- 2 days ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30And can this 800-year-old device, covered in strange sayings, really predict the future?
00:36In me are strange and hidden things.
00:39I am the revealer of secrets.
00:44These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on Earth.
00:50Hidden away in museums, laboratories, and storage rooms.
00:54Now, new research and technology can get under their skin like never before.
01:01We can rebuild them, pull them apart, and zoom in to reveal the unbelievable, the ancient, and the truly bizarre.
01:18These are the world's strangest things.
01:23This unassuming 80-year-old device looks like a typewriter fitted into a plain wooden box.
01:40But, it is one of the greatest secret weapons in history.
01:46What we are looking at is one of the most successful and most powerful code-making machines.
01:53Now, using cutting-edge digital technology, we can bring it to life.
02:05And reveal its mystifying inner workings like never before.
02:10This is the Enigma machine.
02:15Measuring roughly 15 centimeters tall by around 30 centimeters wide,
02:20inside is a complex network of wires connecting switches and rotors.
02:25Each rotor and plug can be set in a vast number of different combinations.
02:29It's a revolutionary technology built on thousands of years of code-making and code-breaking.
02:38An encryption machine considered uncrackable.
02:42There are over 150 million, million, million combinations.
02:46What that means is that if you could check one every second,
02:49it would take over 300 times the age of the universe to crack the code.
02:54How does it work?
02:56What is its fatal flaw?
02:57What is the Enigma machine?
03:04At first glance, it may not look like much.
03:08But looks can be deceiving.
03:11This humble little device was the Nazi secret weapon.
03:17It's the end result of an arms race that has been going on for thousands of years.
03:22The Enigma machine uses a cipher.
03:25And ciphers are a very ancient device for encoding and hiding information that you don't want someone else to read.
03:34Two and a half thousand years ago, ciphers are already common.
03:38They would wrap a piece of fabric around the rod and then write their message across the fabric so that when the fabric was unrolled, it would just look like a series of letters.
03:59If you had a rod of the same size, you could then wrap the fabric around and you'd be able to read the coded message.
04:10Keeping messages secret becomes a never-ending battle.
04:15You really get the kind of arms race where one side or both sides really are trying to develop increasingly sophisticated codes while their rivals are trying to develop increasingly sophisticated and effective forms of breaking those codes.
04:32500 years later, Julius Caesar is using a substitution cipher.
04:39All the letters throughout the message are just shifted by the same amount through the alphabet.
04:46Let's say they go five letters on.
04:48So all the A's become E's, all the B's become F's, and so forth.
04:53But it also has a weakness.
04:56The letter substitution rule is fixed.
04:59Once Caesar's enemies figure out the rule, they can break every message.
05:06For 2,000 years, the battle rages between code makers and code breakers.
05:13Until the 1920s, when this strange and complex device appears.
05:20The Germans were convinced that they had created the holy grail of cryptography, an unbreakable code.
05:31The key to its success is its simple operation.
05:36You type a letter on the keyboard, and then above it, there's a panel of lights, also with every letter of the alphabet on them.
05:42And when you press a letter on the keyboard, a different letter lights up on that panel of lights.
05:46Inside Enigma, each letter on the keyboard is connected electronically to the light board via three rotors.
05:58Within the rotors are a jumble of tiny wires that transpose one letter into another.
06:04This circuit passes through every rotor on the way to the light board.
06:13What makes Enigma unique is that every time a letter is pressed, the first rotor advances by one space.
06:20When it has been all the way around, the next rotor advances by one, and the process begins again.
06:27As those rotors keep on moving, it changes, randomizes the code.
06:34If I pressed A, I might get a Q.
06:36If I pressed A again, I might get an S. Press it again, I might get a T.
06:40And that pattern of apparently random letters makes it very, very hard to decode.
06:48An electrical plug board on the front adds more ways to scramble the connections.
06:54Yet despite this complexity, decoding messages is child's play.
07:00All you need is another Enigma machine set up the same way.
07:04All you have to do is type it into your Enigma machine, configure it appropriately,
07:09and then the plain text should appear flashing on those lights.
07:13You can decode it one letter at a time and you can tell your superior officer the coded message that's been sent.
07:18It's the greatest encryption device the world has ever seen.
07:22The Germans are convinced it's uncrackable.
07:25Why have they gone to so much trouble?
07:32Using weak codes had pretty much cost the Germans the First World War.
07:44In January 1917, German Secretary of State Arthur Zimmerman sends an encrypted telegram to the German Embassy in Mexico.
07:54The content of the telegram was basically an offer to Mexico to get on the right side of the war while they had the chance.
08:02And as a reward, after the inevitable German victory, Mexico would be given New Mexico and other territorial parts of the United States.
08:12But British code breakers intercept the message.
08:17Unknown to the Germans, they have already broken the old code used in the telegram.
08:24They pass the message to the Americans.
08:29Outraged, the U.S. joins the fight and the war turns against Germany.
08:37It's a huge intelligence failure and a diplomatic disaster for the Germans.
08:43So, as the war ends, the Germans felt highly motivated to develop a new coding system.
08:50And that's where the Enigma machine comes in.
08:52The first people to spot the arrival of Enigma are Polish intelligence.
08:59They've been keeping a close eye on Germany with very good reason.
09:06The Treaty of Versailles that had recreated the nation of Poland, part of that was built on former territory of the German Empire.
09:16So, they were literally sitting on what many Germans considered German land.
09:21But eight years after the end of the war, Polish eavesdropping runs into trouble.
09:28All of a sudden, in 1926, it's like a wall comes down.
09:33They simply can't decipher the codes that the Germans are using anymore.
09:41Enigma has arrived.
09:43For two years, the Polish are deaf to everything the German military is saying.
09:49In 1928, they finally catch a break.
09:56The Warsaw Customs Office receives a package labeled radio parts.
10:02They get an urgent phone call from the Germans saying,
10:06oh, this was sent to you by accident, we need it back immediately.
10:09It was really the urgency of the calls that alerted them to the fact that they had something
10:14much more important than merely radio parts.
10:17The package contains a civilian version of Enigma.
10:22This finally gives them the opportunity to look at the interior workings of this code-making device
10:30that has been confounding their best efforts at decryption for so long.
10:34The question is, can they break the code?
10:38In 1932, using the captured Enigma and other scavenged data,
10:48mathematician Marian Raevsky figures out how the military versions are wired.
10:53The Poles can once again listen in on everything the Germans say.
11:03But they are chasing a moving target.
11:07Enigma is evolving.
11:09The Germans continue to adapt their Enigma machines.
11:13They add new rotors.
11:15They wire it differently.
11:16They basically make the code more and more complex,
11:19more and more difficult to break.
11:22In response, Raevsky devises his own machine to fight Enigma.
11:27He calls it the cryptological bomb or bomba in Polish.
11:34It's assembled from bits of the Enigma machine as they understand it.
11:40And it's a device that is able to, over time,
11:44run through the different possible permutations
11:47that the Enigma machine is spitting out.
11:52This approach of testing every possible solution
11:55is familiar to every modern hacker.
11:57A commonly used attack is called the brute force attack.
12:01Say you're trying to break into somebody's email,
12:03you're trying to find out their password,
12:04you can just try every single combination.
12:07That's very similar to trying to crack the Enigma code
12:09by trying every possible position of the rotors.
12:14But in September 1939,
12:16Raevsky's attack on Enigma is cut short.
12:21Hitler invades Poland.
12:27The Polish code breakers do manage to escape the invasion
12:31and they turn over a lot of the notes they'd collected
12:34as well as much of their equipment to Bletchley Park,
12:38which is now going to become the center
12:40of the British code breaking efforts.
12:44The Germans continue to evolve Enigma.
12:47It grows increasingly complex.
12:50British efforts fail to break it fast enough to be useful.
12:53Meanwhile, German U-boats are decimating Allied ships
13:00carrying vital supplies from America.
13:08The Germans really have the advantage.
13:10They have the perfect weapon for stopping those convoys
13:15and for choking off this vital supply line.
13:17They have to break the Enigma messages sent to the U-boats
13:30before the Atlantic supply line is cut off and the war is lost.
13:34One man thinks he knows how.
13:43Alan Turing is really one of the great mathematical geniuses of the age.
13:49He is a Cambridge graduate, absolutely brilliant guy,
13:53very eccentric and it is into his hands that this all-important mission
14:00of cracking the Enigma code falls.
14:04Turing supersizes the Polish ideas and builds a mega-bomba.
14:12This was an absolutely incredible computing machine,
14:15rotating drums, miles of wire and able to crunch through
14:19far more combinations of Enigma codes
14:21than any individual human could possibly manage.
14:25Turing knows that even his huge bombs can't crack Enigma fast enough.
14:29His genius is to combine them with the crucial flaw he spotted.
14:35Not in the machine, but in the operators.
14:40The human flaw was that humans send predictable messages.
14:43For example, one of the most common types of message was a weather report.
14:46And that means if you get a message you think might be a weather report,
14:49you've got a word that you can look for inside it.
14:51At a very minimum, Wetter, the German word for weather.
14:53These known or probable words are called cribs.
14:56Turing combines them with a second flaw.
15:00And this one is in the supposedly unbreakable Enigma machine itself.
15:06A letter can never be encrypted to itself.
15:09So, say I press a letter A, it goes through this whole tangle of wires.
15:13Because the A has to be connected to something,
15:15it can never actually come back and become a letter A in the ciphertext.
15:19Turing can now narrow the search for solutions,
15:22using the cribs as a guide.
15:24Say you're looking for the word Wetter,
15:27you can slide through your text,
15:29and if you find any of the letters in the right place,
15:31you know that isn't your word, and so you can keep on looking.
15:34And once you've found this tiny little chink in the armor,
15:36you can use it to decode the rest of the message.
15:41Now that Turing's bombs don't have to test every possible solution,
15:47they quickly churn through the remaining possibilities.
15:53Enigma is broken.
15:55Some experts claim that cracking Enigma shortens the war by up to two years.
16:16Germany fails to produce an unbreakable code.
16:18But Enigma starts something big.
16:25In many ways, the Enigma contest,
16:28the contest between the code makers and the code breakers,
16:31is the beginning of the information age.
16:33It's the first time that intelligence and access to intelligence
16:37have become the absolute focus of a major military effort.
16:43Even 80 years later, the lessons of Enigma still apply.
16:52The German military added more rotors
16:54to multiply the complexity in Enigma.
16:56Technology today still does the same thing.
17:00The modern analog of that is 128 or 256-bit encryption.
17:04Every time you add an extra bit,
17:06you add twice as many patterns that have to be searched through.
17:08And that just means that a brute force attack is going to take longer and longer.
17:14Modern cryptography is often so advanced
17:16that it would take even the fastest computers
17:18much, much longer than the age of the universe to crack code.
17:21But as Turing shows with Enigma, there's still one flaw no one can avoid.
17:26Humans.
17:28All it takes is one person in your company to click on a dodgy link
17:33or open a dodgy attachment and enter their password
17:35and suddenly hackers can have access to your network.
17:37It's the human beings who are an unescapable part of the equation
17:41that mean the codes get cracked.
17:43So the incredible Enigma machine and the battle to break it
17:47is still teaching us vital lessons in the modern world.
17:51Even if the computers have gotten a tiny bit faster.
17:55This is the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos,
18:06just over 400 kilometers south of Cairo.
18:11Here in the ruins of a 3,000-year-old temple to the god Osiris,
18:16stands a stone door lintel.
18:20Carved into its surface is an impossible image.
18:24A helicopter.
18:27What's going on?
18:29Now, using the latest imaging technology,
18:33we're reconstructing this bizarre artifact in minute detail.
18:37The lintel is roughly 2 meters long and just over half a meter high.
18:50It's sandstone surface is carved with cryptic hieroglyphs celebrating the reign of the mighty pharaoh Seti I.
19:01But amongst them is what clearly looks like a modern attack helicopter with rotor blades,
19:07a sleep body and a tail boom.
19:10And even stranger,
19:12it's not unique.
19:16Almost 100 kilometers away in the temple of Hathor at Dendera
19:20is a carving that looks strikingly similar to an electric light bulb.
19:24It has a glass globe,
19:26a filament,
19:28and even a set of electrical cables.
19:32There are no shortage of extraordinary theories
19:34which believe that these really represent advanced technology.
19:40Ancient Egypt is often a magnet for fringe ideas
19:45and people who attribute the origin of these ancient objects to someone else.
19:51Aliens and time travel feature prominently in such wild theories.
19:57But despite appearances, experts are certain these do not represent modern technologies.
20:03These shapes look instantly recognizable to us as modern viewers.
20:08But in fact, they are ancient.
20:10They are thousands of years older.
20:12So the question really becomes,
20:14what could they be?
20:16What do these bizarre carvings mean?
20:20Who made them?
20:22Why is there a modern aircraft on a 3,000 year old temple wall?
20:26This temple was the mortuary temple of a pharaoh called Seti I.
20:35Seti I may not be a household name in the same way that Tutankhamun is.
20:39Nevertheless, he achieved a huge amount.
20:42He really stabilized the country after a period of fragmentation and difficulty.
20:50He achieved a number of military victories,
20:53which he then carved on his amazing temples up and down Egypt.
20:58Despite the apparent evidence of the carving,
21:01experts are confident that helicopters are not one of his tools of war.
21:07The problem for them is that you can't simply conjure up a helicopter out of thin air.
21:13A helicopter requires a number of innovations in order to literally get off the ground.
21:18Understanding the aerodynamics for building the rotor, you need to have it.
21:23energy source that can provide enough power.
21:26You also need some notion of control.
21:30And evidence of other essential technologies, from precision metal engineering to lubricants,
21:36gears and engines, are notable in Egyptian archaeology only by their absence.
21:44A light bulb is no easier. You need to generate electricity.
21:48You need cables.
21:52And to make the bulb, you require a key skill.
21:56Glass blowing.
21:58Which is a problem.
22:00The ancient Egyptians didn't do glass blowing.
22:03That was a technology that was invented by the Romans.
22:06The idea that they're a helicopter and a light bulb just doesn't add up.
22:15I've been studying ancient Egypt for years and even though it's tempting to call these a helicopter
22:21and a light bulb, I can tell you that the helicopter at the Temple of Osiris is not a helicopter.
22:27And the light bulb at the Temple of Dendra is also not a light bulb.
22:31But if that's not what they are, then what on earth are they?
22:43Solving the mystery means diving into the dog-eat-dog world of the ancient pharaohs.
22:48The so-called helicopter inscription appears at the Temple of Osiris in Abydos.
22:56This temple was the mortuary temple of a pharaoh called Seti I.
23:00That's where everything about this pharaoh was meant to be immortalized,
23:05written for the ages in the most perfect way possible.
23:10The carvings in the temple tell a story of Seti as a mighty, all-conquering king.
23:19The helicopter carving starts life as one of these gushing inscriptions.
23:26It reads,
23:27He who renews the births, strong with the sword,
23:31who subjugates the nine bows.
23:33And the nine bows was a sort of shorthand to refer to Egypt's enemies.
23:39The inscription celebrates Seti's great achievements for eternity.
23:44At least it does until he dies.
23:46And then his son, Ramses II comes along.
23:53Ramses II is known as Ramses the Great.
23:56He's a huge deal when it comes to New Kingdom pharaohs.
24:01And certainly at this point in time, he is second to none.
24:05But along with Ramses' undoubted ability comes a sizable ego.
24:14He decides that all the dedications to his father's greatness will look much better with his name on them instead.
24:21So what Ramses II does is that he comes in, he fills in the name of his father, Seti I, with plaster, and then carves in his own name.
24:32On the helicopter lintel, it no longer proclaims Seti as the great leader that crushes Egypt's enemies.
24:41But Ramses.
24:42But the 3,000 years since then has taken its toll on Ramses' updates.
24:52Some plaster has fallen out of one of the pieces of writing.
24:55What we see today is a combination of one hieroglyph carved on top of another.
25:05So together they look like a helicopter when apart, actually they look quite distinct.
25:10So this astonishing carving has a very human origin.
25:16These symbols are not in fact evidence of advanced technologies years before we realized,
25:22or alien cultures coming down and building the pyramids.
25:26If anything, these symbols are evidence of the ego of Faris.
25:32That's one mystery solved.
25:35But the carving at Dendera is in its original state.
25:39with no alterations after it is first carved.
25:42So if it's not a light bulb, what exactly is it?
25:50Despite appearances, Egyptologists are confident they know the answer.
25:56Because they've seen it before.
26:00Ancient Egyptian people of the upper classes, certainly,
26:04would have been able to look at these images and understand instantly what they were about.
26:09This is actually a very traditional and central motif to ancient Egyptian religion.
26:18The filament is actually a snake, which we think represents the god Artun.
26:22The socket is actually a lotus flower, which stands for rebirth.
26:28The glass bulb itself seems to be representative of the air bubble, that is the sky.
26:35And finally, at the bottom, there is actually something that looks like a cable,
26:39but it's actually a bark. And this is representative of the bark that would have carried the sun across the sky.
26:44So you put all of these elements together. Surprise, surprise, the set of carvings
26:51is not actually a light bulb, but actually tells us a huge amount about ancient Egyptian theology.
26:57So why is it that we can convince ourselves we see things in these carvings that just aren't there?
27:06It's not even limited to monumental Egyptian works.
27:10We see strange things everywhere. We see Jesus in a slice of toast.
27:19Faces on rocks.
27:23Ducks in clouds.
27:24Ducks in clouds.
27:26Even faces on the surface of Mars.
27:34In 1976, NASA's Viking spacecraft sent back a startling image of the Martian surface.
27:41It showed a human face.
27:46To some, it was proof of a lost civilization on Mars.
27:49But when NASA went back with better cameras,
27:56it turned out to be just a rock formation.
28:01We just keep seeing stuff that isn't there.
28:05What's going on?
28:10To find out, scientists have used magnetoencephalography to directly measure electrical activity in our brains.
28:20They've discovered that we often identify these images before we're even conscious of what we're looking at.
28:27So we recognize the face before the slice of toast.
28:33Or the helicopter before the ancient carving.
28:36The technical term for this ability to conjure up images that aren't there is pareidolia.
28:47Pareidolia is a way our brain operates to efficiently come up with patterns and recognize patterns.
28:55But at the same time, it can end up creating flaws and we'll see patterns where they don't necessarily exist.
29:00But this strange effect actually keeps us alive.
29:08Part of this is about sheer survival.
29:11Because if we see some ambiguous shape or shadow amongst the leaves and we think,
29:17that's the head of a tiger, then we run.
29:21If we're wrong in that interpretation, we haven't really lost anything.
29:24But if we didn't make it, and it really was a tiger, then we're done for.
29:28Paridolia relies on spotting things that are familiar to us, which explains a lot.
29:39Nobody bats an eyelid over the carvings at Dendera
29:42until after the invention of the electrical light in 1878.
29:46Only then do visitors spot the similarities.
29:52Which also explains why no one notices the helicopter until the 1980s.
29:59Someday we may see something even more extraordinary in these hieroglyphs.
30:05We just haven't invented it yet.
30:12Locked away in a glass cabinet in the British Museum
30:17is a mysterious metal mechanism covered in strange sayings.
30:23I am the revealer of secrets.
30:25In me are marvels of wisdom and strange and hidden things.
30:31This is a machine from the past created to tell the future.
30:37Now using cutting-edge technology
30:42we can examine this mysterious device with forensic precision.
30:50The geomancy machine.
30:54In all of human civilization there is nothing even vaguely similar to this.
31:00There isn't a single reference to it in any book or manuscript.
31:05It's roughly twice the size of an iPad and strikingly beautiful.
31:08It has this intricate metal work with inlays of gold and silver.
31:14This complex item features a range of sliders, dials and Arabic writing.
31:20This extraordinary object is nearly 800 years old.
31:25It holds the key to mysteries lost to the ages.
31:32What secrets is it hiding?
31:35How does it work?
31:37What exactly is it?
31:39Written on its front is an Arabic inscription describing it.
31:48But it reads like a riddle.
31:51The possessor of eloquence and the silent speaker.
31:55And through my speech arise desires and fears.
31:59The judicious one hides their secret thoughts, but I reveal them.
32:04What does it all mean?
32:10The inscriptions may be obscure, but there are other markings on the face of the machine that do offer clues.
32:19On the sliders and dials we find matrices of dots,
32:22which correspond to similar matrices of dots, which we see in books about divination.
32:32These patterns of dots appear in texts from Spain, Africa and England as far back as the 12th century.
32:39All of them are about an ancient practice called geomancy.
32:46The practice of geomancy is the prediction of fate or the future
32:51from the study of the casting of objects onto the ground and looking at how they fall.
32:59So this is a geomancy device for telling the future.
33:03But how on earth does it all work?
33:09If we look at the origins of the term geomancy, it comes from the Greek.
33:15Gaia for earth and mentea for prophecy.
33:20Geomancy is a form of divination.
33:23That's fortune telling or prophecy derived from natural phenomena or objects.
33:28Divination is an ancient practice throughout the world.
33:33And as time went on, they created more and more elaborate ways to try to figure out
33:38what the future held.
33:41There is pyromancy, the studying of the patterns of flames to foretell the future.
33:46Or hydromancy, looking at patterns on still bodies of water.
33:51Or even crystallomancy, the looking into crystal balls to tell the future.
33:58Geomancy uses sand or soil for the same purpose.
34:05Geomancy was practiced throughout the Islamic world.
34:08They had a name for it, which was Ulm al-Ruml.
34:11Basically, literally, the science of sand or the knowledge of sand to tell the future.
34:18With the expansion of Islam, this form of geomancy reaches into the European world.
34:23Richard II had a text on geomancy.
34:28And he isn't alone.
34:30Several European monarchs have books on geomancy in their libraries.
34:35European politics in the medieval period was quite volatile.
34:37So they certainly wanted to read the future and determine
34:39what their fate might be, including their kingdom.
34:44It probably makes sense to the rulers of the land to incorporate the land itself
34:48in predicting the future.
34:50But the basic method of geomancy can be practiced by anyone.
34:56From a prince to a pauper.
35:02You start out by a casting.
35:04You draw a seemingly random collection of dots whilst holding an idea in your mind,
35:09the question that you want to ask.
35:10You eventually come up with all these dots.
35:14After each cast, you add up the total number of dots produced.
35:18And if it comes out as an odd number, you just draw one dot.
35:21And if it's an even number, you draw two dots.
35:23It takes four casts to produce one geomantic column called a mother.
35:30Each row contains either one or two dots.
35:34Then you repeat this entire process three times.
35:38You end up with four mother patterns.
35:40It's a lot like binary mathematics.
35:43But instead of one and zero, you're using odd and even.
35:45And you just carry on through those calculations,
35:48using those two different states to generate a whole load of new states.
35:52Next, you take the pattern of dots from the top row of mothers.
35:56And from this, you generate a daughter.
35:59Each row of mother dots produces another daughter for a total of four patterns.
36:06Then from each pair of mothers and daughters, you create nieces.
36:11You move across those rows.
36:12And if you've got an even number, you put a two dot symbol.
36:15If you've got an odd number, you just put a single dot.
36:18You end up with 16 characters.
36:21This is called a geomantic tableau.
36:26It's the job of the geomancer, to read the future by interpreting it.
36:32Generating the tableau is simple math that looks much more complex than it actually is.
36:37Perhaps intentionally.
36:4016 times 16 times 16 times 16 means you've got 65,536 combinations in total.
36:48It seems like an enormously complex task for a device built almost 700 years before the first computer.
36:56So how does the geomancer machine work?
36:58The answer lies behind its highly decorated back cover.
37:07Now, all the individual knobs and sliders of the mechanism are visible.
37:11And one thing is immediately clear.
37:14None of them are connected to each other.
37:20Turning one setting has no effect on any of the others.
37:23The geomancer machine is in some senses not a machine at all.
37:28What it is, is a set of disconnected dials and levers which are there to act as a kind of object of reference or a memoir.
37:36The geomancer machine doesn't calculate your fortune.
37:43It's just a fancy upgrade to scratching marks in the ground based on your casts.
37:48Not that it matters, because it's how you interpret the tableau that really counts.
37:55It's not as though they have a really standard interpretation.
37:57You go away and there are literally books and books of information about how to interpret every possible outcome.
38:02It's the geomancer's job to produce a prediction from the calculated symbols.
38:12The problem with this process is although it seems very mathematical and rigorous,
38:16it's actually just a very elaborate way of generating one of 65,536 random numbers
38:22and then assigning some kind of deeper meaning to it.
38:25The whole combination allows you to have a wide range of interpretations.
38:29The actual interpretation effectively seems made up.
38:32It seems that it could be anything.
38:36So, the machine is just geomancy without getting your hands dirty.
38:42It says as much in its own inscriptions.
38:45I have spread out the surface of my face out of humility and have prepared it as a substitute for earth.
38:54Making this the ultimate deluxe accessory for an A-list geomancer.
38:59The only one of its kind in the world.
39:02So, where does such a unique and extraordinary device come from?
39:08And who made it?
39:10The creator of the geomancer machine is actually inscribed.
39:13His name is given.
39:15Mohammed Khutluk, or Mouazli.
39:17So, this is a person actually telling us where he comes from.
39:22That name translates as Mohammed, son of Khutluk from Mouazli, or to use its modern name, Mosul in what is now Iraq.
39:31In the 13th century, Mosul was one of the great Islamic cities of the world.
39:36It was a great commercial center connected to the Silk Road, rich in its commercial resources and also an intellectual center.
39:45So, it's a place that we would expect craftsmen like Mohammed and Khutluk to have been located.
39:50One of medieval Mosul's signature trades is the skillful crafting of one metal into another.
39:58Exactly the techniques visible on the geomancer machine.
40:02It's a very highly developed piece with multiple metals mixed together and worked in high detail.
40:10So, clearly whoever made it had a lot of expertise and Mosul was a perfect place where such a device could have been made.
40:16But what inspires them to produce a geomancy machine instead of more decorative vases?
40:25The vases is really trying to be showy. It's trying to elevate geomancy practice to effectively take it from a kind of back alley practice to a kind of scientific professional practice.
40:39And that makes perfect sense because 1,200 years ago, science is flourishing in the Arabic world.
40:45The 8th through the 13th centuries were the Islamic Golden Age.
40:50This was the time of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad.
40:53And this was the time of the creation of the Bayat al-Hikmah, the Storehouse of Wisdom or the Great Library.
41:01The library holds translations of classical texts from the ancient world.
41:07But it's also a hothouse for new knowledge in science, engineering and medicine.
41:12It did involve learning a lot of things about the natural world, making observations, experimentation, things that we would consider as part of normal science.
41:21And that led to a lot of innovation.
41:22We see the invention of the syringe, of forceps, of surgery to remove cataracts.
41:30We see an enhancement of knowledge in astronomy.
41:34We see mathematic advances, including things like the decimal point and more complex fractions, as well as algebraic innovations.
41:43Algebra, in fact, is an Arabic word.
41:46The word algorithm is another word that we use today that is also an Arabic word.
41:50And all these developed during the time of the Islamic Golden Age.
41:53This is the world that gives birth to the geomancy machine.
42:02But given the popularity of geomancy in the Arabic world, why has just one machine ever been found?
42:09The clue may be in the date of the machine's manufacture.
42:16Engraved on it is the Muslim year 639, or 1241 to 1242 in the Christian calendar.
42:27Just 16 years later, in 1258, the Golden Age of Islam is snuffed out.
42:33The really big blow occurred with the invasion of the Mongols to the east.
42:41The Mongol hordes, led by the grandson of the great Genghis Khan, destroy the accumulated knowledge of Baghdad.
42:50Mosques are destroyed. Hospitals are destroyed.
42:54They cast so many books into the river, it was said to run black with ink.
42:58So this device is produced during the last hurrah of the great Islamic Golden Age.
43:07Everything about it is extraordinary.
43:09From its craftsmanship, to its function, and its history.
43:14It's a window into the incredible creativity and energy of the medieval Islamic world.
43:21It's just a shame it completely fails to predict the coming of the Mongols that ends it all.
43:28All right.
43:29The Mongols
43:34All right.
43:37All right.
43:41All right.
43:43This is not theobooks that are all your countless movies.
43:49Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
Be the first to comment