The Art of Islam (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] this is a series about the Dark Ages when civilization was said to have stopped and ignorance flooded the world I've been trying to convince you that it didn't happen that the Dark Ages were a fine era for art but in this film I'm going further the arts we'll be looking at in this film is some of the most sophisticated ever made if any art challenges the myth of the Dark Ages it's the art of Islam [Applause] [Music] [Music] this is Cordoba and spade that's the Great Mosque of Cordoba up there and this handy little Dark Age gadget is an astrolabe some people call this the first computer and what this thing does is calculate exactly where you are by using the Stars Islamic stargazers perfected the astrolabe in the dark ages to work out the direction of Mecca so they always knew which way to pray and it filled their art with cosmic patterns later on I'll be showing you how to use one of these I hope but first we need to travel back in time to the beginnings of Islam to the first fascinating creations of Islamic art and architecture so right now we're here in Cordoba in Spain to go back to the beginnings of Islamic art we need to go right across the Mediterranean to here Jerusalem the heart of the religious Dark Ages what huge dramas have been enacted here what important art has been created most of its gone unfortunately but not all of it some of it has survived notably that magnificent golden dome on the horizon the Dome of the rock it's one of the most significant buildings ever put up a piece of architecture that changed history you couldn't really ask for a more dramatic location could you and if you think it looks good from up here on the Mount of Olives just wait till we get closer Muhammad died in 632 ad and for the first fifty years or so after his death Islam was preoccupied with conquest the speed at which the Islamic empire expanded was remarkable in just a few decades it went from nothing to gigantic it was the most dramatic most aggressive and fastest feet of empire building the world has seen this is the Islamic empire just a hundred years after Muhammad's death up here whole of Spain all of North Africa the entire Middle East as far across as the borders of India [Music] but all this astonishingly successful conquest didn't leave much time for art almost nothing survives from the first years of Islam clearly art wasn't a priority and then out of nothing as if by magic this appears the Dome of the rock nothing in Islamic art prepares us for this it's just suddenly there a definitive Islamic creation seemingly conjured out of thin air it's like a flying saucer or something that's landed out of nowhere and something you sense immediately even from this distance is the powerful geometry of it that air of mathematical clarity and that's something that continues in Islamic architecture [Music] as you can see it's an octagon it's got eight sides and octagons have a special symbolic presence because they combined the geometry of a circle with the geometry of a square I'll show you if I draw a circle then two intersecting squares here the shape they form a shape in the middle the Octagon is a surprisingly popular Dark Age shape with powerful sacred meanings if the earth is a square but heaven is a perfect circle the octagon is a symbolic bridge between the two all the proportions of the Dome of the rock a meaningful so these walls here the walls of the Octagon each of those is about 20 meters long and the dome in the middle the height of that is again about 20 meters and the diameter of it is also 20 meters so all these proportions have been carefully calculated and have a purpose it's as if the entire building has been shaped by a divine mathematics and those divine mathematics have given it a secret meaning this location Temple Mount is the holiest spot in Jerusalem this is where King Solomon built the first Jewish temple the one destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and then Herod the infamous King Herod built the second temple here as well [Music] Herod's temple was made entirely from white marble and was so huge it covered 67 acres of this sacred location so grand so pompous and to my eyes so inelegant so the Dome of the rock sits on layer upon layer of crucial religious history and when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 ad and claimed this site for Islam they took possession of what is probably the most loaded religious spot on earth and that's just the outside for me this mysterious interior is one of the most atmospheric achievements of the dark ages there's something so haunting about the way the light works in here the shimmer of the mosaics the whispers of the calligraphy [Music] basically it's a circular shrine it's not a mosque it's a place of pilgrimage that's been built around a sacred site and the site it's all been built around as the site of this holy rock here the Jews believe this is the rock on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac and the Ark of the Covenant is thought to lie hidden somewhere underneath as well Islam as a different tradition Islam believes that this is the holy rock for which the Prophet Muhammad set off on its great night journey to heaven the angel Gabriel came to visit Muhammad in Mecca who brought him here to Jerusalem who from this rock the Prophet ascended to heaven and there in paradise he met God and God instructed him on the Muslim duty of prayer [Music] so this holy rock like the architecture around it is a point of contact between man and God and that's the religious message of the whole building if you saw the first film in this series you'll recognize this shape because we've seen it before this type of encircling architecture built over a precious site is something we found in the round churches of Byzantium remember San Vitale in Ravenna and Santa Constanza in Roman the Muslim caliph a banal Malik who built the Dome of the rock was deliberately taking on the architecture of the Christians this round shape the proportions none of it is an accident a [Music] bird al Malik also added an explicit inscription which runs all the way round and which gives the date in which the dome was finished 6 9 1 AD and it also includes a stern message to the Christians o you people of the book it says meaning the Bible Jesus is only a Messenger of God God is only one God it's a deliberate challenge to the Christians Jesus is just a prophet there's only one God and gods don't have sons this entire building is taking on Christianity [Music] floor to ceiling it's covered in the most exquisite mosaics gold and green there's a palm tree and these beautiful jeweled crowns and all the pieces of the mosaic are set at different angles so they reflect the light differently at different times of day do this all these glorious mosaics are intended to evoke a vision of paradise when you look there in paradise since the Quran you will see delights that cannot be imagined fruits of every kind and all that you ask for at a stroke Islam had invented for itself an unmistakable new architecture and at the center of this new architecture was a vision of paradise [Music] the Islamic paradise is a green and verdant alternative to the harsh desert landscape in which Islam was born these are lands where water is precious and so is hope [Music] just a few years after the Dome of the rock was finished the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus gave the world another wonderful Islamic structure the damascus mosque i think it's one of the most exciting buildings i've ever been in look what's on the walls inside the fabulous damascus mosque the Umayyad caliphs set out actually to describe paradise and to surround the islamic pilgrim was delightful and irresistible visions of it it's one of Islam's most dramatic artistic moments these are the joys that await us in heaven these are the beautiful cities in which we will live and this is the water the cool and endless water that we will drink [Music] those magnificent images of paradise in the Great Mosque of Damascus are like images of a wonderful oasis in the desert with water palm trees flowers everything that's so hard to find out here and the Islamic paradise promises so many pleasures in the next life to the true believer all you can drink all you can eat [Music] this is Casa amra it's one of the desert palaces which the Umayyad rulers of Damascus built out here to get away from the city its heat and it's pressures no one certain which of the Umayyad Prince's chose this distant desert location was it the caliph Alwaleed the first or al-walid the second what is sure is why they chose this particular spot Kazu Tamra is built in a Wadi the woody al bottom and Woody's a desert valleys that fill up seasonally with water so when it rains in the desert the precious water floods through the wadi and fertilizes it around the back of the building over here a various contraptions for channeling this water through the palace because believe it or not what you had before you here is a bathhouse Qasr Tamra is a bathing establishment in the desert one of the earliest surviving secular buildings of Islam the reason we've driven all this way across the desert to find it is because this fabulous bathhouse in the sands has something remarkable inside it something you'd never expect to find here floor-to-ceiling Islamic frescoes a troupe of acrobats gives a busy of four months and there's a bear strumming a lute there's so much going on in here and a group of statuesque female dancers show off their figures in their beauty the dancing girls are particularly surprising we're just not used to Islamic imagery as abandoned as this but it's important to remember that this is just as old and just as traditional as everything else we've seen this too is a precious Islamic heritage a negative way to understand CAHSEE Ramirez remarkable frescoes is to see them as signs of moral relaxation away from Damascus deep in the desert a wayward Umayyad prince is indulging an appetite for wine and music and women but I don't think that is what it's about if we go back to the many descriptions of paradise in the Quran there are constant references to the pleasures available there rivers of wine served in crystal cups beautiful flowers beautiful jewels and beautiful girls for the righteous says the Koran there shall be gardens and vineyards and high bosoms virgins for companions dark eyed and bashful as fair as corals and rubies inside here does the Khalid areum the hot room and in here the only ad prints would soak himself in hot water heats it up by all those gubbins we saw outside and as he lay here in his bath the Umayyad prince would stare up the dome where he'd see something wondrous an evocation the stars at night this is the earliest known Islamic star chart painted onto the dome at casa aramara around the edge are the 12 signs of the zodiac but in the middle frescoed representations of the constellations the Great Bear the little bear what a thing to find in an eighth century bathhouse a fabulous image of the heavens at night above your head it's as if someone's taken the roof off the dome and looked out into the sky at night in the desert full of twinkling stars and a beautiful idea [Music] it takes a bit of getting to CAHSEE lambda but I wanted to make it clear right from the start the bits wanna make art from its beginnings in the Dark Ages at this sensuous dimension to it a relationship to pleasure but you just don't find another art scattered across this great Syrian desert are the remains of fantastical who may add palaces filled once with beautiful mosaics and marvellous colonnades what tangible sensuousness we find here in this first Islamic art [Music] these eight sensually desert palaces must once have been filled with the accoutrements of pleasure versus hangings plates and cups almost all of which have disappeared but in 1986 here in Jordan they dug up this it's an 8th century Islamic brazier and it gives us a tiny hint of what life was like in the kazir amra bathhouse the brassiere was used to heat up the princes room and for burning incense originally there were wheels on it and it could be wheeled around from room to room to fill them with sweet smells it's made of iron and bronze the frontier as you can see there are these arches that is a bit like the ones in Kaziranga and inside the arches are scenes of lovemaking and couples canoodling and it's also atmospheric and so beautifully done I mean look at these Eagles at the bottom the way they've been shaped their wings their feathers this is metalwork of the highest quality at the four corners four cuddly nudes prepared to release a small bird into the incense filled air above them and there's a floaty feeling to this marvellous metalwork what a beautiful thing and the figurative sculptures you see here the female figures are again very surprising because this is an aspect of Islamic art that was there at the start it's very traditional but which modern Islam often forgets the beautiful brassiere was an object of private delectation it had no religious purpose but it's important to remember that sensuality played a role in the art of these times in the beginning this was Islamic art - and this and this [Music] when joy was called for Islamic art inspired great joy and when sobriety was more appropriate it achieved great sobriety [Music] this is the finest early mosque in Cairo the mosque of abundant aloni I like everything about it but most of all I admire its architectural seriousness the way you know as soon as you step in here that this is a space devoted to important understandings ahmed IBN tulun who founded this mosque in 87 9 ad was the son of a turkish slave who became governor of Egypt originally the mosque stood at the center of a new city that Ubuntu lon also founded the city of alka ty but al khatai was destroyed in the 10th century and this is all that's left of it they say it wouldn't alone chose this site because this is where noah's ark came to rest there were certainly water here that domed creation in the center is the ablutions fountain where all muslims must wash themselves before prayers all mosques not just this one based on the very first mosque which was the prophet's own house in medina it was a typical mud brick dwelling with a courtyard and in that courtyard the prophet's followers would gather to hear him speak so all these great courtyards of Islam all of them are descended directly from the prophet's own courtyard they're evocative sparseness is an echo of their origins and their sun-baked simplicity has been there from the start the walls that encircle you here and like the walls of the prophets own courtyard their task is to keep the outside world at bay and here at ubuntu lon there's actually two sets of walls a kind of double glazing that separates you from the hustle and bustle out there I like these playful crenellations arranged along the top as well they look like paper cutouts something my daughter might have made to protect his followers from the Sun the Prophet built a simple shelter at the end of his courtyard with a roof made out of palm branches and leaves and that simple shelter was the inspiration for these great arcades would still protect the prophets followers from the Sun the shelters in his courtyard were also used as somewhere to meet and discuss community affairs and that marvelous communal atmosphere of a space with many purposes is something else that survives to this day in the Islamic mosque the largest covered space was the prayer hall which was basically the prophet's own house at the end of the courtyard and every prayer hall today is a continuation of this marvelous Islamic sense there underneath or this mighty religious architecture you can still feel the humble presence of the prophet's own dwelling these prayer halls are so welcoming they have a sense of the living room about them a home from home most mosques a square or rectangular in plan and that's because they're all arranged in relation to this wall here which is called the Qibla wall the Qibla wall indicates the direction of Mecca in Arabic the word Qibla means direction and in Muhammad's house a simple spear stuck in the ground would mark the way to pray the center of the Qibla wall is marked by the me crab which is always the most ornate part of the wall usually Anish these niches were probably inspired by the culminating niches of Byzantine churches Christian architecture and to the right of the myth rad as the minbar or pulpit and this is based once again on the prophet's own house they say that when Muhammad had gathered so many followers he could no longer be heard by everyone he stepped up onto some blocks of wood and those are the origins of the minbar how fascinating that all the great mosques of Islam inherited their wonderful clarity their simplicity and their underlying sacred geometry from the humble house of the Prophet look at all that wonderful stucco work around the arches all that repetition and variety this is art used in a different way not to illustrate something but to create a visual rhythm Christian churches are full of pictures that tell you stories but there are no pictures in these great Islamic interiors the decoration here communicates in other ways there's a sense of endlessness to it it develops in all directions and it makes you feel part of something that's bigger than you so there are no pictures instead all the way round runs this Quranic inscription carved into wood you know I said this mosque was built on the site where Noah's Ark was said to have come to rest well another story they tell here is that this Quranic inscription is carved on the actual wood from Noah's Ark at the mosque of IBN tulun the quranic inscription runs for two kilometres around the building that's one fifteenth of the entire Quran written upon these walls this is the Word of God in its most sacred and purest form the power of the word is one of the great creative obsessions of the dark ages and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York the most beguiling of the first quran's the so-called blue koran turns the words of God into such glorious art [Music] [Music] don't know if you remember the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s it was rather controversial the president of Egypt President Nasser joined up with the Russians to build a dam across the Nile and various archaeological sites were lost forever who had to be moved to new locations stone by stone all sorts of ecological disasters were predicted for the dam most of which haven't happened the conquest of water was another of Islam's great achievements in the Dark Ages in Cairo the Nile would overflow its banks every summer in the agriculture of the entire Nile Delta depended on the success of this fertile flooding thick black silt rich with nutrients would be deposited across the floodplain ensuring a splendid harvest that was in the good years in the bad years the levels were either too low which meant disaster or too high which also meant disaster the Aswan Dam was built to control that process so you might wonder what do they do before in Islamic times they used this the celebrated Nilo metre of Rhode Island on the Nile opened for business in 861 ad it's one of the oldest Islamic monuments in Egypt and what dramatic evidence it offers of the aquatic brilliance of Islam's engineers what this thing does is measure the height of the Nile flood it's basically a big well sunk some 10 meters under the level of the river in the middle is an octagonal marble column a kind of giant ruler which as you can see is marked off at different heights [Music] the measurements are in cubits and one cubit is about half a meter so around 16 cubits is the perfect flood fertile controllable below 16 cubits there's not enough water so famine conditions ahead and higher up once we get past 19 cubits that's really bad a catastrophic flood [Music] the Islamic authorities in Cairo used the great millimetre to calculate their annual tax demands the perfect flood meant perfect profits ahead thus this brilliant piece of design was an early Islamic alternative to the pocket calculator before they built the Aswan Dam these tunnels here led off into the Nile at three different levels so if they weren't closed off now I would be underwater and look at those pointed arches above the tunnels I mean that's pure gothic 400 years early the manometer was designed by the famed Persian astronomer abble Abbas Ahmed ibn Muhammad even Katya Alfa Ghani better known to us by his Latin name how for gayness Alfre gave us his most famous achievement as an astronomer was calculating the diameter of the earth Copernicus was said to have used his results and has even a crater on the moon named after him the Alfre gainers crater but it isn't just science that created this and it isn't just commerce either all the way round there are also these beautiful Quranic inscriptions in a lovely Koufos script thou seest the earth barren and lifeless it says at the 17 cubit mark but when we pour rain on it it is stirred to life at the Nilo meter in cairo science commerce and faith have combined in a uniquely Islamic fashion to create a technological wonder this entire series is about how the dark ages weren't dark but sometimes I should just shut up and let you see the proof for yourselves because it couldn't be more obvious [Music] this is Cara Wong in Tunisia once this was a city of enormous power the most important Islamic outpost in North Africa now it's a marvelous place to visit for any true student of the dark ages kara when they say was founded by the great Arab warrior city Akbar it banoffee who conquered these parts for Islam just fifty years after the death of the Prophet when city Akbar God here this was all desert but something made him pause and look down at his feet when city looked down he saw a miraculous spring the fresh water bubbling up and in that water a golden cup which had lost many years before at the holy spring in Mecca the underground waters seemed to have carried it here so it was clearly a sign and on this holy spot city Akbar founded Caravan [Music] at the center of the new city he built a new mosque the oldest such boss in North Africa from the outside is not much sign of it Islam isn't a religion that flaunts itself in the streets but when you get inside into the great courtyard of the city Akbar mosque what a powerful sight awaits you another practical use for these great mosque courtyards particularly here in Cairo and where it's so dry it's the collecting water when it rains all the water is channeled down here to the center and see these decorative openings they actually have a practical purpose when the water flows through them all these arabesques they actually filter out the impurities dust the feathers then the water pure and clean is saved below in two giant cisterns so all of kara Wan can make use of it because it was built from nothing kara Wan is a particularly pure Islamic city there are few traces here of the Romans or the Vandals or the Byzantines kara WOM Islam started from scratch except here in the courtyard of the mosque look at this column look at the top what is that Corinthian next to it no Phoenician over here Roman perhaps could even be Egyptian who knows of the 414 columns arranged around this great courtyard of the mosque in Kara Wan no two are the same every column is different that's because they were all taken from other people's temples and palaces and city halls this entire mosque was built from bits and pieces of other ancient buildings in the old days it was actually forbidden to count the columns in here anyone caught doing it was blinded if you look closely you find some really surprising things about this courtyard for example up here there's a Christian cross so this column must have come from a Byzantine church but through some miracle of architectural power despite all this busy borrowing the end result is an unmistakable sense of Islamic unity this space could have come from nowhere else this is unmistakably an Islamic space [Music] there are many remarkable things about the Cara Wan mosque but particularly remarkable I think is the proof that is offered here that architecture is an art form of spaces not of details of courtyards lot of capitals see the tower here it's got these saps of stone at the base with Latin inscriptions on them see this one here it's upside down so these must have come from a Roman building this is actually the oldest surviving Islamic minaret and it's got a bulky militaristic presence rising up in these three squat pieces but like all minarets its original purpose is glorious to spread the word to share the news to shine a light the minaret is one of the defining Islamic achievements of the Dark Ages it's landed much that was inventive and progressive in architecture but in its minarets it surpassed itself this word minaret comes from the arabic menara which means lighthouse and that's its function to be a beacon of hope to offer safety and protection and of course the faithful were called to prayer from up there in the very first mosque built by Muhammad the faithful were called from the rooftops that a cities got bigger mosques got bigger you needed somewhere higher up from which to broadcast the faith and look what inventive shapes were found for this conquest of the sky this is the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq it's nicknamed for obvious reasons is the snail shell no one else in the Dark Ages built anything as areally ambitious as this and it wasn't just the mosques this extraordinary brick masterpiece in Iran is the tomb of the zero ad Prince Cabos urban fashion gear it's a thousand years old but looks like something the Bauer house might have come up with don't you think inside caboose had himself suspended at his death in a coffin of pure rock crystal what a thrilling Islamic conquest of the heavens speaking of rock crystal it's a very special substance isn't it according to the Koran when the Chosin arrived in paradise they'll be given drinks of ginger served in goblets of crystal [Music] crystal or rock crystal to be more specific was a substance with which Islam seemed to have a special affinity they say it was ahmed eben toulon himself who introduced the art of carving rock crystals into egypt what's certain is that it was in Egypt that this difficult art reached perfection I don't know about you but I can't think of many substances in the world with a presence as magical as rock crystal [Music] particularly when it has passed through the hands of the master Carver's Islam only a handful of these gorgeous Islamic viewers have survived and that just makes them feel even more precious rock crystal itself is actually very common it's just a type of course the quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth's crust you get it everywhere there's a stripe of it here what isn't common it's pieces of course so pure and perfect and transparent that they satisfy the demands of the great crystal carvers of Islam no one has ever carved rock crystal more finely than this what they do is find a perfect lump of crystal and shape it on the outside and then begin hollowing out the inside and they'd follow it further and further and further till in the very best Islamic art the walls of the crystal were only a couple of millimeters thick now that was unbelievably difficult the shimmering images carved into these gorgeous crystal Ewers would transport the drinker to paradise hunting scenes flowers beautiful birds so crystal clear that none could resist them and it wasn't just Islam that saw something magical in this rock crystal in Ireland when Ireland was still pagan they used to put pieces of rock crystal at the entrance of the burial chambers and in Egypt they carved it into perfect spheres to parent Lea kept your hands cool when you touched it and of course it was used for telling the future but it still is [Music] all sorts of Dark Age societies were fascinated by rock crystal the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder believed that rock crystal was actually frozen water trapped for eons under the glaciers even the early Christians worshiped it for them rock crystal had a natural relationship with divine affection so they put it on the outside of their rennet crisps and up in their golden crosses where it's perfect presence seen somehow to connect them to God Christian rock crystal has a different feel to it in Christian hands the light filled paradise of Islam seemed to fill up with shadows with Christian rock crystal the dark ages are what you expect them to be mysterious spooky and talismanic [Music] the water engineers of Islam perfected their hydraulic skills in lands where water was precious and rare so their relationship to it had something of the dream about it the Islam water wasn't just a necessity it was an enticement - this is cord the back in Spain the Muslim armies got here in 711 ad and conquered it and the Visigoths remember them from the last film and when Islam arrived in Spain it could not believe how fertile this new territory was how folk apero difficult waters this is the Gua delivery in Andalusia the largest navigable river in Spain the name is Islamic it comes from al wadi al Kabeer which means the Great Valley these days the Guadalupe River is only navigable up to Seville but in Islamic times you could sail all the way up here to Cordoba and in this great city Islamic water architecture surpassed itself all along the Guadalupe here a cunning system of mills dams and water wheels channeled the energy of the waters the water wheels are part of the back lifted water from the river CAI up to the bank where the Gardeners of Islam used it to recreate paradise on earth [Music] this isn't actually an Islamic garden it's an Islamic style garden built by the Christian Kings here in Cordoba unfortunately the original Islamic garden has disappeared but Islam was here for 500 years so this style of garden making is ingrained in the culture and what you still get here is a vivid sense of how the Islamic garden felt fountains waterways flowers these are the divine atmospheres of those magical paradisiacal mosaics we saw in the Great Mosque of Damascus except this time they're real to enter the mosque at Cordoba you need to pass through another beautiful evocation of the paradise ahead an orange grove so divinely harmonious this was obviously a very desirable location they say there was a Visigoth Church here originally and later when the Muslims were finally kicked out of Spain a Catholic cathedral was plunked in the middle of the mosque creating this ungainly hybrid it was the Umayyad prince abdul rahman the first who began building the Cordoba mosque he actually bought the land from the Christians and in those early days of religious tolerance Muslims and Christians shared the building the Cordoba mosque is famous for its columns 856 of them like rows of palm trees in the oasis of Syria is how someone's described them columns are very laborious to make and they use up a lot of precious stone so they're very heavy and if you can avoid making them you will for the Cordoba mosque the columns came from the Visigoths church that was there before and also from nearby Roman temples but these reused Visigoths columns weren't quite tall enough so to make the Cordoba mosque higher and more Airy the architects of Islam came up with a brilliant new idea the double arch two arches for the price of one at the bottom the horseshoe arch borrowed as we saw in the last film from the Visigoths then on top of that a round arch arch number two making the mosque taller less solid looking more see-through for the first time in European architecture the aesthetics of light were shaping a building [Music] [Music] you know Cordoba when the Muslims were here had half a million people living in it it is by far the largest and most prosperous city in Western Europe at all of those inhabitants had running water they had toilets that flushed street lamps in the tenth century [Applause] in urban planning architecture mathematics and water engineering Islamic knowledge would peerless and in one area it was spectacular astronomy the study of the stars 90% of the 200 brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names Vega betel juice algal Deneb they're all creations of the Dark Ages because Arabic astronomy allowed the Dark Ages to glimpse the cosmos remember those stars painted onto the roof at the palace in kasnia amra well that was just the beginning while christian science was insisting on a backward biblical understanding of the cosmos islamic science was investigating the heavens more adventurously [Music] this little baby here the astrolabe has been called the first computer it was developed to pinpoint the direction of Mecca Muslims needed to pray five times a day in a specific direction at specific times the astrolabe could work all that out in relation to the Stars so this was the first kompis as well and the first clock so the way it works the first thing you need to do is decide on which star you want to focus on and I'm going to choose Vega so fine Vega in the sky with these sites here I line it up until I can see Vega in the middle it's exactly there and that gives me a reading here in degrees degrees from the horizontal so I can see that Vega right now is 35 degrees so the next thing to do is to set the date measured of course in the old-fashioned way and phases of the zodiac right now we're in Gemini so in fact we're in the fifteenth degree of Gemini way about there otherwise known as the end of May [Music] so this is basically that in diagrammatic form and whatever is true on here is also true out there so I know the date I know where Vega is so with the help of this handy Dark Age sat-nav I can finally work out where I am it was out for a geillis the multi-skilled designer of the milometer in cairo who undertook the first great islamic exploration of the stars he was followed by many others without islamic science and it's sensuous delight in the cosmos perhaps this really would have been a Dark Age with Islamic science it was anything but in the next film we'll be heading north to celebrate those fine craftsman the Vikings and to investigate this particularly skilled jeweler's of the Dark Ages the anglo-saxons [Music]

Channel: Perspective

Views: 107,972

Rating: 4.8217201 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, history documentary, inspiring documentary, inspiring documentary music, ancient art, the dark ages, documentary movies - topic, god art, old art, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, islamic art, islamic architecture, arabic calligraphy, islamic art history, islamic art tutorial, middle east, islamic art painting, islamic artifacts

Id: ugvQIjwbd6U

Length: 59min 33sec (3573 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020