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00:0029th of August, 30 BC.
00:04The Egyptian city of Alexandria.
00:09A 17-year-old boy is running through the streets, pursued by assassins.
00:17He was born to rule an empire, but his people will not help him.
00:26His army has deserted him, and his mother has taken her own life.
00:36He does not know it yet, but this teenager will be the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
00:44A 19-day reign that will bring to an end 3,000 years of history.
00:56Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Samurai of Japan.
01:21Four great civilizations, each a pinnacle of human ingenuity and achievement.
01:31Each lasted for centuries.
01:35Their people thought they would endure forever, until suddenly, everything changed.
01:49These civilizations faced challenges that are all too familiar today.
01:59Climate catastrophe.
02:04Pandemic.
02:09War.
02:12Challenges for which ancient societies had few solutions.
02:24But what if there was a place that had the answers to what went wrong?
02:29A place full of secrets and stories.
02:33A repository of memory stretching back through time.
02:42The British Museum, home to more than 8 million artifacts, is a record of how and why the greatest civilizations rose to power and then spectacularly fell.
02:58Its treasures are the human traces that survived disaster.
03:03But might they also hold lessons for our own future?
03:08Every civilization throughout history has had an expiry date.
03:13With great societies, the seeds of their destruction are sown within the society.
03:23They're already there.
03:24No civilization ever thinks it's going to fall.
03:28No civilization ever thinks it's going to fall.
03:31But the question is, what can we learn from the past?
03:53By the first century BC, ancient Egypt has thrived for three millennia.
04:03Ancient Egypt is the jewel in the crown of ancient history.
04:08It's wealthy.
04:10It's got 3,000 years of the most spectacular history.
04:14It's monumental buildings.
04:17It's phenomenal culture.
04:20And it was the country all others aspired to be.
04:23It had it all.
04:25Egypt is advanced architecturally.
04:32They've built amazing temples and, of course, the pyramids.
04:38And on top of that, there are huge advances in writing and in medicine as well.
04:47The natural resources of this land have allowed the Egyptians to build a vast and powerful kingdom, stretching from the Mediterranean deep into Africa.
05:01The secret to Egypt's success is its unique river, the Nile.
05:10The great bounty of the river Nile allows Egypt to become the breadbasket of the ancient world.
05:17Because each year when the rains fall in the summer, up in the Ethiopian highlands, it causes a great rush of water down the Nile.
05:26And that causes the river to flood its banks.
05:28And it brings water and nutrients to the fields.
05:32It enables the super abundance of grain.
05:36This is the currency that the world economy depends upon, and Egypt has this in huge quantities.
05:45Grain provides Egypt with vast wealth and power, making it the first nation state in history.
05:55It is led by a single, all-powerful ruler, the pharaoh.
06:11One jewel of the British Museum's Egypt collection is a grand monument to the most famous pharaoh of them all.
06:24It is led by a single, all-powerful ruler.
06:39Ramses ruled Egypt during its prime, when its empire spread far and wide, unifying his diverse subjects with a singular vision.
06:50This is a surviving fragment of a 23-foot statue that struck awe and wonder into all who saw it, and played a vital role in uniting his people behind him.
07:09The eyes are slightly tilted down walls, so when you're looking up, you've got this powerful feeling that Ramses is looking down on you.
07:19This really gives you a real sense of majesty and dominance.
07:26On Ramses' crown is his royal symbol, a deadly snake, the cobra.
07:33It reveals the secret behind the pharaoh's absolute power.
07:38For the Egyptians, you have a leader who is the king, but the Egyptian king is someone who is not just a human.
07:47When you see the cobra on the forehead of anyone, it means that they are divine.
07:54The king, or the pharaoh, was a sort of god on earth.
07:59He was supposed to enter into a contract with the gods and make sure the gods were appeased,
08:05and therefore he was both the ruler as well as a deity, and this gave him special privileges and powers.
08:19Egypt thrives when its people unite behind their god-king.
08:24But this is a challenge for the latest pharaohs.
08:31A thousand years after Ramses II, a new dynasty rules.
08:39The Ptolemies.
08:54The Ptolemies are, without doubt, the most violent royal dynasty that there's ever been.
09:03The Ptolemies are not Egyptian, but Greek.
09:09Successors of Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt and built one of the grandest cities of the ancient world.
09:16Alexandria.
09:17To begin with, the Ptolemies build a strong economy and a thriving society.
09:26But after 200 years, there are signs that their riches and successes have gone to their heads.
09:35This is a family that, over several generations, has been tearing itself apart, vying for ultimate control of Egypt.
09:47Like any situation where great wealth or great power is at stake, it is fertile breeding ground for rivalry.
09:56In the days of Ramses, pharaohs represented permanence and invincibility.
10:02But under the Ptolemies, chaos now reigns.
10:07This is a sandstone stela, a monument.
10:34Traditionally, the name of the ruling pharaoh would be inscribed into the stone in an oval
10:40symbol called a cartouche.
10:44But this stela is different.
10:49We get in this period examples of blank cartouches.
10:53The cartouches usually contain the pharaoh's name, but in the records we find many hundreds
11:00of examples of blank cartouches.
11:03We've never been filled in.
11:05The artist hasn't even tried to fill it in.
11:11The turnover of pharaohs has become so rapid that the stonemasons are reluctant to carve
11:18the name of a specific Ptolemaic pharaoh.
11:22Because who knows, you know, in five minutes' time this name might be no more and we'd have
11:27to carve it out and rewrite it.
11:31Brothers have been at war with brothers.
11:34Husbands have been at war with their wives.
11:37One had his own son killed and the body part sent to the boy's mother on the eve of her
11:44birthday celebration.
11:45So this gives you a bit of a sense of the kind of blood-spattered nature of the Ptolemaic
11:51royal family.
11:55Dynasties are a pressure cooker and the people who are the top of the dynasty tend to become
12:01corrupted by power.
12:02We now have ample evidence from neuroscience and psychology that people's brains seem to
12:08change once they get a hold of power.
12:11This is a recipe for disaster.
12:16It's 51 BC and Pharaoh Ptolemy XII lies dying.
12:26His reign has been dominated by infighting.
12:30He has squandered Egypt's wealth and territory to preserve his power.
12:35He is about to hand this poisoned chalice to his successor.
12:42Ptolemy has five kids and is looking to them to pave the way for the survival of the dynasty.
12:53But that shows a chronic lack of self-awareness about dynastic politics and the family that
13:02he has bred.
13:04Of his five children, his formidable 18-year-old daughter seems the obvious choice to succeed
13:11him.
13:12Her name is Cleopatra.
13:16I think it's fair to say that Cleopatra is very much her father's favourite child.
13:23She has a brilliant mind, a great intellect.
13:27She was a superb politician, but she's also very, very ruthless.
13:33She could manipulate those around her quite brilliantly.
13:38And that quality of ruthless ambition is something Ptolemy has deliberately encouraged.
13:53The great family dynasties, whether you're talking about Murdoch, the Hearst family, Rockefeller.
14:00The means by which the head of the dynasty keeps control is by making sure they all understand
14:08that they can be up but they can come down again.
14:14In a sense, he's encouraged division.
14:17He's encouraged ambition.
14:22He has created a ready-made battlefield that's going to explode.
14:29Ptolemy does have a male heir, also called Ptolemy, but he is only 11 and too young to rule.
14:41Their father insists that brother and sister join forces and become joint pharaohs by marrying
14:49each other.
14:51Of course she does not want to marry her brother.
14:56Cleopatra is a headstrong young woman who was well-versed in statecraft, so why would she want
15:03to share the throne?
15:04She was astute enough to know that this was a power struggle waiting to happen and she wanted
15:09to nip it in the bud.
15:17When her father dies, Cleopatra makes her move.
15:24But she inherits a deeply divided society.
15:29The Ptolemies have promoted a Greek elite and they expect a male ruler.
15:35Egypt is a difficult country to rule.
15:39There are tensions between the indigenous population and the Greek settlers.
15:46By this time, the Egyptians feel that they are towards the lower end of the hierarchy,
15:54that the best jobs are actually reserved for the Greek population.
16:00We could see Egypt as a kind of tinderbox.
16:08She tries to appease the Egyptian people.
16:14Cleopatra knows that the people's support can be the tipping point in her infighting with her brother.
16:25The Greeks will have to follow, so she embarks on an audacious campaign.
16:45Pharaohs have always claimed to be divine, but Cleopatra takes it one step further.
16:52Cleopatra refers to herself as a goddess, the new Isis or Isis personified.
17:02The great mother goddess, the bringer of fertility, the bringer of wealth.
17:22By Cleopatra's time, Isis has absorbed all the powers of all the collective goddesses of Egypt.
17:34So she is the ultimate deity.
17:40She is pretty much everywhere. She's on the walls of temples.
17:44And with some of these statuettes and figurines, these are often put in domestic shrines,
17:50so people could worship Isis at home. Everybody literally loved Isis.
18:00This is a stunning sculpture representing the nurturing aspect of the mother goddess Isis.
18:07She's gently raising her hand towards her breast, which means that she was about to breastfeed her son.
18:14Now, if we look closer to her hair, that's probably my favourite bit.
18:20She's wearing a vulture headdress, and every single feather is detailed in dark blue.
18:30In ancient Egypt, Isis is the ultimate symbol of motherhood, protection,
18:35magic, but also of divine rulership.
18:52By identifying herself with Isis, Cleopatra is really saying to the Egyptians,
18:57I am your living goddess. I will protect you as Isis protects you. The tears of Isis give you the Nile.
19:05I am Isis. I give you the Nile. I give you life. I give you protection. I give you fertility.
19:12It was a very sensible political ploy.
19:16So when Cleopatra puts it out there that she actually is a goddess,
19:21part of you might think, well, that's absurd and it's just a piece of spin, dare I say.
19:28But actually, we quite like the idea of thinking there's somebody out there
19:33that we can trust to lead us in a certain direction.
19:36She may be winning over the Egyptian people, but Cleopatra also needs allies with real power.
19:54She looks to her forefathers for inspiration. Who did they turn to to secure their crown?
20:06The Rosetta Stone is so important to us as Egyptologists, because on this hunk of granite,
20:34you have hieroglyphs, Egyptian, Domotic and Greek written.
20:43The Rosetta Stone, a magical key that allowed 19th century historians
20:49to decode hieroglyphs for the very first time.
20:55But the Rosetta Stone is more than just a translation device.
20:58The words written on it explain one of Cleopatra's most important decisions.
21:08When the Rosetta Stone was written, there was an uprising and the Ptolemies
21:12were struggling to maintain control.
21:15And so the Rosetta Stone really is a document that tells us what the Ptolemies did to solve this problem.
21:21The Ptolemies really have to get the Egyptian priests on side.
21:28The priests are very influential figures amongst the native Egyptian population.
21:33On the face of it, it's a simple contract between the priests of Egypt and the royal family.
21:39The early Ptolemies made a deal.
21:44They gave priests tax breaks and land.
21:48In return, the priests decreed that the Ptolemies were god-kings who must be faithfully followed.
21:55Cleopatra strikes the same deal, lavishly funding temples and enriching the priests.
22:11In return, they proclaim her sole pharaoh, and she rules unopposed for 18 months.
22:19But not everyone accepts the new status quo.
22:27While Cleopatra was winning the hearts and minds of the Egyptians and of the priests,
22:32she left one thing out of the equation.
22:35Because her brother went off and got the Greek elites and the military on his side.
22:42But Cleopatra and her brother, Ptolemy XIII, are playing with fire.
22:50The population, rather than being unified by a single belief in the pharaoh,
22:55is instead divided upon multiple ethnic lines.
22:59Different ethnic and ideological groups can become fault lines across society.
23:05This makes society by nature far more fragile.
23:19This makes society by nature.
23:23Cleopatra has the loyalty of the people, but Ptolemy has control of Egypt's mighty army.
23:30As his forces approach Alexandria, Cleopatra flees the country.
23:37But she will not accept defeat.
23:40We're talking about Cleopatra here.
23:47She was born to rule. She was trained to rule. She was a goddess and a queen.
23:52So she was not going to let that little sniveling brat take over.
23:55And so she was going to come back and fight for what was hers.
24:00She was born to rule. She was born to rule. She was born to rule.
24:13Desperate to reclaim her throne, she takes a monumental gamble.
24:17And turns to a superpower even mightier than her own.
24:23The unstoppable rising force of Rome.
24:27The Romans are probably the most warlike society on earth.
24:38Its great deity is Mars, the god of war.
24:46Rome was stampeding its way across the Mediterranean.
24:50Their tactics are swift and bloody and brutal.
24:59That's what it was all about for them, was to expand the idea of Romanitas,
25:06being Roman and creating a civilised world out of that.
25:13It would be a very dangerous thing for Cleopatra to get Rome on her side,
25:17because of course she has to be able to A, convince the Romans that she is the right ruler,
25:23and B, hold Rome in check so that they don't swallow her up.
25:30There's a potential here for Rome, as dangerous as it is,
25:34to actually be the saviour of Cleopatra.
25:37But getting into bed with the devil is a dangerous thing.
25:47If fortune favours the bold, this is Cleopatra's moment to be fearless.
26:02The legendary Roman general, Julius Caesar, is passing through Egypt on a military campaign.
26:08So she smuggles herself back into the country, risking her own life,
26:18in order to meet the man she hopes will save her.
26:23It is almost challenging for a woman to be a ruler, or it has been in the past few thousand years.
26:29And this was obviously something that Cleopatra had to struggle with.
26:32I think the biggest problem was getting military might immediately behind her.
26:42Cleopatra was very astute politically, and she knew that she could use other gifts in her arsenal.
26:49Her charm, her wit, her humour, her wealth, and even her body.
26:54I think that this is where all of that charisma of the woman comes out.
27:06This kind of magic that she works in terms of conversation and intellect.
27:14Julius Caesar, he is smitten. He is absolutely smitten with her.
27:18I think it's a great meeting of minds.
27:20But also, there's a lot of sexual energy in the room too.
27:29Cleopatra had few options as to what she could do, and this was indeed a gamble.
27:36But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and a die is cast.
27:40With Caesar's support, she now has the might of Rome on her side.
27:45But Cleopatra and her brother have unleashed the dark forces of division in Egypt.
27:53Within a matter of weeks, outright civil war breaks out.
28:02This is very serious. This is politics turning against the people and against the things they hold most dear.
28:09This infighting that happens among the Ptolemies does affect people's daily life.
28:16People who had been living in relative tolerance with one another, suddenly they have to pick sides.
28:23The violence boils over into Alexandria as Cleopatra's forces set light to her brother Ptolemy's ships.
28:34A devastating fire sweeps across the city, destroying its treasures.
28:38What's going through Cleopatra's head as the library of Alexandria that her ancestors built and that was the pride of her city is in flames.
28:51They had set the task for the first librarian to collect every book in the world.
28:59Now thousands of books are burnt and lots of homes are destroyed.
29:04The irony to a large extent is that what's at stake isn't as great as that.
29:11It's a sibling rivalry. It's not worth the damage that's taking place.
29:19Alexandria never recovers. This is a huge tragedy for Egypt and indeed for humanity.
29:25I think leaders often find it difficult to separate out their own interests and the national interest and they can persuade themselves that the two are one and the same thing.
29:41And it leads to levels of brutality and ruthlessness and I think once that happens it is dangerous.
29:48The Romans prove too powerful for Ptolemy the 13th. He is hopelessly outnumbered and outflanked.
29:57At the age of just 15 he drowns, fleeing Caesar's troops. Cleopatra's brother is gone.
30:18In the last few years, he is still alive.
30:19In the last few years, he is still alive.
30:21In the last few years, he is still alive.
30:23In the last few years, he is still alive.
30:25In the last few years, he is still alive.
30:27Restored as pharaoh, Cleopatra must now heal the divisions of civil war.
30:36But family feuds and infighting have ravaged Egypt's economy.
30:42More than ever, she must rely on the bounty of the Nile.
30:46But seismic events 6,000 miles away are about to plunge Egypt deeper into chaos.
31:03There is a large eruption in Alaska, of all places.
31:07In fact, the largest volcanic eruption in the last two and a half thousand years in the northern hemisphere.
31:13So this is a very big eruption.
31:19What we have learned in the last couple of years is that very large volcanic eruptions
31:24can impact the East African monsoon, which drives the Nile flood that hits Egypt every year.
31:32Egypt is dependent on the annual flood of the river.
31:35And when that goes wrong, when it's weak or there's no flood, then things are really bad.
31:45This climate disaster leads to food shortages.
31:50And Egypt's grain exports come to a halt.
31:52But the last few years from 7 years from 7 to 8 years to 2 years to find local
31:55assee.
31:56It's a very old industry of the sand.
31:59Cleopatra has to resort to desperate measures to keep her country afloat.
32:03Cleopatra has to resort to desperate measures to keep her country afloat.
32:10The Egyptian economy is in real sharp decline at this point.
32:39A pastor has to respond economically as best she can.
32:44Her extreme measures are revealed in these coins, of father and daughter, minted only
32:5220 years apart.
32:58The economic crises are coming thick and fast, and what do rulers throughout history do when
33:03they're faced with economic crisis, well, they devalue the currency, they debase the
33:07coinage.
33:09There are two coins, one of Ptolemy XII, the other of Cleopatra.
33:20You can see significant changes already in the silver content.
33:26The coin of Ptolemy XII has about 90% silver content, it's larger.
33:33The coin of Cleopatra is about 30% silver content, and it's smaller.
33:39It tells a really important story of the drop off of the Ptolemaic economy between Ptolemy
33:45XII and Cleopatra.
33:48Within just 20 years, the value of Egypt's currency plummets by nearly 70%.
33:55She is faced with a whole array of issues which no ruler on earth could have solved.
34:03To make matters worse, the floods fail to return for almost 10 years.
34:09Food reserves are gone and mass famine breaks out.
34:13Cleopatra has to use all the emergency stocks of grain that the Egyptian government hold,
34:20and she depletes the treasury in order to feed her people.
34:25And it really, a combination of those things, essentially bankrupts Egypt.
34:28Broken and starving, the people lose trust in their pharaoh.
34:42And there is evidence that Cleopatra's subjects place their faith elsewhere.
34:58They turn in increasing numbers to worshipping animal gods.
35:16This is Sobek, Egypt's god of fertility.
35:26This crocodile mummy is fantastic.
35:29Even though I've seen hundreds of them, I still get a frisson because each one is different.
35:36To see Sobek, we are actually in the presence of the divine.
35:41It's extraordinary for us to be able to see a living god from Egypt 2,000 plus years later.
35:50It's about 4 meters plus long, and it's very much blackened because it's got this
35:56resinous black goo on it.
35:58And what's really cool is on the back, they're babies that are stuck to the back.
36:06There were temples dedicated to the crocodile god.
36:09So the young crocodiles were brought in, put in the sacred pools.
36:14They were given a very luxurious lifestyle.
36:18And they were literally treated like the gods that they were assumed to be.
36:24During the Ptolemaic era, the number of animal mummies is mind-boggling.
36:30We have eight million dogs, two million ibises, you have hundreds and thousands of baboons.
36:41This upsurge is an indication that things are not okay, things are awry.
36:49Like everyone else in this world, when it is a time of crisis and the rulers are not doing
36:54their job, you turn to the gods.
37:06The pharaoh, who once promoted herself as the all-powerful goddess Isis, is losing her grip.
37:16It's a very difficult moment when a pharaoh fails, because the pharaoh is the incarnation
37:21of the gods, something has gone wrong in the cosmic set-up of the world.
37:31There are calls in the south of Egypt to break off from the rest of Egypt.
37:37Certainly the Ptolemaic dynasty is hanging by a thread.
37:47Time is running out for the Ptolemies.
37:52But unlike her male predecessors, Cleopatra has an ace that only she can play.
38:17Nine months after Cleopatra and Julius Caesar were first holed up together in the royal palace,
38:44she gives birth to a son.
38:50He has the blood of Rome and the blood of Egypt flowing in his veins.
38:54And she thinks, if I can unite the military might of Rome with Egypt, this is an unstoppable force.
39:03So she really thinks that this is, you know, not the end of a dynasty,
39:08but the beginning of a great new chapter in the Egyptian story.
39:16On this sandstone monument, Cleopatra proclaims that her son will forge a new empire,
39:23one that can feed its people and restore its fortune.
39:28A winged sun and a scarab beetle represent the dawn of a new golden age.
39:40Gifts are offered to Egypt's fertility gods, including Sobek and Isis.
39:50But Cleopatra's son is shown as the new pharaoh.
39:56He will be known by his Roman nickname, Caesarian, or Little Caesar.
40:04This would be a startling new world, unparalleled, unmapped, uncharted, unstoppable.
40:13If the plan works, not only do the problems of Egypt get solved,
40:20but Egypt regains a position as a superpower.
40:26For her strategy to work, Cleopatra must get the Romans to also embrace Caesarian as their future leader.
40:36But events outpace her.
40:41In Rome, Julius Caesar is brutally murdered, before he declares his heir.
40:58The assassination of Julius Caesar comes as a hammer blow to Cleopatra,
41:05not only on the most personal level.
41:08I think she genuinely loved him.
41:10But, of course, it brought a swift end to her political ambitions as well.
41:17All that came crashing down in one foul day.
41:22A lesser ruler might now accept defeat, but not Cleopatra.
41:41After one of her sisters plots against her,
41:44Cleopatra uses the opportunity to wipe out any possible opposition.
41:50Power can be like a drug, and once you're hooked on it,
41:56it's very, very, very hard to give up because you can't really see life beyond it.
42:05Over the next three years, she murders all her remaining siblings.
42:09There's a sort of moral corruption that power can do to people.
42:18You certainly see it having sometimes a very corrosive psychological impact on people.
42:24You're prepared to do anything, anything, to stay in power and to meet your objectives,
42:31up to and including killing people.
42:36The Ptolemy line will continue, but only on Cleopatra's terms.
42:42She now needs to form a new alliance with Rome.
42:58She now needs to form a new alliance with Rome.
43:02So she looks to the men who take Caesar's place.
43:08Two candidates emerge.
43:12Caesar's nephew, Octavian, takes control of the Western Roman world.
43:18He sees himself as Caesar's rightful heir, so will never accept Cleopatra's son.
43:23But there's also the general who takes control of Rome's vast eastern territories, Mark Antony.
43:37And so she casts her eye on Mark Antony to do the kind of work that she needed to be done.
43:53Mark Antony was, to his core, a squaddie.
43:58You know, he was a rough Roman soldier, heavy drinking, heavy womanising, living for pleasure and living to fight.
44:08She clearly recognised that Antony was not a deep thinker, that he was impulsive,
44:15that he was easily persuaded, he was open to flattery, that's for sure.
44:23And so she plays this brilliant political game.
44:40She knows what she wants, and she's able to attract those to her side to support her vision
44:45of almost like the takeover of the ancient world.
44:53She was so magnetic in her charm, her ability to understand what makes the male ego tick, to flatter them.
45:06And that is a heady mix that no one could ever resist.
45:23Mark Antony is besotted.
45:35He abandons his Roman wife and sets up home with Cleopatra, throwing his weight behind her plan
45:43for an Egypto-Roman empire, ruled by the now 13-year-old Caesarian.
45:48This culminates in a spectacular ceremony called the Donations of Alexandria.
45:59This was not merely a coronation, but a politically provocative event to strengthen their rule in the East.
46:06And there in front of all of the Alexandrians and ambassadors from different states around the Mediterranean,
46:18Mark Antony doles out the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire to Cleopatra and her heirs.
46:27And he says that all of these lands belonging to the East of Rome will be in perpetuity
46:38inherited by Cleopatra and Caesarian.
46:42So there is a real possibility at this moment that Cleopatra and Caesarian could become
46:54the rulers of a vast empire.
47:03But when news of the ceremony reaches Octavian, Mark Antony's rival back in Rome,
47:09he is outraged. He refuses to allow Roman lands to be broken up and given away.
47:21Antony and Cleopatra had so much power at their disposal,
47:25the only weapons Octavian had to throw at them was to ridicule them.
47:29Octavian starts a smear campaign to destroy Cleopatra and Antony's credibility,
47:37and turn all Romans against them.
47:44Octavian starts a smear campaign to destroy Cleopatra and Antony.
47:55Now this fragmentary marble relief is fascinating.
47:59It shows Mark Antony and Cleopatra engaged in what's euphemistically called a sexual act on a boat.
48:05It's a sort of a symbol of how some in the Roman world, certainly Mark Antony's enemies, saw
48:15how he was being manipulated by this harlot queen of Egypt.
48:20Octavian creates multiple pieces of propaganda like this to destroy Cleopatra's reputation
48:27and play on fears that Egypt might one day overshadow Rome.
48:37Where her allure and beauty were once part of Cleopatra's armory as a leader,
48:42as a leader. Now they are used to attack her.
48:49And so they're using this as a sort of crowbar to sort of prize apart the two worlds.
48:56And this relief really brings that idea to the fore, to use ridicule and misogyny to undermine one's enemies.
49:12Octavian's plan works. And the Romans turn against Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
49:26But things have gone too far for her to back down now.
49:32There are times when it looks like she has Egypt's best interest at heart.
49:36There are other times when her decisions appear to suggest that she's only really interested in holding on to power.
49:47This is absolutely an all or nothing gamble for Cleopatra.
49:52If she wins, she re-establishes the Ptolemaic dynasty in all its former glory.
50:01If she loses, well, all bets are off.
50:06Octavian declares war and his fleet sets sail.
50:23On the 2nd of September, 31 BC, Cleopatra and Mark Antony face Octavian
50:32in a legendary naval battle off the coast of Greece at Actium.
50:44One extraordinary witness to what happened that day still survives.
50:51This fitting belongs to a boat which participated to the famous Battle of Axiom in 31 BC.
51:01It is made of leaded copper. You can see it's highly corroded and encrusted with sea creatures.
51:20The goddess of strategy, war and wisdom is the goddess you want leading your fleet into battle.
51:38The gods are on her side, Cleopatra has every reason to be confident.
51:47She has the numbers too.
51:48Antony and Cleopatra's fleet of ships, there were about 230 of them.
51:56There were about 150 Roman ships in this.
51:59So, on the face of it, the Egyptians really outnumbered the Romans.
52:06But Cleopatra makes an epic miscalculation.
52:11She lets her fleet be pushed back towards the coast.
52:13The Egyptian fleet was essentially being hemmed in and the Romans moved their fleet closer and closer.
52:22And essentially, the Egyptians were trapped. They couldn't get out of it at all.
52:25Octavian then unleashes burning oil and tar.
52:33An inferno breaks out across the Egyptian navy.
52:39Cleopatra and Mark Antony know the game is up.
52:42They make their escape, abandoning their fleet. Including the ship this prowl once served.
52:52It becomes a burnt, battered witness to a monumental defeat.
53:12Her navy decimated. Her treasury depleted. And her political legitimacy shattered.
53:24Cleopatra barricades herself with Mark Antony inside their royal quarters.
53:31While Octavian's triumphant army marches into Egypt.
53:35It all ends badly. Antony knew the way in which Roman traitors were treated.
53:49And he knew that a spectacle of death awaited him.
53:55So, he took his life to avoid the dishonor of a traitor's death in Rome.
54:01He is taken to Cleopatra who weeps over his body and then gives him a proper decent burial.
54:08But then she then realises, of course, the only option would be for Octavian
54:13to march her into Rome in chains, humiliated. And she was not having any of it.
54:21Cleopatra takes a venomous asp and lets it bite her.
54:26This cobra, once the symbol of unassailable Egyptian royal power, in her hands, becomes an instrument of death.
54:38Even to the end, Cleopatra is mistress of her own destiny.
54:43Octavian instructs his forces to hunt down Cleopatra's heir, Caesarian.
55:02The fate of Egypt now rests in the hands of its 17-year-old pharaoh.
55:07But who will come to his aid?
55:15Decades of the most dysfunctional family in world history had caused a complete disconnect with much of Egypt.
55:25The Egyptians have been through a lot in terms of civil wars and famines.
55:33The people probably knew it was the beginning of the end for the Egypt they knew.
55:42Lacking both military and popular support, Caesarian is abandoned to his fate.
55:48He is murdered by Octavian's troops.
55:58It is the last moment of a 3,000-year-old empire.
56:02And the end of the Egyptian pharaohs.
56:12For three millennia, Egypt thrived, united behind its mighty pharaoh.
56:18But the dysfunctional dynasty of the Ptolemies, with their vicious infighting, tore this once great
56:26civilization apart.
56:29Had the Ptolemies been less inclined to just pursue short-term power gains,
56:36ancient Egyptian pharaonic values would still be alive and well today.
56:42But I think the number of Ptolemies who sought to just benefit themselves,
56:48I think that's what destabilized things ultimately.
56:51In their desperation to cling on to power at all costs, the Ptolemies forgot what it was to rule,
57:01and left Egypt vulnerable and fatally exposed.
57:07Cleopatra, in the end, was undermined by a perfect storm.
57:11Warfare, now flood failure, political instability, Rome threatening her.
57:18On top of which, a shock of a volcanic eruption.
57:22And there are many people today who rightly suggest that we should be on the lookout for a perfect storm event.
57:31I think it's a lesson to learn from Cleopatra's time and what happened to her.
57:38Countries can rise.
57:39They can have a standing and a reputation in the world that is huge, and it can go, and it can fall.
57:51And I don't think we should ever think that we're immune.
57:52The Aztecs, one of the most remarkable civilizations in history, faces an unimaginable threat.
58:08As old world meets new, and a ruthless leader struggles to save his empire from powerful new enemies.
58:22If anyone thinks that he may orrån iship, that he is an dest
58:39to him, that he's free to
58:51You
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