- 39 minutes ago
Τα Μυστικά του Πολιτισμού (The Secrets to Civilization)
2021 | Επ. 3/3 | HD
Κορυφαίοι ιστορικοί μοιράζονται μαζί μας καινούργια δεδομένα για την κατάσταση του πλανήτη μας και αποκαλύπτουν πώς αυτά τα δεδομένα παρέχουν νέες πληροφορίες για την επίδραση των κλιματικών αλλαγών, των πανδημιών και της ηφαιστειότητας, στην εξέλιξη της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.
Ερευνούμε τι αναφέρει η επιστήμη για την επίδραση των ασθενειών στην ανατροπή της Ρωμαϊκής Αυτοκρατορίας και πώς η επιτυχία της Ρώμης ίσως την κατέστησε άτρωτη απέναντι σε μια σειρά φονικών επιδημιών.
2021 | Επ. 3/3 | HD
Κορυφαίοι ιστορικοί μοιράζονται μαζί μας καινούργια δεδομένα για την κατάσταση του πλανήτη μας και αποκαλύπτουν πώς αυτά τα δεδομένα παρέχουν νέες πληροφορίες για την επίδραση των κλιματικών αλλαγών, των πανδημιών και της ηφαιστειότητας, στην εξέλιξη της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.
Ερευνούμε τι αναφέρει η επιστήμη για την επίδραση των ασθενειών στην ανατροπή της Ρωμαϊκής Αυτοκρατορίας και πώς η επιτυχία της Ρώμης ίσως την κατέστησε άτρωτη απέναντι σε μια σειρά φονικών επιδημιών.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:03Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:08Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:12Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:15Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:21This was a transformative stage in human history.
01:33Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:36Kyle Harper has dedicated his career to the study of ancient Rome.
01:42Kyle Harper interview, take one.
01:44I fell in love with the history of the Romans.
01:47I think they're one of the most fascinating and historically important civilizations.
01:53It's one of those cultures that people return to generation after generation.
02:01What makes the Romans so extraordinary is the sheer longevity of their civilization.
02:07They build a republic and then an empire that endures for centuries.
02:12Their ability to administer a massive empire is one of the most extraordinary political accomplishments in history.
02:22Kyle is one of a new generation of historians using science to re-examine the past.
02:30Their work is revealing how the Romans shaped and were shaped by the natural world.
02:37The world is very different from ours.
02:41The Romans didn't have fossil fuel industry.
02:44They didn't have biomedical science.
02:46In some ways, their societies were more exposed and more vulnerable to environmental change and to challenge from the natural
02:57world.
03:00New discoveries are re-writing one of history's greatest dramas.
03:05The decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
03:14To Romans living in the second century of the current era, the notion that their empire might collapse must have
03:21seemed impossible.
03:23For 200 years following the accession of Augustus, Rome's first emperor in 27 BCE, the empire has basked in a
03:33golden age.
03:35It's an era of such unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Romans themselves call it Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
03:46Roman rule has banished warfare to distant frontiers.
03:55It's the year 150 CE.
03:59A violent Roman custom continues to be embraced by people across the empire.
04:06Like here in Pergamon, in what's now modern Turkey.
04:17Watching from the wings is a young doctor.
04:19Claudius Galen.
04:24As a physician, he embodies the science and knowledge of the Greek-speaking East.
04:41But he learns his trade stitching up wounded gladiators in a Roman amphitheatre.
04:48Here, where two worlds meet, Galen is our witness to the pivotal moments in the history of the empire.
04:57Galen's writings give us a different window into Roman life and death, from the usual parade of emperors and battles.
05:07hidden within, are precious clues to the ultimate fate of Rome and her empire, to which we can now add
05:14the findings of cutting-edge modern science.
05:21By the second century, the frontiers of the Roman Empire stretch from the Middle East to the Atlantic Ocean.
05:30Around 70 million people, perhaps a quarter of the world's population, are now under her command.
05:38Even by modern standards, it's a stunning achievement.
05:43Rome's imprint on the world isn't just seen in magnificent monuments that we can still see today.
05:49It can be found in some unlikely places, like Nevada.
06:02Joe McConnell is a hydrogeologist.
06:05He studies ancient ice dug from the frozen wastes of Greenland.
06:14So this piece of ice is 1,328 metres depth.
06:19These are longitudinal samples cut from a cylindrical ice core that's about 12 centimetres in diameter.
06:28So the saw blades are set to 3.4 by 3.4 centimetres, which is the size we want.
06:34So I'm just going to trim off a little bit of it.
06:37Each of Joe's ice cores is a window on the past. History frozen in time.
06:45So how's it going?
06:46Good, good. Just getting everything started.
06:48Getting warmed up.
06:50And the ICPMSs look good?
06:51Joe and his team are looking for evidence left behind by the Roman Empire.
06:57And that means searching for lead.
07:00The beauty of lead is that it's very low background.
07:03It's pretty rare in the environment.
07:05But humans, especially in our silver smelting and mining, produced a lot of it.
07:10So you can take lead pollution and silver production and almost equate the two.
07:15Joe is looking for lead from the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Spain and Portugal,
07:20where Rome's silver mines were concentrated.
07:24So we just need to get the part pumps going.
07:26The mines in Iberia, they are Galena ores, and so they tend to have a lot of lead.
07:32For every ounce or gram of silver you produced, you would have had to produce about 10,000 grams of
07:40lead ore.
07:41Much of that was vented off into the atmosphere, and that's why we see such strong lead pollution associated with
07:47Iberian mining.
07:51But Joe's work is about more than just ancient pollution.
07:56Spanish silver was the cornerstone of Roman coinage, and increased production is a marker of economic growth.
08:04Clean carefully to make sure it's good and clean.
08:06Find lead, and he can track the performance of the entire Roman economy.
08:11We're going to load it up into the stand, and then we're going to gently set this ice down onto
08:20the melter plate there and start the analysis.
08:27Starting 30 BCE, this is the very last days of the Roman Republic.
08:3327 BCE, Octavian is made first emperor, and you switch from a republic officially to an empire.
08:42About 10 or 12 years later, you have a big jump in lead pollution.
08:50That jump was about a factor of four in only a decade or so.
08:56Joe's analysis provides scientific proof of a centuries-long economic boom that precisely tracks the years of the Roman Empire's
09:07golden age.
09:11An era when Rome reached out to the rest of the world.
09:16There's tremendous traffic, tremendous trade, silver flowing into India from the Roman world, and goods flowing back into the Mediterranean
09:25via Egypt.
09:26The level of wealth coming from trade is absolutely enormous and at a different scale than had been known before.
09:37We can get a sense of just how large a scale the Romans could operate on at Las Medulas in
09:44northern Spain.
09:46A strange vista of deep ravines and towering spires of rock.
09:52Remarkably, this isn't the patient work of Mother Nature.
09:56These are the scars of Roman mining for another precious metal, gold.
10:02The way this would work to start an opencast mine was first start digging a series of shafts and tunnels
10:10intersecting each other at right angles in order to intentionally cause them this to collapse and open the mine.
10:20The force to break open the mountainside came from water, brought here in a network of aqueducts from over 50
10:28miles away,
10:29and stored in reservoirs, the largest of which could hold 18 million litres.
10:36This water would come down the sides of this opencast mine and, you know, wash away every loose debris that
10:42was there.
10:43Pliny the Elder, who describes quite in detail this technique, he refers to it as the ruina montium, the destruction
10:52of mountains,
10:53because indeed you have an entire man face or, you know, hills that are completely eroded away.
11:02While Roman industry inflicted scars on Mother Earth, nature was nevertheless giving her agriculture a helping hand.
11:10The Roman climactic optimum meant warmer temperatures in general in the Mediterranean.
11:15So what that means is, is more evaporation from the Mediterranean, which means more moisture in the air,
11:20which in turn means more precipitation and higher agricultural yields.
11:25Evidence from Greenland's ice cores also reveals a surprising link between Rome's success and volcanic eruptions.
11:35The first couple of centuries AD, the height of the Roman Empire, has been identified as the Roman Quiet Period,
11:44because there's really only one large volcano in the period, as opposed to many volcanic eruptions in the preceding few
11:54centuries BC or so.
11:56While it might be cold comfort to the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
12:01the relative lack of volcanic activity was a boost for the rest of the Roman Empire.
12:06The Roman Empire gets a bit lucky in its climate, but I think the lack of large volcanic eruptions in
12:13the first two centuries AD
12:14played some sort of role in the ability of Rome to consolidate its empire.
12:23A stable climate supported a revolution in Roman agriculture.
12:28In Tuscany, in the north of Italy, at the Villa Setta Fenestri,
12:33archaeologist Elizabeth Fentress is documenting how Roman farming transformed the landscape.
12:42The main products of the Tuscan countryside are like everywhere in the Mediterranean,
12:49their grain, their wine and their oil.
12:53These are the basis for mixed farming.
12:56Throw in onions, cabbages, and you've got a diet.
13:00For centuries, this whole landscape was dominated by a patchwork of small subsistence farms.
13:09In the course of time, these small farms get replaced by ever larger villas.
13:17and the one we're in is perhaps one of the last to be built.
13:21It's built around 40 BC.
13:25They take on the agriculture in a completely different way.
13:31Where olives now grow, in Roman times the hillside was given over to vineyards,
13:36producing enormous quantities of wine.
13:39You can look at them in terms of investment agriculture.
13:43This is as close to capitalist agriculture as you can imagine.
13:55Nearby are the remains of the Roman port of Cosa.
14:00The ruins are clear evidence that this was an industry serving consumers in far away places.
14:08Its importance is underlined by those great hugs of masonry that are still here.
14:18And what they're doing is creating a great big jetty.
14:21The port was initially a fishing port, but as the wine trade starts developing in the hinterland of Cosa,
14:35the most extraordinary amount of amphorae left this port for Gaul, Spain, all the western Mediterranean.
14:48While much of Italy was making money shipping produce to markets around the empire and beyond,
14:55Rome itself is sucking in the food it needs from overseas.
15:00From places like Egypt's Nile Delta.
15:04By the time of Augustus, Rome needs as much as 400,000 tonnes of grain a year.
15:14And central Italy isn't going to be able to supply that.
15:19A huge proportion of the empire's output goes towards feeding the city of Rome's growing population.
15:26Very characteristic of the era of the Pax Romana is intense and rapid urbanization.
15:33The city of Rome reached as many as one million residents.
15:36It's the only European city to reach a population of a million until London in around 1800.
15:44We can now excavate the harbours of Rome and the canals and the systems that turned the Tiber into an
15:51archery that fed the rest of the world into Rome itself.
15:55Rome's huge population had access to epic public entertainments.
15:59The Circus Maximus could hold anything up to a quarter of a million people to watch spectacles such as chariot
16:06races.
16:0760,000 could cram into the Colosseum to enjoy the destruction of thousands of exotic animals and humans.
16:14A population this large requires a mountain of supplies.
16:18As you run into Rome now, on the southern side, there's a district called Testaccio.
16:24And Testaccio means potsherd.
16:27This is an entire mountain made only of fragments of oil-carrying amphorae.
16:35Amphorae are clay pots designed to carry oil or wine.
16:40You can't reuse an amphora that's had olive oil in it.
16:44You can't wash it out, particularly not without soap.
16:46And so they simply discarded them.
16:50Testaccio is testament to Rome's enormous appetite.
16:53And by almost any measure, the Roman Empire represents a high point in living standards for rich and poor alike
17:01in the ancient world.
17:04But this doesn't necessarily translate into longer, healthier lives.
17:15Average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was up to 30 years of age.
17:22But in reality, high childhood mortality warps the statistics, dragging down that average.
17:31In fact, the 50% of Romans who make it to adulthood have a good chance of living comparatively long
17:38lives.
17:40They are helped by two centuries of Pax Romana, which reduces major sources of adult deaths like warfare and starvation.
17:51But reaching old age still means navigating a landscape of disease threats made progressively worse by some of the same
18:00forces underpinning Roman success.
18:09The Romans experienced a form of what I think we could call the paradox of progress.
18:15The very forces that enabled Roman dynamism also made the Romans suffer poor health.
18:23The germs that were endemic in the Roman Empire benefited from the same patterns of urbanization and trade.
18:32The effects were felt most keenly in the Empire's cities.
18:36Nowhere more so than the capital, Rome.
18:39The Romans are extraordinary civil engineers.
18:43They build this amazing city with aqueducts that bring in fresh water from the hills outside Rome.
18:50But Rome had a reputation, even in its own day, for being a pretty dirty and disgusting place.
18:57By the time of Pax Romana, 11 aqueducts funnel fresh water into the city.
19:04We're talking 220 litres per person per day of water being brought by the 11 aqueducts which fed Rome.
19:15That is more than the average city in the US in the 1970s.
19:21That is something to behold.
19:23But there's a catch.
19:26Erin Marshall studies life and death in ancient Rome.
19:29She believes Rome's reputation for bathing hides a dirty secret.
19:37Picture a city of a million people going to all of those baths.
19:42The large municipal baths were used by thousands of people every day.
19:50Every self-respecting emperor would build a new public baths as a gift to their people.
19:56So you'd go with your friends, but then you had other people coming along, other people from all over the
20:01empire.
20:03And all going into plunge pools, which weren't changed often enough.
20:09The baths themselves were the seeding mess of bacteria.
20:14Of course, they didn't know it.
20:16The Romans took care to keep their baths clean, and they thought bathing was a very healthy thing to do.
20:22They didn't know it was dangerous.
20:25Roman doctors, including Galen himself, thought that going to the baths was a great therapy.
20:32So you can imagine gastrointestinal diseases were treated with visits to the baths.
20:39A million people in baths with gastrointestinal diseases.
20:44So while the emperors think they're providing health, they're actually killing them.
20:51Supplies of drinking water were also vulnerable to contamination.
20:58A city of more than a million people, all going to the same fountains, each with his own bucket, all
21:06with their bacteria entering into the water, which will then have a secondary infection.
21:11So the next person coming around is not only adding his bacteria to the water basins, but is taking someone
21:17else's.
21:17Rome's famous sewers are designed primarily to channel rainwater, so residents struggle with a mountain of human waste.
21:26We have satirists who make jokes about what a cesspit Rome was, and we need to remember that that's not
21:33a metaphor.
21:35You have people living in houses where, effectively, none of the latrines connect to a sewage system.
21:45So the Romans used chamber pots and cesspits.
21:50And very often the bathroom was located in or right next to the kitchen, because it was simplest to have
21:58one little pit where you could throw everything in.
22:00A Roman house must have really stunk, and the city itself must have had a really fetid odor.
22:09Ignorance of basic hygiene was a feature of life all across the empire, with cities and towns overflowing with filthy
22:17waste.
22:19In Pompeii, we can see where engineers even built stepping stones to help walkers navigate its fetid streets.
22:28In the capital, the problem was only made worse by the terrain.
22:34Rome was built on seven hills, running alongside the river Tiber.
22:39But as the city grew, it expanded into the lower-lying areas.
22:45Despite the Romans' best attempts at drainage, the Tiber often flooded, further spreading the bacterial diseases, hiding amongst the waste.
22:55The Romans suffered very intensely from a range of diarrheal diseases.
23:00They are disproportionately impactful during the height of summer.
23:08It is likely that mortality rates in the city of Rome were so high that only the constant influx of
23:14newcomers, both free and slave, kept its population growth from going into reverse.
23:24While many diseases were endemic, nature could still bring new dangers.
23:31Scientists believe that it was sometime during the Roman era that a new and deadly type of malaria took hold
23:39in Italy.
23:42VIVAX malaria is the older form of human malaria, and it was probably established in the Mediterranean long before the
23:52Roman Empire.
23:53We still don't know exactly when falciparum malaria becomes established in the Mediterranean.
23:59We have very good reasons to believe that it's there by the time of the Roman Empire.
24:06We know from his writings that Galen treats a lot of malaria patients.
24:12It's clear that the disease struck rich and poor, young and old alike, especially in the summer.
24:20There's a real peak between August and October in the deaths, and you know what's really interesting is that it
24:26affects everybody.
24:28I think it's because of malaria.
24:32There's a real problem here with the Pontine marshes, with the standing water there.
24:39The Pontine marshes stretched across a vast area to the south of Rome, with the Appian Way, its main highway,
24:47passing right through it.
24:49Even the name of the disease itself, evil air, reflects a kind of basic understanding that marshy or swampy places,
24:58that are the kind of places where mosquitoes thrive in abundance, are dangerous for human health.
25:06The Romans had tried and failed to drain the marshes, leaving the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
25:14However, malaria was not just confined to the capital city.
25:23Mark Macklin believes that the Romans' aggressive land management techniques helped make malaria a huge problem across the empire.
25:33What people generally understand is that malaria is related to temperature.
25:41But it's a little bit more complicated than that.
25:43Mark is an expert in the ways that rivers and water have shaped civilisation.
25:50It's water, flooding regime, and also the siltation patterns in rivers, which are as important.
25:59The creation of small pools and ponds where the mosquito breed, they overwinter, and these are called dry season refugia.
26:09These dry season refugia were often created as a consequence of accelerated deforestation.
26:18Rome's blind exploitation of the planet that had once been so generous was beginning to reap fatal rewards.
26:26Pax Romana, the Roman peace, has lasted for two centuries.
26:31But across the empire, in places like Pergamon, the peace will soon be shattered.
26:38In just a few years, many of these people will be dead.
26:49In the second century, Rome's Mediterranean Empire is in contact with the Indian subcontinent and even with Han China.
26:57Together, they form a global network linking populations from the Pacific coast of Asia all the way to the Atlantic
27:05coast of Europe.
27:08But this interconnectedness brings risks as well as rewards.
27:15This was a transformative stage in human history.
27:21Dense, urban populations of people in this greatly interconnected world.
27:29Disease could pass very easily from person to person and then from city to city.
27:35Civilisation reached the point where ripping plagues became possible.
27:43In 165 CE, stories begin to circulate about a frightening new disease.
27:50Reported to have been brought back by soldiers campaigning in the Near East,
27:54it spreads rapidly throughout the empire, reaching forts along the northern frontier
28:00where Rome's armies are fighting Germanic tribes.
28:05This will be called the Antonine Plague, after the dynasty of emperors currently in charge.
28:14Our key witness, Claudius Galen.
28:24The doctor who cut his teeth in the amphitheatre at Pergamon is now a medical legend.
28:31There's very little more important than Galen in the ancient world.
28:37He's travelled the empire, wowing crowds with feats of medical prowess, including an ancient version of open heart surgery.
28:46He's even been to Rome.
28:50The author of hundreds of works, Galen left vital accounts of what he witnessed.
28:56He mentions it throughout his corpus of writings.
29:00Even to him, this was the standout medical episode of his long career.
29:07Compared to the killers he's seen before, like malaria, dysentery and typhus,
29:12this plague seems merciless and horrifying.
29:16The doctor Galen does provide some hints of the medical response to the pandemic.
29:23And most of the pharmaceuticals that he prescribes would have been totally ineffective.
29:37The Antonine Plague takes a heavy toll.
29:43Between 10 and 20% of those infected die.
29:50But where did this mysterious disease come from?
29:55The earliest Roman sources point east to Seleucia, a city on the banks of the Tigris in modern day Iraq.
30:04Its markets link trade routes from Africa and China to the Roman Empire.
30:11The Romans are trading with the people of the far north of Europe.
30:15They're trading across the Sahara Desert.
30:18They're trading particularly actively with South Asia, with East Africa, with the Near East.
30:26And of course, that connectivity would also be exploited by pathogens.
30:34It looks likely the plague came from the east.
30:37But identifying the disease itself is more problematic.
30:43When we don't have ancient DNA evidence that pinpoints the microbe responsible for a disease outbreak,
30:51like the Antonine Plague, we can only rely on whatever written sources we have.
30:56And in the case of the Antonine Plague, we do have some descriptions,
30:58mostly from the contemporary Dr. Galen, that describe some of the symptoms of disease.
31:06Most Roman historians have suspected that smallpox, caused by the smallpox virus,
31:12was the agent of the Antonine Plague.
31:15Smallpox is one of the greatest killers in human history,
31:19and was only finally eradicated in the 1970s through mass vaccination.
31:26The problem with blaming it for the Antonine Plague is that scientists are not even certain that the modern form
31:33of smallpox has been around long enough to have been killing Romans 1800 years ago.
31:50Modern smallpox, the highly virulent form of the disease, isn't actually that old.
31:56It's only four or five hundred years old.
31:58It's possible that there were more ancient or ancestral forms of smallpox,
32:03and we now actually have new additional medieval recovery of smallpox DNA that shows us that, in fact, other strains
32:11of smallpox existed in the past.
32:15To add to the mystery, historians still debate what impact the plague had on the empire.
32:23There's a lot of dispute about how serious the Antonine Plague is,
32:27and that's because the kind of data we have isn't the kind that public health collects nowadays.
32:32There are people who think a staggering proportion of the population of the empire was killed.
32:39I think most people are now a good deal more cautious,
32:42and think that it was very severe in some places, but maybe hardly touched others.
32:52However, while we will never be able to count the victims,
32:56it's possible science offers clues as to how big an effect the Antonine Plague had on the Roman Empire.
33:13Back in Nevada, Joe McConnell has clear scientific evidence of the plague's impact on Rome's economy.
33:21When we look at the impact of plagues on lead pollution,
33:25and so therefore an indicator, an economic activity indicator,
33:28we clearly see the Pax Romana comes to a sharp and dramatic end associated with the Antonine Plague.
33:36Lead pollution in the Arctic does not return to those levels this period from 17 BCE to 165,
33:43until the early Middle Ages, the time of Charlemagne.
33:49With labor in short supply, the empire's Spanish silver mines struggle to maintain output.
33:57The Roman source of new metal disappeared when the Antonine Plague hit Iberia and never recovered.
34:06The Roman economy, it almost ran on silver.
34:09It was the coin of the realm.
34:11And when you no longer had silver, that was kind of it.
34:16Things were starting to go downhill for the Roman Empire.
34:21With legions still to pay, the emperors who ruled after the Antonine Plague are forced to debase the currency.
34:28Economic turmoil and threats from tribes along the frontier soon spill over into outright civil war.
34:36Between 235 and 285 CE, more than 50 individuals will claim the imperial throne,
34:43with a higher proportion meeting a violent death than the average gladiator.
34:52The middle of the 3rd century is a time when the Roman Empire undergoes the most serious existential crisis that
35:00it had ever faced.
35:01It's a political crisis in which there is a series of civil wars.
35:07It's a period of geopolitical and military crisis when enemies across both the eastern and northern frontiers attack Rome simultaneously.
35:18It's a period of monetary crisis when the silver content of the Roman coinage plummets, causing a long period of
35:30serious inflation.
35:32Pax Romana is fast becoming a distant memory.
35:36Now even Mother Nature seems to be turning against the empire.
35:43From 150 CE onwards, the weather systems underpinning the Roman climate optimum become increasingly unstable,
35:52triggering more extreme weather events like floods and droughts.
35:59In turn, bad weather can cause failed harvests, prompting populations to move in search of better farmland.
36:10Plague, civil war, foreign invasions, failed harvests and now desperate people on the move.
36:18The empire that eventually emerges from this chaos will be almost unrecognisable.
36:31In the year 306, a new emperor rises to power, Constantine.
36:37He heralds a new period in the Roman Empire's history.
36:43In 330, he moves his capital some 850 miles further east to Byzantium, modern day Istanbul.
36:52He renames it Constantinople.
37:01Whilst the emperor's resources and people are now being pulled east,
37:05the western half of the empire is on a downward spiral.
37:11Roman provinces across Western Europe and North Africa are conquered by Germanic tribes.
37:18In 410, less than 100 years after it ceases to be the imperial capital, Rome itself is sacked.
37:27Hope for the empire now lies with Constantinople.
37:33Constantinople, this had always been the most populous and wealthiest part of the Roman Empire,
37:40and still controlled a vast territory stretching from Central Europe, all across the Balkans, Anatolia, the Near East, Egypt.
37:52And then, in 527, one of the greatest emperors in all of Roman history comes to the throne.
38:00Justinian.
38:03He built a vast cathedral, higher Sophia.
38:08Now a mosque, it still dominates the city.
38:12But Justinian's ambitions go way further, nothing less than the restoration of the empire.
38:19The Roman Empire is in the process of really quite successfully putting back some of the major pieces of the
38:28empire.
38:30But Nietzsche isn't going to let that happen without a fight.
38:34They've conquered North Africa and reattached it to the imperial center.
38:40And they are in the midst of successfully reconquering Italy when, seemingly out of nowhere, in the year 541, a
38:49new disease outbreak begins.
38:53It starts in Pelusium, which is a town on the shores of the Mediterranean in Egypt.
39:00And the following year, it spreads across the Mediterranean and reaches the capital of Constantinople itself.
39:07By the following year, it's in the western Mediterranean, spreading throughout Italy, Gaul, Spain, and now we increasingly believe even
39:15Britain.
39:15We have several eyewitness accounts, and it's quite clear from these descriptions that this was a disease event unlike anything
39:26that they had lived through.
39:28And the terms in which they describe it are sometimes apocalyptic.
39:35It's 300 years since Galen, but the Romans still have no germ theory and no concept of the value of
39:43public health.
39:43In an age before antibiotics, 80% of those infected die.
39:52In Constantinople, survivors leave horrifying accounts of what they witness.
39:58Our sources describe the bodies being stacked in these towers and pushed down and crunched to make room for the
40:07next body.
40:07And for the Christians who witnessed this, this was a symbol of the apocalypse.
40:14And in fact, they draw from the Bible, the book of Revelation, and they literally think of the bodies that
40:21are being crushed down, bursting like grapes, as the winepress of God's wrath.
40:33Unlike in earlier periods, by the sixth century, more people are being buried than cremated.
40:40So scientists searching for the cause of this new plague can study the bones of its victims.
40:47My name is Dr. Christiana Shaip. I'm head of the ancient DNA laboratory at the Institute of Genomics at the
40:52University of Tartu in Estonia.
40:56In short, I drill dead people's teeth.
41:02These are fun. These are what dentists use to pull teeth out. We use them to hold on to the
41:07teeth.
41:12Christiana studies ancient diseases to help with the fight against modern pandemics.
41:19Teeth are a particularly valuable resource for us because they contain both the human genome or the host as well
41:26as the pathogen that was in the person's bloodstream at the time of death.
41:31We take the tooth, we extract DNA into solution.
41:36We then manipulate that DNA physically so that it can be read by our sequencing machines.
41:41The DNA sequencing proves that the Justinianic plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium behind the medieval Black
41:52Death.
41:53Those infected could expect an agonising and often fatal illness.
41:58The plague actually has three different clinical manifestations.
42:01So you've got the bubonic plague, which creates the buboes, it's the infection of the lymphatic system.
42:07This often leads to septiccemic plague, which then just means that you get a high level of bacteria in the
42:13blood.
42:14And that's how we can actually detect it in ancient individuals.
42:17In a very rare number of cases, you also get pneumonic plague, which is when the bacteria gets into your
42:24lungs and is able to multiply.
42:26And then you are able to pass it to another human through aerosol.
42:30So you're coughing out plague bacteria and it's directly infecting the person near you.
42:35If you get that, you have maybe 24, 48 hours to live.
42:38It's incredibly fatal.
42:41While studying skeletons from a remote site in eastern England,
42:46Christiana used the same sequencing technology to make a stunning discovery about how far and fast the plague spread.
42:55There was no indication just from looking at the site from the archaeological perspective that there would be a plague
43:01pandemic coming through there.
43:05It was absolutely a surprise.
43:06We had this huge hit for plague in one of these individuals, a young male.
43:11This was the first genetic evidence that anybody has found of Yersinia pestis or plague coming to England during the
43:18first pandemic or the plague of Justinian around the year 541.
43:22The results of Christiana's work make a big splash.
43:27This place where the plague has now been found, this is the opposite of Constantinople.
43:32It's in the far west. It's in the countryside.
43:35We're talking the boondocks of Anglo-Saxon England, a settlement of 60, 70 people.
43:42And the fact that the plague reached there is a strong indication that it had the ability to spread truly
43:50far and wide.
43:53Based on evidence like Christina's, some experts have called the Justinianic plague the first pandemic.
44:00This really opened up our eyes to the fact that very early on in the pandemic, it spread very far.
44:07In probably the first year of the outbreak, what we see is a very rapid expansion of this pathogen at
44:14that time.
44:17The most common form of transmission is by fleas.
44:22These fleas normally feed on rodents.
44:27But plague-carrying fleas become voraciously hungry and will look elsewhere for food.
44:36The fleas, who normally drink the blood of black rats, get a little desperate and decide that in this condition
44:45they'll try and drink some human blood.
44:47That's when humans get bubonic plague.
44:50Unfortunately for the Romans, black rats are established in every corner of the empire,
44:55aided in large part by the Romans' network of large cities, their system of grain supplies and the constant churn
45:03of people.
45:05This set the stage for the explosive outbreak of the plague of Justinian.
45:13What started this pandemic on its murderous journey?
45:22The Justinianic plague sweeps across Asia, Arabia and Europe, killing between 30 and 50 million people.
45:32New scientific discoveries are now revealing what triggered this deadly pandemic.
45:39Ulf Bündchen is an expert in paleoclimatology at the University of Cambridge.
45:51He collects ancient tree samples from across Europe and uses tree ring analyses to shed light on historic climate events.
46:05Under the microscope Ulf can examine tree rings at a cellular level.
46:09He now believes he's found a significant correlation between ancient climate events and the advent of the first pandemic.
46:19This is a sample from the Italian Alps.
46:25It's from the upper tree line, so at about 2,100 meters of elevation.
46:30And it's a pine sample.
46:32We see a full ring.
46:34This part of the ring, the light one, is produced at the beginning of the growing season.
46:38And then, towards the end of the growing season, late summer, early autumn,
46:43we see here this very clear boundary, early wood, late wood, so complete.
46:49This makes one growing season.
46:52But as Ulf winds through the years of the early 530s, there's a dramatic change.
47:01When he reaches 536, the darker band of late wood is missing.
47:08This would indicate that summer into autumn was extremely cold and the tree was suffering and couldn't produce its normal
47:18late wood.
47:20And then the next year, 537, again a very thin ring, so basically it starts already cold, so the entire
47:29growing season is massively reduced.
47:32And if we follow this cluster, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, such patterns are indicators of growing season temperature depressions.
47:51Ulf believes that the prolonged cold spell that began in 536 was caused by the eruption of at least one
47:58volcano.
47:59The ash cloud from which blocked some of the sun's heat from reaching the earth.
48:08Scientists have yet to identify where the eruption occurred, but the period of cooling was so dramatic, Ulf has dubbed
48:15it the Late Antique Little Ice Age.
48:19And he believes this climate event is connected to the outbreak of plague.
48:29The main host for Yersinia pestis are gerbils.
48:33So, wild living animals.
48:36This is the host that is carrying Yersinia pestis.
48:39And the vector are fleas.
48:43Normally gerbils stay clear of rats and humans.
48:47But the cooler, wetter weather is likely to have driven gerbils out of their burrows and closer to the black
48:54rat and human populations.
49:00As arid conditions return and food for the gerbils dwindles, a gerbil population crash is triggered, forcing the fleas, carrying
49:09Yersinia pestis, to find new hosts.
49:17Those new hosts include humans, and the plague of Justinian wreaks havoc across the ancient world.
49:27One of the really distinguishing features of plague is that it wasn't a one and done.
49:32The plague then managed to establish itself and recur every 10 to 15 years.
49:39This was a disease that sort of haunted these societies in the transition between the later Roman Empire and the
49:46early Middle Ages.
49:50History's first pandemic isn't the end for the Roman Empire.
49:56Constantinople will remain a major power until the 15th century.
50:00But any dreams of resurrecting the glory days of Rome in the West are permanently shattered.
50:07Civilization has taken a backward step that will last for centuries.
50:14Power shifts away from urban centers to the countryside.
50:19The vast majority of long-distance trade networks wither and die.
50:29In Rome itself, once home to a million people, fewer than 30,000 now live amongst the ruins of past
50:38glory.
50:44For Kyle Harper, collaboration between historians, archaeologists and scientists is vital for our understanding of ancient Rome.
50:55I think there's a greater openness, a greater realization that we can work in teams,
51:01that we can understand the human story more richly by trying to partner with people who bring new insights.
51:13That's how progress works is by being willing to take risks when it's bringing together sometimes completely different domains of
51:22knowledge that let us ask questions that we often didn't even know were possible.
51:29And while historians continue to debate what exactly caused the collapse of the world's first superpower,
51:37what's beyond doubt is that science is transforming our understanding of this critical moment in history.
51:45Barbarians, the social dynamics, the fiscal taxation challenges, the dynastic challenges, we still need those human dimensions.
51:54But we can't tell the story without giving the environment its place in the human story.
52:01cause
52:32Ευχαριστώ.
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