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00:00Help everyone explore new worlds and ideas.
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00:09In a labyrinth of ancient Roman tombs,
00:13a mysterious chamber comes to light.
00:22Thousands of bodies stacked on top of each other.
00:27This is an incredibly unusual discovery.
00:31A mass grave from the days of a golden empire
00:35sends archaeologists on a hunt for answers.
00:43The body has the appearance of a sort of mummy.
00:46That's quite an unusual custom.
00:50What killed so many people so quickly?
00:53Could these be the bodies of Christian martyrs?
00:58Or victims of a deadly plague?
01:00A chance find.
01:01A tomb that confounds all expectations
01:04and multiple mass deaths.
01:09Roman Catacomb Mystery.
01:11Right now, on NOVA.
01:13It's over.
01:14ROOM
01:18MUSIC
01:40Beneath the streets of modern-day Rome
01:43lies a network of interconnected tunnels that stretch for hundreds of miles.
01:54A giant underground cemetery.
02:02These are Rome's catacombs.
02:04They're over 1,500 years old
02:07and they contain many of Rome's ancient dead.
02:10In 2003, deep within this subterranean labyrinth,
02:16a bricked-up tomb was discovered,
02:19unlike anything seen before in Rome.
02:23I had never excavated a site with so many bodies.
02:31Quite unreal.
02:32The burials here are quite unlike the other burials in the rest of this funeral complex.
02:43Typically, in Roman catacombs, the graves are neat and orderly,
02:47with individual bodies carefully placed into niches.
02:50But that's not what the archaeologists find here.
02:56This was an ancient mass grave piled high with thousands of skeletons.
03:02This is an incredibly unusual discovery.
03:05Tombs packed full of bodies layered on top of one another.
03:09You just don't expect to find this type of burial in a Roman catacombe.
03:13I'm Michael Scott, and as a classical historian,
03:17I've studied burials across the Roman world.
03:20But I've never seen anything like this.
03:23Who were these people?
03:25What did they die of?
03:26And why are they buried here in this extraordinary manner?
03:29For the last ten years, an international team have been trying to find out.
03:39The archaeological detectives are looking for clues.
03:45In the layout of the tomb,
03:48in personal possessions,
03:51and in the bones themselves.
03:54Our aim is to try and understand who they were.
03:57So, in some way, bring them back to life.
04:01But with each new clue,
04:03that task will become more difficult than they ever imagined.
04:19Rome's catacombs have been explored and excavated for centuries,
04:22and by and large, their use, their layout, their architecture, fairly well understood.
04:28But then a chance discovery in one of these catacombs opened up a whole new mystery.
04:35Behind a nondescript door on the outskirts of Rome,
04:38lies the catacomb of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter.
04:48Here in the summer of 2003,
04:51a burst watermaid causes the roof in one of the tunnels to collapse.
04:56The hundreds of miles of tunnels that make up the Roman catacombs
05:02fall under the jurisdiction of the Vatican.
05:05Inspector Raffaella Giuliani is sent in to investigate.
05:09Just above us is the place where the hole opened and started this whole adventure.
05:23The collapsed ceiling revealed a medieval fresco.
05:29The painting is believed to show the two 4th century patron saints of the catacomb.
05:43Marcellinus, a priest.
05:46And Peter, an exorcist.
05:49They appear to be standing guard over a burial chamber.
05:54When we find early medieval frescoes in catacombs,
06:00they are usually connected to the presence of a martyr's tomb.
06:06In the centuries before the Roman emperor converted from paganism to Christianity,
06:12Christians were persecuted,
06:14sometimes rounded up and massacred in amphitheatres all over the Roman Empire,
06:19like the Colosseum.
06:20The religious painting in the catacomb raises expectations for a martyr's tomb.
06:27But nothing could prepare Raffaella for what lies hidden behind the fresco.
06:35We found these spaces almost entirely full of skeletons piled on top of each other.
06:45They had uncovered a mass grave.
06:51The burial site is located in an area of the Vatican's underground mapping system,
06:58labelled X.
07:00They came to be known as the X-tombs.
07:07So are the X-tombs the last resting place of hundreds of Christian martyrs?
07:12To find out, the Vatican seeks specialist help.
07:16A team of French archaeologists are called in, led by Dominique Castex and Philippe Blanchard.
07:28Both are experienced in excavating ancient mass graves.
07:32What were your first impressions the first time you came here?
07:42When I entered, I discovered a huge number of bones.
07:45There wasn't enough room to move, so we had to squeeze in.
07:48As excavations begin, six more chambers are uncovered, each piled high with bodies.
08:04The tombs are arranged on three separate levels, all located around a central hub.
08:18We need to completely forget these modern walls here, which are actually working as foundations to stop the six metres or so of rock above our heads from collapsing on us.
08:27This is the crucial bit.
08:28This is the largest of the burial chambers.
08:30And the archaeologists estimate that there's just under a metre, about 80 centimetres left, of compressed bodies still to excavate.
08:37There's another tomb there that was full of bodies that the archaeologists have now removed.
08:42And there's another one, two, three burial chambers behind us.
08:46So, when we stand here, we are surrounded by chambers of mass death.
08:55All together, the archaeologists estimate the tombs contain the bodies of at least 2,000 people.
09:07Picking their way through the bones, a few personal possessions come to light, a pair of earrings.
09:16A hairpin.
09:19And a small black ring.
09:22They also unearth a few coins.
09:31The bones themselves reveal more clues.
09:37You can see connected bones in some places.
09:46Here you have a whole vertebral column with the pelvis.
09:52Ah, yeah, a pelvis.
09:54Continuing with the femur.
09:56The corpses were brought here and decomposed here.
09:59It was not just a case of throwing bones in.
10:02Most of the bodies are in similar positions, with their shoulders compressed, hands resting on the pelvis,
10:09and their legs stretched out straight, with ankles touching.
10:16The fact the skeletons are still intact, and are packed so closely together with very little soil between the layers of bodies,
10:25suggests that large numbers were buried here at the same time.
10:29They're all relatively well laid out on their stomachs or on their backs.
10:35The bodies were carefully laid out side by side, head to foot, and vice versa,
10:41to bury the maximum number of people in an extremely restricted space.
10:45This has to have been something of a mass death moment, what archaeologists call a crisis event.
10:58Multiple people dying within a very short space of time.
11:04To find out more, the team makes a detailed study of one of the tombs, where all the bodies have been excavated.
11:11By digitally restoring the flesh to the bone, a computer program calculates the original volume of the bodies.
11:21And the results are completely unexpected, because the bodies don't fit.
11:28The volume of all the bodies was bigger than the size of the room.
11:34This means that the bodies could not all have been laid out at once.
11:39There isn't enough space.
11:47Some bodies must have been placed in the tomb after the bodies below had already decomposed.
11:54But because the bodies tend to be stacked together so neatly,
11:58we think they were placed here in waves.
12:01The victims of a series of mass death events.
12:04For centuries during the age of the Roman Republic with its famous figures like Julius Caesar,
12:23and the early Roman Empire under emperors like Augustus,
12:25the Romans buried their dead in cemeteries just outside the city.
12:33In fact, the area directly above the ex-tombs, now a bustling suburb of Rome, was once a cemetery.
12:40Remnants of gravestones recycled in the catacombs below revealed that the upper cemetery was the resting place for the emperor's elite cavalry guard.
12:52But as the population of Rome expanded during the second and third centuries, the space available became increasingly limited.
13:03So they started burying people in underground cemeteries.
13:06Rome was built on a soft volcanic rock called Tufa, which could be carved out by hand.
13:16These sprawling subterranean graveyards, the Roman catacombs, grew rapidly under the city.
13:23But they look quite different from the chambers of the ex-tombs.
13:27Despite the fact that the corridors in a typical catacomb meander every which way, the layout of the dead was actually fairly regularised.
13:37You had your individual tombs called loculi.
13:40Burials in most catacombs were neat and orderly, with a special shelf for each individual body.
13:46I always refer to them as bunk beds. There's still the bones of one poor individual left there.
13:50And if you wanted something a bit more special, then you could have a cubicular, a bedroom for the entire family to be put to rest in.
14:04As excavations continue, the bones from the ex-tombs are removed and kept in a makeshift storeroom for further analysis.
14:12So far, the French team have made a detailed study of around 500 bodies.
14:19They're starting to build up a picture of who these people were.
14:24From the pelvis bones, they can tell there is a mixture of men and women.
14:32The size and stage of development of the femur bones also gives an idea of their age when they die.
14:39We have a right femur that would form a joint here, and the head is fully formed. There is no sign of fusing, so it is an adult femur.
14:49Are most of them adults?
14:53There are a large quantity of bones which range from teenagers and young adults.
14:58These people certainly didn't die of old age.
15:03But are there any signs of trauma?
15:08If the bones are those of Christian martyrs, we would expect to find clear marks of violence.
15:15But here in the ex-tombs, not a scratch.
15:18Out of 500 individuals, you would expect to find evidence of blows or injuries on the skeletons, which we do not have.
15:32None of the bones show any signs of trauma that one would expect if someone had been crucified, or indeed if they died in battle in some sort of massacre.
15:45Despite the fresco of saints outside the tomb, there is no evidence that these are Christian martyrs.
15:59So who were they? And why were they buried down here like this?
16:02The first step is to try to find out when they died.
16:08One way to establish a possible date for the tomb's occupants is to study the handful of personal belongings uncovered amongst the bones.
16:18These earrings were made from fine gold.
16:23They have a design that became popular in the first century.
16:26This ring is made of the semi-precious stone jet, which Romans thought held magical powers.
16:37Studying its chemical composition, the archaeologists conclude it came all the way from northern England in the third century.
16:47Then there are the coins, possibly left as payment to enter the afterlife.
16:52Their age is much easier to establish.
16:57The oldest coin is of the tenth emperor, Titus, dating from the first century.
17:07The wife of emperor Antoninus Pius features on another.
17:12As does the emperor Marcus Aurelius, both from the second century.
17:17The last coin was of emperor Gordian.
17:23It's a rarer find than the others.
17:28He only reigned for three weeks in the third century.
17:31Coins are fantastic. They really help us narrow down a range.
17:37But there are caveats.
17:39You carry coins around in your pocket for a long time.
17:40They exist in circulation for ages.
17:42And the archaeological contexts here in which these coins were found are not secure.
17:52To try and get a more accurate date for the bones, the archaeologists use radiocarbon dating.
17:58Surprisingly, the different chambers of the ex-tombs come back with different results.
18:13The bodies from the two larger chambers date from the second and third centuries.
18:18But some of the bodies from the smaller tombs date from the first century.
18:29These dates suggest the first burials took place before the use of underground catacombs became widespread.
18:37And possibly up to 200 years before the corridors surrounding the ex-tombs were built.
18:42This is an exciting revelation.
18:52The ex-tombs could be among the oldest underground tombs found anywhere in Rome.
19:00The dating provided by the coins and the bones and the other finds indicate that these people died between the end 1st century AD and the early part of the 3rd century AD.
19:11Now that period of time in Roman history was, by all accounts, a golden age.
19:21Some of Rome's finest imperial buildings were completed between the 1st and 3rd centuries.
19:29The Colosseum.
19:32Great bath complexes.
19:36And ever larger public forums.
19:38The people of the ex-tombs, whoever they were, were living at the centre of a vast and powerful empire.
19:50At its height, the Roman Empire spanned three continents, 2 million square miles.
19:56And its territories stretched from North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, Asia Minor, across Europe, and northwest to the borders of Scotland.
20:11At the very heart of it was Rome, Caput Mundi, the capital of the world.
20:16Rome was a multicultural city, full of people and products from around the empire and beyond.
20:30This was the ancient world's greatest metropolis, with a population of over a million.
20:39This cosmopolitan melting pot is where the people of the ex-tombs lived and died.
20:49At their lab in Bordeaux, the French team are searching for more clues to the possible identity of these people.
21:12Kevin Seles is analysing the chemical makeup of the bones and teeth in a process called isotopic analysis.
21:26This looks at the various atomic forms, or isotopes, of chemical elements like oxygen and carbon, found in organic remains.
21:39The minerals in your teeth are set when you're a young child, and they don't change throughout your life.
21:44Whereas your bones keep remodelling themselves, so they tell us about where you spent the last part of your life.
21:49And by comparing the two, we can find out whether these people were originally from Rome, or whether they came from elsewhere and migrated to the city.
21:59The first isotope Kevin is looking at is a rare form of oxygen, called oxygen 18.
22:06Nearly all of the oxygen found in our teeth and bones comes from the water we drink, and that comes mainly from rain.
22:14The amount of oxygen 18 in rainfall varies from place to place, depending on climate and location, including distance from the ocean.
22:27By looking at the oxygen 18 in bones and teeth, Kevin can get an idea of where an individual was born and lived, and compare it to a typical native Roman.
22:38Here are the results from the teeth, and here you have the results from the bone samples.
22:50The teeth and bones of native Romans typically have levels of oxygen 18 that lie within the red zone.
22:57But the teeth and bones from the ex-tombs fall outside this zone.
23:02This shows that the people of the ex-tombs were not born in Rome, and even as adults, they travelled around.
23:10The bones tell us the last years of their lives.
23:14These individuals most likely moved from one region to another region, so this group is characterised by great mobility.
23:21According to Kevin's research, the oxygen 18 levels indicate that some of the people of the ex-tombs may have come from northern Europe, others from across the Mediterranean, northern Africa.
23:38And by studying isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, Kevin is even able to explore what foods they might have eaten.
23:44The bones from the ex-tombs reveal a diet rich in meat and fish more than the average Roman who lived mainly on grains and beans.
23:56These people must have been fairly wealthy for their time.
24:00What's coming through very strongly in the archaeological analysis is that the people of the ex-tombs were not from Rome.
24:06They came to Rome, but where they were from initially, well, that's a question that the archaeology is still struggling with.
24:13There are some indications that it may have been central Europe, but also from elsewhere.
24:17This doesn't seem to have been a homogenous population, all from the same place.
24:21But they came to Rome, they lived in Rome, and they died altogether in Rome.
24:25The French team are starting to build a picture of who these people were and how they lived.
24:34But they also want to find out how they died.
24:40We know they weren't martyred.
24:43We know from the dating that bodies were deposited here possibly over a 200-year period.
24:48We also know they were carefully packed in several layers deep at a time and that there were a series of separate mass burials.
25:04What the archaeology is showing is fascinating.
25:08Piles of bodies were put in these tombs on top of already partly decomposed bodies.
25:13So what we've got is waves of mass death.
25:18We know it wasn't massacres.
25:21So the best hypothesis for what could have caused this has to be disease.
25:30Disease was rampant in the capital, from tuberculosis to typhoid, leprosy to malaria.
25:38During the time of the X-tombs, diseases like these are thought to have killed over 30 people.
25:43We know it was about 30,000 residents each year.
25:49It's really not surprising when you realise how most Romans lived.
25:56The majority of the population lived in the world's first high-rise apartment blocks.
26:01They were called insulae, or islands, and there were thousands of them, densely packed into the city.
26:14This is the insula d'Aracelli. It dates from the second century and would have stood at least five storeys tall.
26:19Down there is the ancient Roman ground level. That's where the floor was.
26:25And the first levels are shops and inns, and then as you go up, you get the private apartments.
26:30But you know what? You wouldn't want to be in the penthouse here.
26:33While the lower floors were rented to wealthy tenants, the upper levels were for the less well-off.
26:45The apartments were smaller, the number of people in each room increased, and living conditions were just awful.
26:52Aqueducts brought in fresh water, and the city had an impressive drainage system.
27:03But the people of Rome still lived in filth.
27:06All the trash and garbage were thrown into the streets, and none of these apartments had toilets connected to the drains.
27:16So human and animal waste ended up in the street too.
27:21The people of the ex-tombs may have lived during Rome's golden age, but the streets of the capital were more like an open sewer.
27:30Disease raged through the city.
27:36And there was no escape, even at the famous baths.
27:42The Romans loved their baths. It was a great place to relax, soak, have a massage, scrub down, chat with friends, catch up on the gossip.
27:55The people of the ex-tombs would have likely gone to the baths.
27:59The baths were part of the social glue that bound all Romans together.
28:06The baths were attended by rich and poor, young and old, healthy and diseased.
28:15In fact, we know that Roman doctors actually prescribed a good soak in the baths for all sorts of ailments.
28:20So if you had everything from boils to rabies, from diarrhea to tuberculosis, you came to the baths.
28:28The sick and the healthy baths bathed together because the Romans had no real idea of how disease spread.
28:39The baths really were the perfect place to catch a disease.
28:42And new strains of disease were constantly being brought into the city by traders, migrants and soldiers.
28:53It's easy to imagine how the people of the ex-tombs might have succumb to waves of infection.
28:59To try to find out what disease might have killed them, the French team bring in a world expert in reconstructing ancient DNA.
29:15Johannes Krauser is a professor of paleogenetics.
29:22His previous work studied the Black Death which struck Europe in the 14th century, killing millions.
29:31By extracting DNA from bones from a mass grave site in central London,
29:39he proved that the culprit behind the Black Death was Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.
29:48Here in the ex-tombs, he faces a far greater challenge.
29:52The bones are much older.
29:54There may be very little DNA left behind from any disease-causing microbes or pathogens.
30:01So what we want to have is the genetic material of the pathogen itself.
30:07So we're trying to find places in the skeleton that still might have the pathogen DNA to preserve.
30:13And what we have found is the best container for the genetic information are actually teeth.
30:18How do you pick the particular teeth that you're going to work with?
30:22We try to identify teeth that are still intact.
30:26They don't have a crack or some hole in the surface.
30:28And inside those teeth, we might have a little bit of dried blood where the pathogen DNA might still be present.
30:38So we can actually see that the jaw is just sticking out here.
30:41You can actually see the teeth here being exposed.
30:44It's just perfect to actually get in here.
30:45Yes.
30:46Yes, that comes out.
30:52Perfect.
30:53Look at that.
30:54Wow.
30:55Oh, my God.
30:56Yes, you can see how wet that is as well.
30:57That's a molar on the left.
30:59No jaw.
31:00Okay.
31:01Okay.
31:03Easily.
31:05Pardon me?
31:06Yep.
31:08The teeth are photographed, catalogued, and bagged up, ready for transportation back to his lab in Germany.
31:17Hopefully we have a little bit of the pathogen DNA that we can also get out of those teeth and then reconstruct the DNA, reconstruct the entire genome.
31:28Johannes believes that some of the people here in the X-tombs might have been killed by one of the most virulent epidemics ever to strike the Roman Empire.
31:37This devastating disease was first recorded around the year 165, when the Empire was ruled by two brothers.
31:57It was called the Antonine Plague because of the family name of the two brothers.
32:02Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Verus.
32:06Lucius Verus may have succumbed to the disease.
32:15It's uncertain where the Antonine Plague came from.
32:19There were reports it started in the Middle East.
32:22But the disease swept through the Roman army, just at the time when the Empire was challenged by invasions from the north.
32:30It wasn't long before the Antonine Plague passed into the civilian population.
32:37The Roman Empire was a vast, integrated, connected trading network, which also contributed to the plague being able to spread so far so quickly.
32:48It was in Italy. It was in parts of Central Europe. It was in the East. It was in Egypt.
32:52In Egypt, there's even one report that it made it as far as China. And of course, as the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome.
33:01When the plague struck the capital, there was panic and public hysteria. Priests were summoned and religious rites performed to purify the city.
33:23The people of the ex-tombs would have been vulnerable just like everyone else.
33:32According to Roman consul and writer Diocasius, 2,000 people often died in Rome in a single day.
33:41In his books, the emperor's physician Galen describes some of the symptoms of the Antonine Plague.
33:48A fever, a rash, diarrhea, foul-smelling feces, an ulceration of the windpipe, and dry pustular eruptions on the skin.
33:58No-one knows for sure what disease was responsible for the Antonine Plague.
34:07We do know it claimed more lives than any previously recorded epidemic.
34:12Across the empire, something like five million people were killed,
34:17up to a tenth of the entire Roman population.
34:21The plague struck in waves that lasted from 165 to 180, then again in 189.
34:35It's entirely possible that some of the people in the ex-tombs living in Rome at that time
34:40were killed by this disease that shook the empire.
34:51In his lab in Germany, Johannes Krauser and his colleague, Kirsten Boss,
35:07are trying to extract DNA from the teeth samples taken from the tombs.
35:21I drilled out the pulp from inside the tooth, which is now powder.
35:27The powder now goes into the solution, and the DNA gets released from the bone.
35:34So our answer could be in that tube?
35:36I hope so very much.
35:38This process creates a mixture of billions of DNA molecules.
35:42But because the samples are very easily contaminated,
35:45the cocktail will contain not just DNA from the bones and potential disease microbes,
35:51but also DNA from soil microbes that were present in the tomb.
35:56It's kind of like looking for the needle in the haystack.
35:58So you have billions of molecules that we get out of those teeth,
36:02and maybe just a few hundred come from the pathogen.
36:04So there's a lot of sorting, and then there's a lot of puzzling.
36:07To isolate any fragments of DNA left over from bacteria or viral pathogens,
36:17Johannes has adapted a technique known as DNA hybridisation capture.
36:22He calls it fishing.
36:27On this glass slide are 100 short single strands of synthetic pathogen DNA.
36:34They include the genetic codes of everything from smallpox to measles,
36:39typhus to bubonic plague.
36:44The cocktail of DNA from each tooth is then added to the slide.
36:49The synthetic strands now act as bait to hook out any actual pathogen DNA from the solution.
37:00DNA is a double strand of chemicals.
37:03Each strand containing a string of four chemical bases,
37:07represented by the letters G, A, T and C.
37:13These two strands only stick together when the bases match up precisely.
37:18C to G and A to T.
37:25DNA has this double strand where you have the bases facing each other,
37:30and there's always this A facing with the T,
37:33and you have the G facing with the C.
37:35And this creates the famous double helix.
37:37Exactly.
37:38Everyone knows the kind of picture of DNA.
37:40And just if the right sequence kind of matches the opposite sequence,
37:44those DNA fragments will actually bind and form the double bond.
37:47If they don't match, they will not come together.
37:49It's like a magnet basically.
37:51It only kind of pulls the DNA together if the strands matches.
37:55So only pathogen DNA would bind here.
37:58But Johannes is pushing this technique to its limits.
38:04It's never been used to fish for so many possible causes of ancient disease.
38:09We have not just looked for a single pathogen,
38:14but we have actually looked for hundreds of them in parallel
38:16because we don't know what has killed those people.
38:19We don't know if it was one or several pathogens
38:21that were spreading in their population during their time.
38:28Johannes and his team are just beginning their search.
38:32Even if they manage to isolate DNA from a disease-causing bacteria or virus,
38:37it could then take months or even years of computer analysis,
38:42comparing millions of genetic sequences
38:45to identify which specific pathogen was the cause of death.
38:51This technology, this science represents the best chance we have
38:56of finding out what killed the people of the X-tombs.
39:00But for now, the mystery of the deadly disease remains unsolved.
39:15One mystery the archaeologists may be able to crack
39:18is the identity of the people themselves.
39:21The French team have been doing tests
39:23on a white powder that was found in the tombs.
39:27It was very odd.
39:31Right from the start, we found this whitish material covering the bodies.
39:36Our first reaction was to think it was lime.
39:42Lime is often used to prevent the bodies from putrefying
39:48and from disease-spreading.
39:50We had some tests done, and when we got the results,
39:55it turned out that the material was actually plaster.
39:59It's unusual to find plaster in traditional Roman burials,
40:04and this plaster contained further clues about how the bodies were buried.
40:09We can see particularly well a small imprint,
40:15which is in fact traces of fabric which have become imprinted on the plaster.
40:20The presence of plaster and fabric suggests these bodies may have been bound
40:28in an intricate shroud, which has since disintegrated.
40:32This would explain why the shoulders were compressed,
40:36hands resting on their pelvis, legs stretched out with ankles touching.
40:41And in amongst the skeletons and plaster, a second curious substance was discovered.
40:50In certain chambers, in direct contact with the bones,
40:54we uncovered a very large quantity of very fine red flakes,
40:58rather like small crystals.
41:04In fact, the flakes turned out to be amber, red amber.
41:08Amber was a very expensive material.
41:13It was used in burial sites to ensure safe passage to the afterlife.
41:22But it's rarely been found in this ground-up form,
41:25and never in this quantity, in all several pounds,
41:29were recovered from the tombs.
41:31One piece in the puzzle was nearly overlooked altogether.
41:43I was with Dominique.
41:44We were leaning over a skeleton when I saw this gold thread.
41:48I said to Dominique,
41:50have you lost a strand of hair?
41:52She answered, no, no.
41:54Well, in that case, I think we've found a gold thread.
41:58This was at the beginning.
42:04The more we dug, the more gold threads we found.
42:07Sometimes heavily concentrated on the shoulders and collarbones,
42:11bands of gold threads.
42:13Sometimes just small fragments.
42:19Could the people have been buried, dressed in gold-embroidered clothes?
42:23What began as just a mass of bones is beginning to come into focus a little.
42:32We've got a large number of individuals who are all carefully laid out,
42:36mostly adults, articulated one by the other.
42:40And then there are all these strange finds, the white powders, the red powders.
42:44And then there's the fine gold thread, what they thought to be Dominique's hair.
42:51We're getting a clear picture now of an elaborate and expensive burial ritual
42:56for what seemed to be some wealthy and distinctive people.
43:00In Bordeaux, more clues are coming to light.
43:09One of the French team, Delphine Henry, has been studying remnants of the fabrics
43:14that were embedded in the tiny pieces of plaster recovered from the tombs.
43:18There are different layers of fabric.
43:28You can see very clearly we have coarse fabrics, finer fabrics,
43:32and some very fine fabrics in certain places.
43:38The fine luxury fabrics were made by professional weavers.
43:43The coarser fabrics were probably made at home.
43:48Delphine believes she can even work out where the person who made the fabrics came from
43:55by closely examining individual threads in the cloth.
43:59A thread is made by twisting the fibers.
44:02And traditionally, this was done using a spindle.
44:07In the northern Mediterranean, the spindle is held at the top,
44:12and most people, being right-handed, give it a twist,
44:16which produces a thread called a Z-twist.
44:23So the Z-twist is European?
44:26You could say mainland Europe.
44:29And in the southern Mediterranean, they tended to hold the spindle at the bottom,
44:35and so produced an S-shaped twist.
44:37Delphine found fabrics made both with the Z and the S-shaped twist.
44:44But it's the coarser fabrics she finds most intriguing,
44:48because they often display the S-twist in the tradition of the southern Mediterranean.
44:52Since these fabrics were probably made at home, it is likely that the people from the X-tombs were either themselves from the southern Mediterranean,
45:06or had slaves from that region.
45:07Philippe believes this cultural connection with the southern Mediterranean can be narrowed further, to North Africa.
45:22The practice of completely covering the corpse from head to foot in plaster does lend the body the appearance of a sort of mummy.
45:35That's quite an unusual custom.
45:38That was really a burial practice that came from northern Africa.
45:50Probably in the region of Tunisia or Algeria, because we find it a lot there.
45:57All this evidence points to these people being outsiders, who had travelled around Europe and the Mediterranean, and eventually came to Rome.
46:07Their diet, their jewellery, the gold threads, all indicate they were relatively wealthy.
46:14So who were they?
46:18I think a very important clue may be in the location of the X-tombs.
46:26The ground directly above the X-tombs was a site marked out for the burials of a very important group of people.
46:37That's the entrance to our tombs over there, and the big structure behind me, that's the mausoleum of St Helena, Emperor Constantine's mum.
46:46But ignore it entirely for the moment, because it was built in the early 4th century AD, way after the time we're interested in.
46:52During that time, end 1st century to mid 3rd century AD, despite what it now looks like, car park, football pitch, this place was actually a really important cemetery for the emperor's personal cavalry.
47:06Now their name changes over time, but they're perhaps best known as the Equites Singulares Augusti.
47:11Equites Singulares Augusti is Latin for the emperor's chosen horsemen, a regiment founded in the 1st century.
47:24At the Museum of Roman Civilization, we can get a close look at some spectacular reliefs featuring the Equites, as they fought under the command of Emperor Trajan in the 2nd century, battling the Dacians from what is now Romania.
47:45Here they are heading off with the Emperor Trajan into battle.
47:52These guys really were the chosen ones to share in the emperor's most successful military campaign.
47:59The Equites were the finest imperial horsemen.
48:06Most were foreigners, handpicked as teenagers from across the empire.
48:12They were strong and by many accounts, very handsome warriors.
48:17To be selected was a ticket to great wealth and high status.
48:24This is one of my favourite scenes, the Equites Singulares Augusti in full battle gear.
48:29Their helmets, their shields, their chainmail jackets on their horses, charging in behind their emperor, Trajan,
48:35who offers the horseman's salute, the open right hand.
48:40And they're coming to the rescue of the Roman troops that are being besieged over here by the Dacians.
48:46It really is the emperor, his crack cavalry, coming to the rescue.
48:54The Equites' official graveyard has vanished,
48:57but fragments of tombstones found in these catacombs
49:01suggest that the Equites' cemetery was in use above ground.
49:05At the same time, the bodies were being packed into the ex-tombs below,
49:10which raises an intriguing possibility.
49:13It's unlikely that a space reserved for elites, as the Equites were,
49:20would have been used for burials of anyone completely unconnected with them.
49:25It is possible that these chambers might contain dead Equites Singulares Augusti.
49:35The people in the ex-tombs were mostly young adults, a mixture of men and women.
49:44And we know from surviving tombstones that the Equites were often buried with their wives and slaves.
49:50When they were in Rome, they lived here with their families.
50:00This would explain the high number of female bodies that were found in the tombs.
50:05The Equites numbered 5,000 strong.
50:12They were foreigners selected from various occupied territories across Central Europe,
50:17but also from southern Spain and North Africa.
50:20This could explain the distinctive funeral rituals similar to those in Tunisia and Algeria.
50:34Written accounts also tell us the Equites were dressed in jackets embroidered with silver and gold thread.
50:41The Equites were wealthy, well-fed and well-connected.
50:47But if many of them died at once, possibly from a raging plague or epidemic,
50:53it's conceivable that the Equites community may have converted pre-existing underground chambers,
50:59possibly old water systems, into a mass burial site.
51:04It's only a theory, and we may never know for sure.
51:11But from all the evidence we have, it certainly seems plausible
51:16that the ex-tombs could be the last resting place
51:20for over 2,000 of these great horsemen and their families.
51:25Soldiers especially chosen to protect the Roman Emperor.
51:31What I love about this investigation is the way that it's been able to put not just the flesh back on the bones,
51:38but to have turned these skeletons back into real people.
51:43They came here to the Caput Mundi, the capital of the world,
51:47the kind of ancient Roman version of the American dream.
51:50And the irony is that it was also here in Rome that disease found its perfect breeding ground.
52:00and ultimately killed them.
52:04..
52:06..
52:09..
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