and rearmed they spread they fought their way into Eastern Europe and a centuries past some groups pressed on into the Carpathian Basin the horse and arsenic or copper had brought a common culture from the Caucasus to the Danube [Music] since people had first arrived in Europe the Danube which cut through the barrier of the Alps to the centre of the continent was one of its main avenues for trade anyone who could hold a position along a Main Avenue was banned to prosper and beside the Danube about five hundred years after the birth of the battle-ax this meant powerful chieftains who raised cattle and controlled river trade when the new weapons began to appear in the cargos they adopted them eagerly and used them on each other as ever new weapons meant new defences around settlements such as butchered or a more belligerent society also meant a rich one today all the remains are their graves but from hordes last store offered to the gods we can at least tell the priorities of the day in one hoard lays sixty battle-axes mass production on this scale provided wealth and prestige worth fighting for and could command the allegiance of neighboring tribes power came from expertise in metalwork a warrior Prince's dagger of gold copper was the currency of prestige and the luchador princess got theirs and thus their power from the mountains of what's now Yugoslavia the battle ax carried their culture all the way north to the site of present-day Prague and there the copper trade met another trade coming from far distant lands trade of another metal tin Smith's already understood the concept of the alloy of mixing metals and have found that mixing copper with tin was even better than mixing it with arsenic but in didn't come from new mountains like the Alps it came from the granite heart of an older Europe and some cultures as distant as the one in southern Britain the one of us building Stonehenge 300 million winters had eroded these mountains away and dispersed the veins of tin as nuggets in stream beds instead of being mined the nuggets were scooped up with gravel which being lighter would wash away and the thousand-mile trade in this metal of many colors mark the beginning of yet another new era in unit because tin and copper made bronze it was 2500 BC and Europe's Bronze Age had begun with a continuation an intensification at the age-old arms race [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] men now lived and died by the sword and for the next 2,000 years mounted warriors and warring tribes spent virtually all of the creative energy of Central Europe on warfare and ostentation [Music] [Applause] but in another part of Europe the New Age brought an era of peace the Aegean Sea the geological basis for cultures here was the stretching of the planet's crust layers of rock had tilted up and sometimes rise above the sea as Islands even before Europeans had learned how to farm there were mines here as people came in search of valuable minerals pushed up from inside the earth on some volcanic islands such as minnows obsidian could be found this is a volcanic glass with a color and molecular structure that is different for every volcano but it has the common quality of being a very good raw material for stone blades and arrowheads 13,000 years ago obsidian collectors were voyage into me loss in reed boats of a kind that was still being used in Corfu 50 years ago they would fill baskets with the precious rock and risk crossings between islands as far as 20 kilometres apart the last ice age was waning and the world sea level was lower then this myth that the islands were closer together but in a reed boat any seed journey on the open sea is too long it was a perilous trip from me loss to frankly on the mainland where obsidian had been found in the debris of a cave me loss is part of an arc of volcanoes that define the southern boundary of the Aegean Sea caused by the same stretching that is putting crete southwards about 10 centimeters every year the stretching is tilted the rocks of Crete higher and higher Mount Ida has risen high enough to intercept the winds from the south and west they bring snow and rain which create forests and bring water to the valleys in the Bronze Age creats climate was even wetter and the island had thick forests of ash older and lied the earliest poets wrote of many fountain died er the mother of wild beasts creats first settlers arrived 9,000 years ago with cattle and seed corn they regarded the rain as a gift from the gods and worshiped the mountains perhaps for bringing the rain to their crops indeed Mount yuccas has the profile of a sleeping man all of nature clouds Springs rocks trees all were sacred and ruled by a goddess dicta no in the cretan scheme of life humans inhabited the valleys while the gods lived in the forests and on the mountains [Music] [Applause] [Music] the first communities on Crete were isolated from each other by ranges of hills and mountains that cut off their separate valleys this made them as safe from competition with each other as they were from the mainland and it was the fertility of these valleys where there is still enough grain grown to feed the whole of Greece that provided the foundation for the first European civilization civilization in its simplest form is the organization of society into communities supported by outlying farms 4000 years ago the Cretan farmers built large ceremonial settlements and in them were massive circular containers almost certainly for storing grain a surplus of grain they would have held much more than the people who lived in the settlements needed what were these giant centralized grammar is for in case the rains failed or had grain take another deepest of liberties certainly whoever controlled it had power great bronze soars we used to build palaces of limestone three stories high like these on a contemporary mosaic the fertility of the valleys was transformed through the currency of grain into the first European cities and the sea itself was changed it was still a barrier a huge moat at a loud treat to develop in splendid isolation and thanks to one of mankind's quantum advances made about four thousand years ago the invention of the sail it also became a medium of travel of trade [Music] in fact it was easier to travel by sea than by land [Music] scarabs have been found on Crete imported from Egypt where surfaces had already been transformed into pyramids from even further south and ivory monkey thought perhaps with Cretan wool olive oil and timber from Syria tiny cylindrical seals with portrait of the rulers that had grown rich on the trade by camel caravan from the east [Music] and most important of all copper ingots Crete had no mines but agriculture civilization and the sale had brought them bronze just the same and that other metal the one that never tarnishes gold and once they had the metal their craftsmanship was exquisite this skill granulation was later lost for thousands of years they used a blowpipe to increase the heat of an oil lamp flame the product a delicate golden pendant to wasps clutching a coma honey it's 4,000 years old the pottery was delicate - so eggshell thin you might expect it to crack under the weight of its design [Music] wine cups [Music] sacred Signet rings gold engraved with dancing priestesses goddesses of rocks and trees [Music] there was a goddess of nature apparently of the earth who bestowed power on the priesthood who ruled these palaces the greatest of which was ex gnosis there were no defensive walls and ceremonial stairs led directed to the countryside Cretan civilization was only human and the palaces no doubt were celebrations of the power and prestige of a priesthood but there was a gentility about them like the craftsmanship nothing here resembled the grandiose megalomania and the pyramids or the defensive monuments of the east though one could have held a Cretan palace against an angry populace but at the center of every Paris still lay power in the storage chambers perhaps Crete was easy to rule because a population of simple farmers was held in sacred or the palace priests certainly exercised authority of a trade and economy as certainly as the Pharaohs did in Egypt at the palace of Colossus a lead-lined vats and hundreds of huge jars for olive oil wine and grain and in time the stock grew richer perfumed olive oil fine woolen textiles metalwork stonework and no dad a sophisticated bureaucracy to keep track of it all a seal established the palace ownership but that wasn't enough some quartermaster had to keep records on clay tablets and the first one to do it was probably the first person in Europe to write the script is called linear a and it's never been deciphered but these are obviously numerals and it's known that this is the sign for wheat in the way of bureaucracy the time had yet to honor state archives measured and manipulated the fruits of the working man's labor the main thing most people know about the first European civilization the Minoan is that its citizens were obsessed by the power of bulls bull cults had existed for thousands of years in the East and the symbol of Colossus became the bull man the mine at all in Fresco's athletes vaulted the horns of bulls the men perhaps sacrificial acrobats were rendered in red the priestesses were white when the Minoans reached the peak of their power they had graduated from a society based mainly on farming to being masters of trade trade that flourished because of their singular craftsmanship and also because crete was the right sized island in the right place at the right time to keep command of that trade meant maintaining the freedom of the waves with a powerful fleet from palaces like gnosis Minoan culture and trade radiated from Crete to all the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and the riches of the known world flowed back to the priests of the Minotaur and the lords of the labyrinth which was named after the second symbol of Colossus the double-headed axe the lavish it was mounted between the symbolic horns of the sacred bull as the political and religious power of the rulers of the palaces increased the palaces themselves increased in magnificence life grew more and more luxurious rituals more extravagant and the priesthood more obsessed with the metaphysical [Music] it was still the great goddess of nature whose rituals were observed now as the goddess of snakes [Music] [Music] but then the crust of the earth did what it had always done it moved [Music] Santorini or Syrah erupted it was only one incident in the story of the continual stretching of the Aegean floor but a resource of the greatest eruption of historical times dated recently at 1628 BC it converted a mountain into a huge flooded crater and round about that time the Minoan civilization collapsed today a wisp of smoke remains and underneath the lava on the side of the volcano a Mediterranean town that was obliterated Akrotiri now little by little being dug up again it's tempting to think that the disaster that crushed this staircase also wrecked a civilization there's certainly no doubt that it wrecked Akrotiri and Akrotiri had a strong Minoan influence [Music] these storage jars for grain now turned to carbon were covered by 30 meters of pumice thira and entombed the refined culture exquisite frescoes of African antelopes a young fisherman with his catch this greatest of all historical explosions took place just 120 kilometers from Crete but did it cause the fall of Colossus one long-held theory was that the falling ash buried the Minoan crops and brought a terminal famine but though the ash fell a metre deep on roads and smothered Asia Minor only a few centimetres touched Eastern Crete was it tidal waves tsunamis they would have been huge but did they destroy the palaces Cotto's across the palace near a sea level is at the eastern end of the island there's no sign of giant waves here they seem to have been directed to the west and miss Crete entirely but one thing does appear to have happen to all the palaces that have been excavated one thing at the same time a southern end of the Minoan civilization there wasn't a drenching from the sea quite the opposite but final just the same in the ruins of all the palaces you can find a black layer of cinders and above that the rubble of the tumbled walls the palaces were all burnt down and theory is too distant to have been the cause the volcano wasn't the culprit and this contemporary pottery proves it after theaters eruption this new style came into fashion and fifty years on the labrys the double-headed axe was still in place so what happened at Colossus in the 16th century BC one of the purposes of mythology can be to transmit history [Music] the myth of the mannitol and the rising Greek culture maintained that every year the Minoans demanded from the town of Athens seven young men and seven maidens to be taken to canosa's and fed to the mine at all one year Theseus son of the Athenian King demanded to go with them but Ariadne the daughter of King Minos fell in love with Theseus and gave him a spindle of wool to thread his way in and out of the labyrinth beneath the palace she also gave him a sword [Music] he found his way to the lair of the miner tour [Music] but the miner taught dead the lovers escaped as Colossus turned the myths from the ancient civilizations long preceded modern archaeologists who have often been surprised by discoveries that give the myths at least symbolic credence in the records of the rebuilt Palace of Colossus they found a new kind of writing which they called linear be there when it was translated they found it was in Greek the burning of the palaces preceded a new dynasty new rulers who continued to have a bureaucracy that continued to record herds and wool and spinning and weaving but in Greek these Greeks Warriors of the mainland came from the fortress town of Mycenae that dominated Athens they were the Mycenaeans maybe thira had been a factor in the downfall of the Minoans in that the infallible rulers had been terminally embarrassed by failing to predict it maybe the tidal waves sank the Minoan fleet maybe the Mycenaeans had led a revolt against a hated minnow and priesthood maybe no one will ever know but it is one of the greatest unknowns of history and it's certain that people will continue to speculate and here is where the speculation begins the grim ruins of Mycenae but lower above the fertile plain of Argos [Music] in 1876 Heinrich Schliemann the discoverer of troye retrieved Mycenae from the darkness of Greek prehistory when he found this great stone circle and cut into its bedrock royal graves full of gold [Music] the king who bore this gold mask died the no sauce Pharaoh [Music] this was the sumptuous hoard of a warrior race [Music] the tradition that began with the magical battle-axes of the caucuses had made Mycenae rich in gold the heirs of the fierce Horsemen of the north who wined and dined behind these ramparts and now triumphed over the whole Aegean for about a century and a half the Mycenaeans traded from Troy to the Tiber it is likely that it's they who won the Trojan War but then a Dark Age began from about 1200 BC the Mycenaean fortresses one by one began to fall in fact the whole population of the region crashed there'd been another eruption in 1150 BC in Iceland the volcano hexlen exploded with such violence but it's ash darkened the entire Northern Hemisphere the European climate already cooling cooled faster glaciers advanced forests retreated lakes rose peat bogs grew Mediterranean olive trees died of frost perhaps it was a volcano that caused a Dark Age in the Aegean in the turbulence of the following centuries the Greeks even forgot how to write their later lament was that an age of gold had been lost to an age of iron geology is oblivious it destroys as easily as it creates the continents were still colliding the Alps still rising the process of making new materials for new ages was still going on Greece would rise again on the resources of the Mediterranean and someday northern Europe would too [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] necklines

Channel: Tim Atkinson

Views: 17,086

Rating: 4.8167939 out of 5

Keywords: Minoan, Crete, Bronze Age, Alps, Continents, collision, volcanic eruption, volcano, civilisation, agriculture, trade, meditteranean

Id: 0Ynju8_f9PQ

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017