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00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:00Υποτιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:06Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:09και το πραγματικό πραγματικό.
01:13Αυτά είναι τα πράγματα του κόσμου κόσμου κόσμου.
01:26Στον το Ιεόλιο Μουσία της Αθήνας είναι ένας από τις ικονικές φυσίες από την Αγγεία.
01:32Τις πραγματικές φυσίες είναι και το να αναπτύχουμε με το τεχνομακρός και το λεγό delle πραγματικές φύσεις.
01:43και με όλους τα τεχνολογίες μας, βρίσκει το πραγματικό τένα τεχνός μετλήρα.
01:52Αν είναι το σακκό Αγαμεμμένα.
01:55Αγαμεμμένα είναι Χριστό θα ήταν το παιδίου γενικό που έκανε το σειγή επιτureοφίωσης του παιδιού.
02:00It was seen as a mythical king, really.
02:02Not someone who is real.
02:04But if this is Agamemnon's mask,
02:06then he is очень real.
02:08Roughly 25 cm tall by 17 cm wide,
02:13it is crafted from a single sheet of gold.
02:16Every detail is painstakingly embossed into its surface.
02:21You get the sense that you are really staring into a person's face
02:24from thousands of years ago.
02:26But is that really true?
02:28Αυτό δεν είναι όχι αυτό που είχαμε πράξει σε αυτή την Ελλάδα.
02:34Ήταν κανιδιόνται από έναν αρχαόγιο εξανόλου φοβολογικό μεταξύ μεταξύ μεταξύ μεταξύ μεταξύ μεταξύ στις πράξεις.
02:40Ήταντανταντανταντανταντανταντοιχομερική.
02:43Αυτή είναι το ενδιαφιβολογικό πιο χρόνο.
02:47Οι είναι τον άνθρωπο μετά την κορδίσσα στο κορδίσσα και κυρίτσι τον φοβολογικό ελληνικό.
02:541876, Southern Greece.
03:03German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann
03:05is searching for a legend
03:06in the astonishing ruins
03:07of the Bronze Age citadel Mycenae.
03:10Mycenae was clearly an important town.
03:13It had huge stone masonry walls,
03:15which were these large boulders or blocks
03:18reportedly built by the cyclops,
03:20monsters, basically because the walls were so huge
03:24that only monsters can build such a city.
03:26So it was seen as this grand, great place.
03:32Inside the mighty walls,
03:34Schliemann's dig unearths a lost tomb complex.
03:38Schliemann discovers remains of 19 individuals,
03:41from children to adults, men and women.
03:45He uncovers a treasure trove.
03:48There were a number of precious objects,
03:50including gold and silver, precious stones,
03:53ornate kinds of jewelry.
03:54even gold leaf covering for at least some of the bodies.
03:58And he finds something unlike any previous discovery
04:01from ancient Greece.
04:03Some of the bodies that were buried in these tombs
04:06had their faces covered by gold masks.
04:10No one had seen Greek death masks like these before,
04:13each one crafted from a single sheet of gold.
04:16Four of them are relatively plain in decoration.
04:20What stands out is one mask,
04:22which was actually quite decorative.
04:24It has more detail.
04:25It looks more like a face we would recognize.
04:29It becomes known as the Mask of Agamemnon.
04:33Has Schliemann really uncovered the tomb of a mythical king?
04:37Schliemann's been quoted with saying that he'd written to the king of Greece saying that he'd gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.
04:44Who is Agamemnon, and why is finding him such a big deal?
04:50According to myth, Agamemnon was one of the most powerful kings of Greece at the time.
05:00Agamemnon's story is told in the Iliad and the Odyssey,
05:04the mythical poems of ancient Greek writer Homer.
05:06According to Homer, Agamemnon wages a legendary ten-year war against Troy.
05:14It ends when his soldiers breach the mighty citadel
05:17by hiding inside a giant wooden horse, the famous Trojan horse.
05:23The story of the War of Troy is one of the most important narratives in the history of myth and literature.
05:31But is that all it is?
05:34Just a myth?
05:35According to Homer, the Trojan War happened over 3,000 years ago
05:39in a mysterious age we know little about.
05:43Disentangling these stories and trying to find out what's truth versus what's the story is not an easy task.
05:49The problem with these stories is they were full of characters who seemed potentially quite real,
05:53kings and warriors that seemed possible.
05:57But it also had all kinds of mythological creatures.
06:00We read about the Cyclops, the one-eyed giants.
06:02We read about other sort of great monsters fighting these heroes.
06:07And hard evidence is very thin on the ground.
06:10Places like Troy, where the conflict is centered upon in the Iliad, was not known.
06:16It was, for many scholars, had considered Troy to be completely mythological.
06:19Gods, monsters, mythical lands.
06:24It's all a bit hard to swallow.
06:27So what makes people think that this really could be Agamemnon?
06:30By the time he finds the mask, Schliemann has already spent years obsessed with proving the Iliad is more than just a tall tale.
06:42Schliemann thinks that many of the famous classical stories like the Iliad were true,
06:47that they were full of real characters, not just mythological kinds of stories.
06:50So he was obsessed about proving this.
06:52And Schliemann's first step is to hunt for the legendary city of Troy.
06:58For millennia, there have been whispers that the ruins of Troy are buried somewhere in the northwest of modern-day Turkey.
07:06In 1870, Schliemann begins to excavate at a site called Hisalik.
07:11Hisalik was a man-made mound.
07:15In the past, it would have been a lot closer to the coastline, which means it had a good site for incoming ships.
07:23But it also meant that it was a really good position within the Mediterranean for trading.
07:27So the location of it makes sense.
07:32After three years of digging, Schliemann hits the jackpot.
07:36He uncovers a lost city.
07:38There's evidence of destruction and fire, which would match well with the story that Troy was sacked by the Greeks.
07:45He finds a group of high-valued objects, gold and other kinds of objects,
07:50that he associates with Priam, the king of the Trojans, the key character in the Iliad.
07:55It is one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time.
07:58The discovery of Troy proved that actually it was not just some mythological place, but a real city that existed.
08:06It's music to Schliemann's ears.
08:09If Troy is real, what other myths could be true?
08:13So now, having found a key location of the Iliad, his next mission was to find one of the characters.
08:20Schliemann zeroes in on Agamemnon.
08:23According to Homer, after victory in the siege of Troy, Agamemnon heads home to Mycenae,
08:29where he is murdered by his wife's lover and buried by the city walls.
08:33This is exactly where Schliemann finds the extraordinary gold mask and seals his fame.
08:40There was a media frenzy because it seemed that it was definitive proof that the mythological king of the Greeks during the Trojan War was real.
08:49Which is remarkable, because for decades, other archaeologists had tried and failed to find proof of the Trojan War.
09:00But in the space of just three years, Schliemann uncovers both the central location and the leading man.
09:08Schliemann seemed to be finding everything that would corroborate his story of these mythical figures being buried exactly where he was digging.
09:18Schliemann is either extraordinarily lucky, or is it just too good to be true?
09:28At the time of Schliemann, this would have been a very odd find, because we don't have anything like this from ancient Greece.
09:36You actually have to go to Egypt to find something similar, this gold mask that would be placed on the heads of the deceased.
09:45And Schliemann doesn't find just one never-before-seen mask. He finds five of them.
09:52For some people, that was too much. They didn't believe that this was authentic.
09:56They thought that maybe Schliemann actually had him forged somehow.
10:00Not only does the mask seem out of place, but Schliemann's reputation was highly questionable.
10:06Schliemann wasn't a professional archaeologist.
10:08In fact, he didn't start engaging with archaeology until later in his life.
10:12He was a self-made millionaire. He'd dabbled in multiple industries.
10:17He'd even gone to the U.S. during the gold rush and made a lot of money there.
10:22People had doubts about him.
10:23They know he was very charismatic and very resourceful and very passionate about what he was doing,
10:28but they didn't always necessarily believe him.
10:29Many of the objects that he had found in Troy seem to belong to different periods,
10:35and he seemed to have been putting them together in order to create these groups of objects that were very impressive.
10:43They thought that he maybe just made up stories at some times.
10:46And he's done more than just spinning a tall tale.
10:49Schliemann was actually accused of smuggling part of the treasure of Priam
10:54and actually had to pay a fine because of this to the Turkish government.
11:00So it's not exactly surprising that some suspect that Schliemann faced the discovery of this mask.
11:08But there is a problem with this accusation.
11:11Schliemann was being observed during excavations at Mycenae by Greek officials.
11:17Schliemann was a controversial figure, so people didn't completely trust him,
11:21and he was being watched all the time he was excavating.
11:24Most scholars now believe that Schliemann simply never had the opportunity
11:28to slip in fake masks to the dig site unobserved.
11:33They are certain the mask of Agamemnon is genuinely ancient.
11:37But some still thought that something about it smelled off.
11:43Examined in detail, the crisp features,
11:47the individual hairs of his beard and handlebar mustache
11:49really make the mask of Agamemnon stand out.
11:53The look of the mask was quite different from the other masks that were found.
11:57The level of detail seems out of place in something so ancient.
12:02Some scholars have suggested looks more akin to classical period kinds of looks or appearances.
12:08So this is about 700 years after the story of the Iliad, around 500 B.C.
12:13So the accusation is that, ironically, it looks a bit too Greek for something so old.
12:19The idea came that perhaps Schliemann reworked the mask.
12:24Visible under high magnification, there's one detail that stands out to scholars.
12:29The mustache looks like it's been flipped.
12:32It was sort of pointing upwards, but at maybe one point it was pointing downwards.
12:37The argument is that Schliemann didn't have the opportunity to slip in a fake.
12:42But maybe he reworked the original.
12:44It was not very clear what it looked like.
12:46It initially was removed from the grave.
12:48It was only photographed some weeks after its discovery.
12:50So there was a period of time where someone could have potentially altered the mask.
12:56But there is a flaw in the argument that it looks too detailed to be genuine.
13:02It may be different to many Mycenaean artifacts.
13:06But its look is not unique.
13:09There was a drinking vessel that was found with a mane, a kind of depiction on the lion.
13:14And this mane was quite similar to the beard and mustache of the Agamemnon mask.
13:20in terms of the style.
13:21So this gave support potentially that Agamemnon's mask may have actually come from a period similar in time to this drinking vessel.
13:29Which has finally led to one very obvious conclusion.
13:33The consensus is that the mask is real.
13:35It does represent a mask that was created in antiquity rather than something that was forged much later.
13:42So is this really the face of the mythical destroyer of Troy, King Agamemnon?
13:50The problem is, with Schliemann, little is ever quite as it seems.
13:55Take his undisputed discovery of Troy.
13:59Schliemann stopped digging when he found evidence of a settlement that had suffered a great fire.
14:04And he believed this to be evidence of the Trojan War.
14:09What he didn't perceive at the time is settlements had been built one on top of each other, almost like a layer cake.
14:16So once a settlement was abandoned, centuries later another one would be built on top.
14:20What he found was actually a much earlier city.
14:23And the real Troy from the period of the Iliad was actually dug through.
14:28He went right through it without noticing it.
14:30And it seems that Schliemann got his timings wrong at Mycenae, too.
14:34The tomb in which the mask was found doesn't date to the time in which Agamemnon is supposed to have lived.
14:43The mask was found in a shaft tomb.
14:46And recent studies show that the Mycenaeans stopped building these around 300 years before the Trojan Wars.
14:54The consensus does seem to be that the mask is a genuine artifact.
15:00It just isn't King Agamemnon.
15:02Unfortunately, it turns out that this fabulous object is hundreds of years too old to be the mythical destroyer of Troy.
15:11It may have not been Agamemnon, but it certainly was an important individual, perhaps even a king, who was buried in this death mask.
15:29Recent research suggests he was a powerful figure.
15:34The Mycenaeans during the Bronze Age dominated most of the Mediterranean when it came to trade and culture.
15:41and warfare.
15:43His influence would have reached across the entire region.
15:47In the excavations in Mycenaean cities, we have found a tomb of a warrior with lots of elements that are connected with other civilizations of the area.
16:00It seems this king could have had contact with a very powerful and very famous civilization.
16:08We have been able to find a little head of the goddess Hathor, which is an Egyptian goddess.
16:14And that could explain where the Mycenaeans get the idea for this stunning gold death mask in the first place.
16:20So it's quite possible, for instance, that the Mycenaeans had seen similar masks on deceased kings and pharaohs in Egypt and thought this was a great idea.
16:28The fact that this mask isn't the face of Agamemnon doesn't make it any less remarkable or less important.
16:38And the real Agamemnon might even be a descendant of this man.
16:44Troy turned out to be real.
16:46So why not Agamemnon?
16:48Behind glass in the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. is a corroded copper plate.
17:02This is an object worth more than its weight in gold.
17:06Now using the latest technology, we're bringing it into the light.
17:14By expanding the object and zooming in, faint markings become visible etched across its surface.
17:22And by digitally removing the corrosion, we can finally see them clearly.
17:28This object is covered in tiny symbols in writing.
17:32It's a really highly skilled piece of engraving.
17:38It's hard to read because everything is back to front.
17:42But flip the image, and the words, Bank of England, appear.
17:48As you look more closely at it, you see a sign for 10 pounds and a date, 1937.
17:54This is a printing plate for making British 10-pound notes.
17:59Something this valuable should have been locked away in the British Treasury.
18:04But this plate isn't discovered in a London vault.
18:07It was found in 1959 in the most unexpected of places.
18:12At the bottom of an Austrian lake.
18:15How does it end up at the bottom of a lake?
18:19Where does it come from?
18:21Is it even real?
18:27By the 1930s, the 10-pound note design is over 150 years old.
18:32And it shows.
18:34They were printed just on white paper.
18:36There was no use of color.
18:38They were printed on one side.
18:40There was no embossing.
18:42There was no metal stripe.
18:44The note is produced using a printing plate exactly like this.
18:48And that's going to be an incredibly carefully engraved object onto which you place the ink.
18:54And then you press it onto the paper to produce the final product.
19:00But close examination of this plate reveals a flaw.
19:04Next to the abbreviated word for company is an extra sliver of metal that would leave a dot of ink on the note.
19:11Does this error mean it's a fake?
19:15Quite the opposite.
19:17The Bank of England thinks they've got some neat little tricks to fool the forgers.
19:22Britannia has only one earring instead of two.
19:25And there were a few little dots that were meant to look like printing errors.
19:29But were actually put there on purpose.
19:31And the idea was that these little flaws were extremely hard to identify and to replicate.
19:37And this was to deter counterfeiters.
19:40By the 1930s the notes have up to 150 marks hidden on them.
19:46The tiny dot on this plate is definitely one of them.
19:50Others may have been eaten away from this plate after years under water.
19:54They were made from very, very fine bits of metal.
19:58Those fine details are exactly the ones that will corrode first of all.
20:03Britannia, for example, has been almost completely erased.
20:07But based on what remains of this plate, there seems to be nothing about it that indicates that it would be anything other than a genuine printing plate.
20:18So what is a British bank plate doing over a thousand kilometers from London at the bottom of Lake Toplitz in Austria?
20:29The key clue to the plate's origin is that the divers who find it are searching for an infamous hoard of treasure.
20:35Towards the end of the war, people see German soldiers bringing wagons with chests in them and dropping them into the lake.
20:43Now, nobody knows what's in those chests, but of course everybody wants to believe it's Nazi gold.
20:49But when they dive to the bottom of the lake in 1959, it's not gold they find.
20:55They discover this copper plate.
20:58Which raises one very obvious question.
21:01Why did the Germans have a printing plate for British ten-pound notes?
21:06Historians searching for answers have zeroed in on secret Nazi objects.
21:12On secret Nazi files.
21:15A plan codenamed Operation Andreas.
21:18A deadly scheme to bomb Britain.
21:21With money.
21:23The plan is to airdrop 30 billion pounds in forged notes over Britain.
21:29The British people would find this money and would start to use it.
21:34And that by, you know, feeding that into the economic system, it would undermine the whole basis of currency and really collapse the economic system.
21:44Britain would end up in such huge financial distress, it would be unable to wage war at all.
21:50Germany would win without firing a shot.
21:53It's the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
21:58All they have to do is produce a perfect counterfeit plate.
22:03How are they going to do that?
22:08The plan to destroy the British economy begins in a stone mansion west of downtown Berlin, where Operation Andreas sets up shop.
22:17The building that they use is an SS training center that had already been used to produce false documents and forgeries.
22:24The Nazis recruit mathematician and code breaker Albert Lange to run it.
22:29He's a highly skilled scientist, but he also believes that King Arthur was real.
22:35He believes that the British flag contains astral magical symbols.
22:39Lange comes up with a fiendish plan.
22:43Use a light sensitive and acid resistant dye to create a perfect copy of a real plate.
22:49Lange's plan was to begin with to take as perfect as possible a photograph of a genuine £10 note.
22:58And then to transfer that image onto a plate using this acid resistant dye that would enable the rest of the plate to be etched away.
23:09And so you'd have a perfect printing plate for a £10 note.
23:12But even with the best cameras, Lange struggles.
23:16None of them looked convincing close up.
23:19And in fact, Lange himself said that the reproduction of Britannia herself just looked like an old hag.
23:29Lange's genius plan is a flop.
23:32He is forced to abandon science for old fashioned craftsmanship.
23:36He hires expert engraver Walter Ziedrich.
23:41Even for him, this is a challenging job.
23:44The engraver has to capture all those little marks, those little intentional flaws that characterize the genuine thing.
23:52Britannia is particularly tricky for the Nazi forgers.
23:56Getting the eyes right was incredibly difficult.
24:01It takes Ziedrich six attempts to make a perfect looking plate.
24:05Now, we don't know for sure if this is one of Ziedrich's plates.
24:10It's not like a forger can sign his own work.
24:12All we know is that it was important enough for them to hide it.
24:16So this was really one of the better versions.
24:18But a perfect plate alone isn't enough.
24:21The Nazis also need the right paper.
24:24It's actually got a feel right.
24:26Is it smooth?
24:27Is it slippery?
24:28Does it fold correctly?
24:30Does it sound right?
24:32Lange was so obsessed with this that he actually got some blind people to test this out.
24:39They wouldn't be distracted by the look of it and really be able to listen to the crackle of the note as it folded.
24:45Lange thinks he's cracked it.
24:49All he has to do is prove it to his paymasters.
24:52The story goes that the Germans sent an officer across to the Swiss border with a forged passport and a whole bunch of these forged pound notes.
25:04And then they tipped off the Swiss authorities that someone was going to try to cross the border with faked documents.
25:11They assumed, and they were right, that the Swiss would check both the passport and the money.
25:16Well, they spot the forged passport, they know it's a forgery.
25:20But as far as they're concerned, the money is legitimate.
25:26Lange has pulled it off.
25:28They're ready to destroy the entire British economy.
25:31But on the brink of victory, Operation Andreas unexpectedly grinds to a halt.
25:38The problem with this plan to bomb Britain with money is that you have to be able to get the airplanes over Britain to do that.
25:45And after the Battle of Britain, that just wasn't going to be possible for the Luftwaffe.
25:51It's all gone wrong for Andreas.
25:55Is this the end of the greatest counterfeiting operation in history?
25:59In July 1942, Hitler's spymaster Heinrich Himmler is struggling to pay his network of foreign agents.
26:12He needs cash and lots of it.
26:15But Germany doesn't have any spare.
26:18Unless they print it themselves, of course.
26:21He doesn't care whether or not the money they have is forged.
26:24Himmler's code name for the new plan is Operation Bernhard.
26:27Named after the man put in charge, SS Major Bernhard Kruger.
26:33He's a much better choice than Lange, because this is a guy experienced in the art of forgery.
26:38He himself has produced fake documents.
26:41The 10-pound plate and all of the other equipment have been gathering dust in a Berlin basement.
26:46Kruger takes it all to his new forgery HQ.
26:50Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp north of Berlin.
26:56One of the main problems with Andreas was they had all kinds of intelligence leaks.
27:02This explains why they set up the new operation in the concentration camps.
27:06They could keep it under wraps if they did it there.
27:09There is no risk of workers leaking information out of the new base.
27:12Sachsenhausen is a labor camp, a vicious, brutal concentration camp where its occupants can be executed at any time and without reason.
27:24But Kruger's operation treats the largely Jewish prisoners very differently.
27:29He goes to great lengths to try to make the workers on his project happy and comfortable.
27:34Distributes extra rations, cigarettes, even sets up ping pong tables for them to amuse themselves.
27:41By 1943, Operation Bernhard is in full swing.
27:46The counterfeiting plates turn out high quality fake money on an industrial scale.
27:52Lines of prisoners pass the notes between them to make them look used.
27:56The very best, the ones that were almost flawless, were good enough to give to German spies for their activities.
28:04Himmler's spies are never told they were receiving counterfeit money.
28:09The second grade were used to launder money throughout Europe.
28:14And the less convincing bills are not circulated.
28:17The lowest quality of notes were kept in a room labelled Apfuf, meaning airdrop.
28:23That idea that perhaps one day they would be airdropped hadn't been completely abandoned.
28:30But it never happens again.
28:32Germany loses the war.
28:36The work of this plate is a bust.
28:39Or is it?
28:42The scale of what Bernard and Andreas had actually achieved was a real shock to the Allies.
28:47The airdrop plan may have failed, but this plate and others like it still do enormous damage.
28:53It seems that the scheme was actually surprisingly effective.
28:58There were over 130 million pounds of fake notes produced.
29:02Around 10% of all sterling on the market.
29:06With just a little more effort, this scheme could actually have been extremely disturbingly effective in disrupting the British economy.
29:15Which leaves just one unanswered question.
29:20How does this plate end up at the bottom of a lake?
29:22As the war comes to an end, the Nazis try to get rid of all the evidence of this widespread forgery program.
29:31The plan is to murder the Jewish inmates who ran the operation.
29:35But they are saved by an administrative error.
29:38The notes and equipment are disposed of.
29:40Some of it they buried.
29:42Some of it, the banknotes, they burned.
29:47And some of it, like the plates, they dumped into lake toplets.
29:52This remains the only known surviving plate from the greatest counterfeiting operation ever mounted.
29:59Had this plate and the others like it, had they done their job, this could have been one of the most devastating weapons of the Second World War.
30:10In the British Museum's archives are three mysterious chalk artifacts.
30:21They are a 5,000 year old puzzle.
30:25Ever since these objects were discovered in the 19th century, archaeologists have been uncertain as to what they were made for.
30:32Now using the latest technology, we're bringing these incredible artifacts into the light.
30:41They are known as the Folkton Drums.
30:45Although these are called drums, they most definitely were not drums.
30:49It's merely because of their form that we have called them this.
30:52Each one is intricately carved.
30:56They're beautiful objects with geometric and curvilinear designs.
31:02Some that even suggest a stylized human face.
31:09But that's not the strangest thing about them.
31:12These three objects were of incrementally different sizes.
31:15Each one is .84 times the diameter of the next biggest drum.
31:23Small, medium and large.
31:26They had a mathematical relationship with one another.
31:30This is unknown for Stone Age artifacts.
31:34But new research suggests an explanation.
31:36One that connects them to the greatest monument of the entire Stone Age.
31:42These objects could be related somehow to Stonehenge.
31:46What is the meaning behind this precise geometric sequence?
31:51What are these bizarre markings?
31:54And can these extraordinary objects unravel the secrets of Stonehenge?
31:591889. Folkton, Northern England.
32:09An amateur archaeologist excavating a burial mound finds something unexpected.
32:15The canon William Greenwell discovers a grave of a child, probably around five years in age.
32:22The tomb is Neolithic, a period in the British Isles that spans around 4,000 to 2,500 BCE.
32:33A Neolithic burial for just one person is incredibly rare.
32:38Archaeologists have only found a handful of graves of this sort.
32:42The vast majority of burials from this time period are in mass graves.
32:47Meaning this is no ordinary burial.
32:49Could this child have been of an elite family and therefore accorded a special burial?
32:57And next to the child's body are these three strange artifacts.
33:01And they were placed very deliberately within it, behind the head and hips.
33:06They're clearly special.
33:08But what are they for?
33:12Archaeologists have offered some intriguing ideas.
33:15One holds that they were a mnemonic device, an object that would prompt memory and assist an individual, for example, telling a story to a group of people.
33:26That was a function of the tactility of it, of the lines incised and the shapes that as the finger would follow, they would prompt the next part of the story.
33:36Another theory is that they are talismans.
33:38Another theory is that they are talismans.
33:41They feature carefully engraved decoration, showing or could be interpreted as human eyes.
33:49Might seem to suggest that they were watchers, that they are somehow overseeing the sleep of this child in death within the tomb.
33:56That they are in a sense protective objects.
34:02That fits with the drums resting place, but it doesn't explain the most puzzling thing about them.
34:09Their sizes form a precise geometric sequence.
34:13It's not clear why this should be the case.
34:16Now, new research suggests that the answer could lie in one of the greatest and most mysterious monuments of the Neolithic world.
34:27Stonehenge.
34:33The drums are dated to around 3000 to 2500 BCE.
34:38The same time that Stonehenge is being built.
34:40The stones form a series of concentric symmetrical circles around a central point.
34:4852 of the 80 massive stones, known as sarsens, survive.
34:53The largest is around 30 tons, and the tallest about 7 meters.
34:59It is an engineering masterpiece.
35:02What's really special about the stone circle at Stonehenge, despite the fact that there are many, many more,
35:10in Britain and continental Europe, is that it's the only one that's been found that employs very sophisticated mortise and tenon joint construction.
35:20These lintels across the top of the standing stones are joined as a carpenter would join a wooden structure.
35:29The scale and precision of Stonehenge suggests that it must have an important function.
35:34A pagan temple?
35:37A ceremonial burial ground?
35:39An astronomers' solar calendar?
35:42We're still looking for answers.
35:44In the early 2000s, archaeologists Andrew Chamberlain and Mike Parker Pearson investigate the layout of the site in detail.
35:53They went to measure the concentric circles of Stonehenge and discovered something quite extraordinary, that each of them was a multiple of a measurement of 1.056 modern feet, which they called the Long Foot.
36:10And the Long Foot doesn't just appear at Stonehenge.
36:17Less than 5 kilometers away is a site known as Durrington Walls.
36:22Durrington Walls itself may have been a settlement for people who were creating Stonehenge.
36:27It also features a now disappeared Hinge Monument, which was probably made in wood.
36:34The Durrington Walls site happened to have circular structures which also have this ratio to the Long Foot.
36:44The further afield researchers look, the more structures they find that seem to be built using this same measurement.
36:51The Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, over 800 kilometers away, and the Great Circle in New Grange, over 500 kilometers away, across the Irish Sea.
37:05They all seem to use the Long Foot.
37:08What's so intriguing is the possibility that it represents a standardized measurement system that was in use not just in the immediate vicinity of Stonehenge,
37:19but potentially throughout Neolithic Britain.
37:24It's as if someone sent a memo to everyone across Stone Age Britain to agree the same system.
37:30And yet this was 5,000 years ago, almost 3,000 years before writing even appears in Britain.
37:38Formally, when we looked at Neolithic Europe, we imagined small farming communities living in relative isolation.
37:47If there was a standard measurement system in use at the time, the next question becomes, how are they sharing it with one another?
37:57Recently, an archaeologist has found an extraordinary possibility.
38:02A link between the Long Foot and the mysterious drums.
38:07Could they hold the answer to these strange connections right across the country?
38:11The Folkton drums have a precise mathematical relationship to one another.
38:21The largest drum is 14.6 centimeters in diameter.
38:26The next, 12.4, and the next, 10.4.
38:30Each one is .84 times the size of the next biggest drum.
38:35Could this simply be coincidence?
38:37In 2016, a researcher at Manchester University discovers something amazing.
38:47Dr. Anne Tether examines the smallest drum and discovers that its circumference is 1.056 feet.
38:57The Long Foot.
38:59Dr. Tether takes a cord, measuring exactly 10 long feet.
39:02She wrapped it around the smallest of these chalk drums, and it went around 10 times precisely.
39:11She repeats the test on the other two drums.
39:14She did the same with the larger drums, and it went around 8 or 7.
39:19This suggests an astonishing possibility.
39:21One theory is that these drums could have been used as portable devices for the wrapping around of cords,
39:29for the creating of standard measurements, for laying out buildings or monuments.
39:36The suggestion is that these are like 5,000-year-old measuring tapes.
39:41But with only one isolated find, it could all be coincidence.
39:45Except, it's no longer just one find.
39:52In 1993 in West Sussex, 80 kilometers from Stonehenge, archaeologists discover another drum.
40:00But this time, with no carved decorations, almost as if it were unfinished.
40:05When Dr. Tether tests the new drum with the 10 long feet cord, it wraps around exactly 9 times.
40:12The idea that these strange drums are tools for the architects of Stonehenge is attractive.
40:19But there's one very big problem.
40:22The drums are made out of chalk.
40:27There is a problem with chalk, particularly if you are using it for some kind of measuring standard.
40:34It is soft, and it erodes easily.
40:36If these objects were part of some Neolithic toolkit, then you'd expect to see marks of wear upon them.
40:43But up close, there are no cord marks or signs of damage from regular use as tools.
40:50But weirdly, in Neolithic Britain, not all tools are made to be used.
40:55We call these sorts of objects, skeomorphs, objects which were functionally in one material, but for which replicas can be made in another material, which is not functionally suitable.
41:08A good example of this would be a chalk axe, which, while looking like an axe, would shatter if you actually used it like an axe.
41:16And we've actually found such a chalk axe from near Arundel in Britain.
41:23The working theory is that the real drums would have been made of something more durable, like wood.
41:29So why make copies out of chalk?
41:33Their use appears to have been largely ritual.
41:38It would appear that the long foot measurement had an important symbolic as well as functional use in this society.
41:46We may view these two realms, the functional and the spiritual, as different phenomena today.
41:56But for the people of the past, this was not the case.
41:59That fits with the long foot being used at a ritual site like Stonehenge, and why the drums might be buried in a tomb.
42:09But if the drums really are connected to the monuments, how is it they were found hundreds of kilometers away from any of them?
42:18New evidence at Durrington Walls may hold an answer.
42:21Researchers analyzed 38,000 teeth and bones from animals that had been butchered and consumed at the Durrington Walls site.
42:31And they were quite astonished to find that many of them had come from as far away as the northern tip of Scotland.
42:38500 miles.
42:40Archaeologists have had to rethink ideas of Neolithic communities being isolated.
42:45There was a huge amount of contact, and not just with neighboring communities, but communities that span the British Isles and could have even included the continent.
43:00The idea that knowledge of measuring drums could have traveled hundreds of kilometers no longer seems so strange.
43:07People were traveling long distances, and when people come together, they share ideas, they talk, they talk about religion, they talk about what they've experienced.
43:21It's what humans always do.
43:23These beautiful and strange chalk objects are fundamentally challenging our views on both the skills and the beliefs of the Stone Age people who crafted them 5000 years ago.
43:35The trouve
43:42The
43:44Dorothy
43:55The
43:59The
44:01The
44:04Ευχαριστώ.