- 5 minutes ago
Τα Πιο Παράξενα Αντικείμενα (Strangest Things)
2021 | Επ. 02.09 | HD
Καταχωνιασμένα μέσα σε μουσεία, εργαστήρια και αποθήκες ανά την υφήλιο βρίσκονται τα πιο αξιοσημείωτα και μυστηριώδη αντικείμενα στον κόσμο. Σήμερα, αξιοποιώντας νέες έρευνες και τεχνολογικά μέσα, μπορούμε να τα μελετήσουμε πιο διεξοδικά από ποτέ.
Γιατί κάποιος θέλησε να στολίσει ένα καπέλο με ανθρώπινα δόντια; Μια χρυσή φαρέτρα που βρέθηκε σε μακεδονικό τάφο μπορεί ν' επιβεβαιώσει την ύπαρξη των Αμαζόνων, των μυθικών πολεμιστριών;
2021 | Επ. 02.09 | HD
Καταχωνιασμένα μέσα σε μουσεία, εργαστήρια και αποθήκες ανά την υφήλιο βρίσκονται τα πιο αξιοσημείωτα και μυστηριώδη αντικείμενα στον κόσμο. Σήμερα, αξιοποιώντας νέες έρευνες και τεχνολογικά μέσα, μπορούμε να τα μελετήσουμε πιο διεξοδικά από ποτέ.
Γιατί κάποιος θέλησε να στολίσει ένα καπέλο με ανθρώπινα δόντια; Μια χρυσή φαρέτρα που βρέθηκε σε μακεδονικό τάφο μπορεί ν' επιβεβαιώσει την ύπαρξη των Αμαζόνων, των μυθικών πολεμιστριών;
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:05Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
00:30Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:00Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:01Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:04Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:06Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:11Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:13Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:24Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
01:26στις ανάμενος, τετάριο ζεία,
01:29καθαρίζοντας στις τρεις μορφες.
01:32Στο σκορία φοριασία, δεν είναι?
01:35Ήταν η τροχηγική εξαριασία μέρος,
01:38είναι εξαρμιζόντας την τερία φοριασία...
01:42...ε γνωρίζε.
01:46Στην επακρίνηση είναι μαζί.
01:48Στο σκορία, βγήσα σε αρκετές.
01:51Στο αρχόντα, όπως κάτι πρόβλημος,
01:53από την παιδίκη δεύσκη.
01:55Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
02:26There are no pictures, no written descriptions, nothing that really gives us much context.
02:33Just a couple of cryptic notes written by a collector.
02:37So who does this gruesome hat belong to?
02:41Why is it covered in teeth?
02:43What is it for?
02:48This macabre object was donated to London's coming museum in 1916 by collector Edward Lovett.
02:57Lovett is the chief cashier for a major London bank in the turn of the 19th century.
03:03But that's just his day job.
03:05When Lovett isn't counting checks at the bank, he can be found combing the back alleys and rougher areas of
03:12London seeking out curios that he can purchase from street vendors.
03:17Charms, objects of magical power, anything that is weird or considered to be strange.
03:23Lovett is part of a growing obsession with collecting folklore across Britain.
03:29This is really a response to the acceleration of urbanization.
03:34When you have people that travel around England trying to gather up the stories and artifacts relating to folklore.
03:42All in an attempt to sort of protect these local traditions.
03:48But there is no known folklore in England that describes a hat covered with teeth.
03:54Which leaves a very obvious question.
03:57Why would someone in Victoria and London want to get a bit of material, cover it in teeth and then
04:02wear it on their head?
04:03What possible purpose could this serve?
04:08Luckily, this gruesome hat comes with a clue.
04:11Lovett does leave a cryptic note that says it's believed to have magical properties.
04:17And it's certainly true that throughout history and in various societies, teeth have been worn or used to adorn decorative
04:25objects, clothing and weapons, all with reputed magical powers.
04:31In former times, for example, in Germany, people would wear a stack teeth as a pendant as a sign of,
04:39you know, good hunting luck.
04:41Wolf teeth are used for thousands of years as a charm or as something that brings you luck or respect.
04:51This fits in with another object in Lovett's collection.
04:55One that might connect to more English magic.
04:59A small silk bag containing what is believed to be the tooth of a dog.
05:04There was a tradition of using animal teeth to try and cure toothache.
05:08And the idea was that as you wore that tooth, then the pain or whatever was causing the problem in
05:12your tooth will be sucked out and absorbed by the animal tooth.
05:16The problem is, these aren't animal teeth.
05:20They're human.
05:24But it turns out that in 19th century London, wearing human teeth is surprisingly in vogue, thanks to the Queen
05:32herself.
05:34The death of Prince Albert in 1861 prompts Victoria to enter a period of extended mourning.
05:42And this practice is soon imitated by other members of Victorian society, women in particular, who will wear black for
05:50up to two years after the death of a loved one.
05:52And they'll often adorn themselves with mementos of that loved one, including hair and sometimes teeth.
06:02But if this is a memento for a mourning widow or widower, there's a bit of a problem.
06:09Enlarging the hat reveals tooth fragments, which combined could make at least 60 different teeth.
06:16There's just a lot of teeth. How many dead relatives did this poor person have?
06:20So, maybe not a charm or memento, but Lovett does leave another clue.
06:26Which is a note indicating that this hat was bought from another London professional in 1855 and his profession was
06:38a dentist.
06:45Dentistry really takes off in Europe after Columbus discovers the Americas.
06:49After Europeans arrive in the Americas, they quite quickly realise that the Caribbean is well suited to sugar cane.
06:56And so they start to introduce big plantations from as early as the middle of the 1500s, which produce sugar
07:05cane and eventually refined sugar for export to Europe.
07:08By the 17th and 18th centuries, this sugar stuff is just getting more and more widespread.
07:13People are getting more and more tooth decay. And actually, it's a pretty serious cause of health problems.
07:19The rot sets in across Britain and no one is prepared.
07:22People did not know until the 18th century what really made teeth decay.
07:29The idea was that there's a tiny worm that lives inside of your teeth and produces the holes that many
07:34people know.
07:37And in a time before antibiotics, blood poisoning from tooth decay is a killer.
07:42Actually, it was the fifth or sixth leading cause of death in London during that period of time.
07:48And if the infection didn't kill you, the pain from the ache itself might do that.
07:54In 1862, there's a report of a man in Sussex who, after suffering for five months of pain from a
08:04rotting tooth, committed suicide because the pain was just so unbearable.
08:09All this decay and despair leaves a gaping cavity in the market for dentists.
08:15An assortment of different people came forward, from barber surgeons to street tooth pullers to blacksmiths.
08:21And what blacksmiths might have lacked in knowledge of dental anatomy and maybe subtlety of practice,
08:26they made up for with the ability to manufacture tools.
08:31Each one is more like a torture device than a dental tool.
08:38But tooth pullers are supposed to pull teeth, not wear them.
08:42So what is this hat about?
08:45There's a painting by a 17th century Dutch artist that shows a tooth puller.
08:50And if you look closely, you can see that he's wearing something rather strange.
08:55It's a necklace made of human teeth.
09:00So it's not unknown for tooth pullers to wear teeth.
09:03The question is why?
09:10This strange hat comes from an age when anyone with a tool and a strong arm can practice medicine.
09:17Back in the day when barbers were also doubling as surgeons, they used to be bloodletting.
09:22That red streak down the pole represents the blood on the bandages as they remove the blood from a patient.
09:27In the days predating that pole, they used to use literal blood to advertise their service.
09:32Just leave a bowl of blood on the street outside their shop.
09:35Traveling tooth pullers go to even greater extremes.
09:38It became kind of a theatrical event to draw the attention of as many people as possible.
09:44There could be juggling, there could be storytelling, there could be music, and of course there was tooth pulling.
09:51And if the tooth puller seemed to be good at what he was doing and was yanking out those teeth
09:54without causing too much pain,
09:56maybe they'd put themselves forward to have their teeth pulled.
09:59Some tooth pullers were known to wear necklaces of the teeth they had pulled.
10:03The more teeth they wore, the more skillful it made them look.
10:07The most famous of the tooth pullers at the end of the 19th and nearly 20th century was Edgar Randolph
10:15Parker, otherwise known as Painless Parker.
10:17And he joins a circus where he will offer his services as a kind of sideshow amidst the other entertainments,
10:26you know, such as clowns, elephants, the tent of mysteries.
10:30He carried around a bucket of hundreds of teeth that he'd yanked out and also reportedly wore a necklace of
10:38357 teeth that he claimed to have pulled in a single day.
10:47So this hat of teeth could be an advert for a tooth puller's prowess.
10:52There's just one problem with this explanation.
10:56When we look closer at the teeth on this hat, we see something that's rather wrong or rather not as
11:06wrong as it should be.
11:07Because a lot of these teeth show no sign of decay whatsoever. They're absolutely pristine.
11:13If this hat was an advert for tooth pulling prowess, why are most of them so healthy?
11:22It's fair to say that tooth pullers weren't always 100% honest.
11:27The tooth pullers occupied this strange space between really vital medical service.
11:32And yet they also had their share of scams going along with that.
11:37Sometimes they'd have accomplices in the crowd who'd volunteered to have their teeth pulled.
11:40And when they yanked out the tooth, it wouldn't actually be one of the accomplices' teeth, but a hidden tooth
11:45that they'd got stuffed in their mouth exactly for that occasion.
11:48This 17th century Dutch painting suggests these kinds of dentistry scams are well known.
11:54It's in a style that was very popular at the time. A style showing deception actively happening.
12:00Because you look around the tooth puller, there are accomplices, there's someone planted in the crowd.
12:05And then there's this poor person who's being taken in by the scam.
12:08And so as the viewer of the painting, we're sort of in on the joke.
12:14Tooth puller deception could explain the apparently healthy teeth on this weird hat.
12:19These tooth pullers that sometimes, let's say, exaggerate the medical diagnosis and remove teeth that were perfectly healthy just to
12:26get a bit of cash.
12:29But there is an even more grisly possibility.
12:33Because a healthy set of teeth isn't all that hard to come by in 19th century England.
12:38Thanks, in part, to one of the most famous battles in history.
12:45Waterloo teeth comes from the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, which had an immense number of casualties.
12:53And what you had was people roaming the battleground, pulling the teeth out of corpses.
13:00Thousands of teeth were collected this way, and they were sold to the manufacturers of dentures.
13:10In the 19th century, the trade in real teeth becomes so lucrative that people aren't just raiding battlefields.
13:19They're turning up graves.
13:22A more extreme form of tooth collection came by the resurrectionists, which is a polite term for grave robbers.
13:30The origin of the resurrectionists really comes from the demand of medical schools for fresh cadavers that can be used
13:38to train students in anatomy.
13:40And the resurrectionists figured, well, it's not like they're going to need to examine the teeth.
13:45So why not make a little extra money on the side?
13:49But if any of these teeth do come from the battlegrounds of Waterloo or the spoils of grave robbing, they
13:55don't come cheap.
13:56Given the highly competitive market for them in London at the time, this could have been quite an expensive hat
14:01to put together.
14:03Which might explain something odd you can only see in close-up.
14:08Some of these teeth are actually sliced in half to make it look like there's more of them.
14:14But by 1855, when this strange hat is sold off, the tooth pulling business is on the way out.
14:20The first dental colleges were being founded in the US and the UK, and this was the beginning of a
14:26regulated profession of dentistry.
14:29The days of the traveling tooth puller are over, and one street dentist appears to, quite literally, hang up his
14:37hat.
14:39But what about Edward Lovett's first note that claimed this hat has magical properties?
14:45If you go back to 2013, when this hat was being stored in the Cumming Museum, there was a huge
14:50fire.
14:51And that fire destroyed a load of extremely valuable, very old artifacts.
14:56Incredibly, the tatty velvet hat, covered in 87 teeth, survives unscathed.
15:03So, maybe not magic, but certainly a little charmed.
15:15At the University of Akron in Ohio is a harmless-looking box.
15:20It's covered in lights, switches, and dials.
15:24It looks like a prop from a 1960s science fiction movie, but it's not.
15:29This seemingly innocuous piece of equipment was actually created for one of the most infamous experiments in the 20th century.
15:38Now, using the latest technology, we can examine it in unprecedented detail.
15:45This is the Milgram shock box.
15:49On its control face is printed shock generator type ZLB.
15:54Because that is exactly what it is designed to do.
15:59This box was part of an experiment where one person was told to electrocute another person, literally until they died.
16:09And hundreds of people did deliver that final lethal shock.
16:15But what is the test's real purpose?
16:18Who is behind it?
16:19And how is an experiment this dangerous ever allowed?
16:26In 1961, an unusual ad appears in a Connecticut newspaper.
16:31These advertisements were looking for participants to take part in a study that looked really inoffensive at Yale University.
16:38Participants would get $4 for their time, which is about $40 today.
16:44Initially, the experiment seems straightforward.
16:47Two people enter the experiment who've never met each other before.
16:50One of them is chosen, randomly, to be the learner, and one of them to be the teacher.
16:55The teacher sees the learner strapped into a chair.
16:59The learner is strapped down by their wrists.
17:02So they can't get out of this chair, and they're hooked up to something.
17:07Electrodes and wires are attached to the learner's wrists.
17:11The teacher then leaves the learner and is led into an adjoining room.
17:15They sit down at the controls of the device they will be operating.
17:19The shock generator, type ZLB.
17:22The machine at the heart of this experiment.
17:25There's a lot of different switches running along the bottom, from 15 volts all the way up to 450 volts.
17:31It allows you to shock someone, to give them shocks of increasing magnitude and severity.
17:37As you flip each switch, from slight shock, to moderate shock, to higher levels of shock, to even a danger
17:44XXX.
17:46The machine is connected to the learner.
17:49But the teacher is told that, despite the alarming warnings, the machine poses no threat to the learner's health.
17:55But that's hard to believe.
17:57The teachers were given a small shock, just a taste of what they would be administering.
18:03So they were given a 45-volt shock.
18:06That's not going to kill you.
18:07It's enough to give them a sense of, you know, what was going to happen when they pressed these levers
18:13and switches.
18:15The experiment begins.
18:17The learner is given a series of memory tests.
18:21The teacher is instructed to give a shock to the learner whenever they give an incorrect answer.
18:30And then, subsequently, to raise the voltage one notch.
18:35As the voltage went higher, the teacher would begin to hear the learner react through the dividing wall.
18:43The learner becomes increasingly agitated, pleading that the experiment stop.
18:49The learners would scream and shout.
18:51Sometimes they would bang on the wall.
18:53On occasion, they would go completely silent and refuse to answer the questions.
18:56The teacher was instructed that any refusal to answer counts as an incorrect response, and therefore they should administer a
19:05further shock.
19:08If the learner keeps getting it wrong, the teacher will eventually reach the maximum lethal switch, 450 volts.
19:17What's going on?
19:19Will this machine really deliver a fatal shock to a learner who just can't get it right?
19:27Using state-of-the-art graphics, we can get under the skin of the remarkable shock generator type ZLB.
19:35You open up the box and it does look a bit fishy.
19:39The whole thing is held together by ordinary shelving brackets.
19:44And the chaotic interior seems totally at odds with its professional exterior.
19:49It's just a rat's nest.
19:52It's a mess of wires. It's not really clear what's connected to anything.
19:57The switches and lights are wired to come on together, and there are buzzers that activate with each switch press.
20:03But something vital is absent.
20:05What is missing from it is the crucial element.
20:08A high voltage transformer that will create the kind of voltages that allegedly it's producing.
20:15That means the shock generator type ZLB is technically incapable of generating a lethal shock.
20:23And that's the funny thing about the box. The learner is never actually being shocked. The box is a fake.
20:29Is the whole experiment some gruesome practical joke?
20:37This experiment was conducted by the eminent Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.
20:42But the secret is that it was all smoke and mirrors.
20:46Everything about Milgram's experiment is rigged from the start.
20:51The learners are never the subject of this experiment.
20:55The so-called learners are all in on it.
20:59The only real volunteers and the true subjects of the experiment are the teachers.
21:05The screams and the cries were actually a recording.
21:08And they were a key part of what was being tested.
21:11Would the teachers continue to raise the voltage if they were told to do so by someone in authority?
21:21The whole thing was designed to get the participants, the teachers, into a situation where they believe that they are
21:27going to shock the person to death if they comply and flip all of those little switches.
21:33And if the teacher refuses to initiate a shock to the learner, the scientist monitoring the experiment responds in one
21:40of four ways.
21:41The first response was, please continue.
21:44The second response was, the experiment requires you to continue.
21:49If they still refuse, the response is, it is absolutely essential that you continue.
21:55And the final response was, you have no other choice. You must go on.
22:01Will the teachers ultimately do what they're told, even though the markings on the box clearly suggest it could be
22:08lethal?
22:09Milgram designed this experiment to test the limits of human morality and human response to authority.
22:17Essentially, it was to answer the question, what does it take to get an ordinary person to shock a stranger
22:23to death?
22:23And the answer apparently was, not very much.
22:29People were horrified.
22:31The teachers are ordinary people.
22:34Without any threat to themselves, the majority sacrifice their moral compass for four dollars.
22:41What motivates Stanley Milgram to construct such a dark experiment?
22:49Milgram is born in New York City in 1933, and he's the son of Jewish immigrant parents.
22:56And for quite obvious reasons, the whole family is deeply affected by the Holocaust.
23:01Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies systematically murder over six million Jews.
23:18The burning question in Milgram's mind is, why would ordinary Germans, people who had never killed anyone or tortured anyone
23:28their whole lives, why would they carry out these horrendous acts?
23:32This shock box is the result of Milgram following through on that question.
23:40Milgram's study was a study of obedience.
23:42And what Milgram wanted to know is, can you get good people to do really bad things if you ask
23:49them to obey someone in authority?
23:51That was the central question.
23:56Milgram suspects the answer lies in something more universal than extremist Nazi ideology.
24:04Milgram is convinced that the uniform conveys a very powerful element of authority.
24:11So he makes sure that the people who are instructing his teachers are dressed in lab coats and identify themselves
24:18as Yale psychologists.
24:21To Milgram, this proves beyond doubt that it is the uniform that makes people obey.
24:27So what made the shock box so essential to the success of the experiment?
24:33Although this box is actually completely harmless, what was crucial to the experiment is that it looked like it wasn't.
24:42And in order to really persuade people of that, it seemed to be crucial to get it to look like
24:48a proper designed commercial instrument.
24:52Milgram's box taps into the visual grammar of groundbreaking new ideas surrounding product design and ergonomics.
25:00There was a new way of thinking about the design of machines called human systems engineering.
25:06This brought psychology and engineering together to think about the way that machines should be visually organized.
25:14Designers of everything from telephones to spaceships were evolving controls to make them as intuitive as possible.
25:21And Milgram takes the same approach.
25:24Milgram tried different versions.
25:26He tried button versions instead of switch versions, for example.
25:29And he found that people understood the switches.
25:32But there is more to Milgram's final shock box, the ZLB, than just its functional appearance.
25:39It's also designed to leave no room for confusion about the consequences of the teachers' actions.
25:44The little line underneath that said slight shock or XXX extreme shock, that helped people figure out what they were
25:51doing.
25:52They knew that over here is a slight shock and over there is death.
25:55They had to know what the consequences of the flips were.
25:59But is Milgram right?
26:01Does all this carefully staged psychological theater really prove that humans can be manipulated to follow almost any order?
26:12As a psychologist, looking at just the first experiment, I would say you have no idea why they shocked that
26:17person.
26:18It's really difficult to tell. Too much is going on.
26:21Milgram is aware of this and carries out follow-up experiments.
26:24In order to test his theory, Milgram will sometimes replace the instructor in a lab coat with an instructor in
26:32plain clothes.
26:33And the results are dramatic.
26:37The number of teachers willing to administer a lethal shock drops from 65% to 20%.
26:45So it's exactly the kind of thing, switching it out from a lab coat to plain clothes and then watching
26:51the compliance drops.
26:52That tells us it's the lab coat.
26:55Changing the institution that Milgram is supposed to be attached to from Yale to somewhere a lot less fancy and
27:00seeing if the compliance goes down.
27:01That's how you tell what's driving the behaviors.
27:04The more symbols of authority Milgram eliminates, from the white coat to the prestigious institution, the less teachers comply.
27:12The original experiment is just the start. It's the eye-catching headline.
27:17But it's the later experiments that tell you why it worked. That's the important part.
27:2260 years on, some dispute Milgram's results.
27:26And it's a dispute that's unlikely to be resolved, because his groundbreaking study would not be allowed today.
27:32In the old days, psychologists didn't really have standards for how to treat people or how not to hurt them.
27:39And, unfortunately, that meant quite a lot of people got hurt, which is why we have those standards today.
27:45This lack of ethical standards could have potentially fatal consequences.
27:50Harvard psychologist Henry Murray decides to study the effects of psychological attacks on people's core beliefs.
27:59And he subjects volunteers to weekly sessions of vicious verbal abuse.
28:06In 1959, a 17-year-old math prodigy joins the study.
28:11And over the course of the next few years, he's subjected to some 200 hours of verbal abuse.
28:19Nearly 20 years later, that math prodigy begins a 17-year bombing campaign in the US.
28:25He kills three people and injures 23.
28:29His name is Theodore Kaczynski.
28:32The press call him the Unabomber.
28:35It's been suggested that the psychological damage inflicted by the experiments helped send him off the rails.
28:44I do think it is our responsibility if we're conducting experiments on human beings to treat these human beings well.
28:50To think about not only what can we learn from the experiment, but also what are we doing to the
28:55people who take part?
28:56To respect them as much as we'd like to be respected.
28:59Milgram was aware his shock box apparently killing someone might have been traumatic for the teachers.
29:06To look after them, he debriefed some participants before they returned to their normal lives.
29:12There's no evidence that any of the teachers suffered long-term issues from their experience.
29:18Milgram's shock box study remains one of the most significant experiments ever conducted in psychology.
29:26The implications of this are that what happened under Nazism could happen to any of us, anywhere, at any time.
29:34Milgram's shock box changed our understanding of who we are.
29:44In the Archaeological Museum at Vergina in Greece is a mysterious 2300-year-old relic.
29:52This strange thing holds a remarkable secret about an ancient myth.
29:57It might allow us to connect a real-life individual with the mythic legends of the past.
30:06Now, using the latest technology, we're bringing this incredible object into the light.
30:13This is the golden quiver.
30:17About the size of a briefcase, it is an exceptional piece of ancient craftsmanship.
30:23The golden surface skillfully embossed with finely wrought details of lifelike scenes.
30:30But this isn't an ornament. It's a weapon.
30:33A quiver is a container that an archer uses to hold their arrows.
30:37And where it is found is startling.
30:41The quiver was found in the tomb of a Macedonian king.
30:45But this style of quiver isn't Macedonian.
30:48It comes from hundreds of miles to the north in Scythia, home to a mythical warrior race.
30:54The deadly warrior Scythian women were said to be legends that descended from the Amazons.
31:02And that's why the quiver matters.
31:05Because the king isn't the only body in the tomb.
31:08There are also the remains of a woman.
31:11The question is, does she have anything to do with the quiver?
31:15What is the Scythian quiver doing in a Macedonian tomb?
31:19Does it belong to the woman?
31:22Could she be a real-life descendant of the legendary Amazon?
31:28The quiver is part of a spectacular find made in 1977 by archaeologist Manolis Andronicus.
31:35The excavations occurred in the Macedonian city of Aegea, which was an important city really in the Macedonian kingdom.
31:42Andronicus uncovers a complete and untouched Macedonian tomb.
31:47Nothing like it has ever been found before.
31:50They uncovered this incredible building with the vaulted room and two chambers.
31:55And within them, they actually found a cache of really incredible objects.
32:02And they also discover the man the tomb is built for.
32:05They find a sarcophagus with a gold ossuary inside it and the remains of a cremated man and evidence that
32:16he'd been wrapped in a purple textile.
32:19This color is a vital clue.
32:21Purple would have been a very significant color as the resources needed to create that hue and textiles would have
32:29been very expensive.
32:30Which means that this would have been a very important individual.
32:34The tomb's dating spans the reigns of Macedonia's two most famous and ambitious kings.
32:41Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great.
32:47These men transform the ancient world.
32:51Philip II expands Macedonia into a Mediterranean powerhouse.
32:56Alexander turbocharges this, creating a vast empire that stretches nearly 5,000 kilometers.
33:06But there are the remains of a second body in the tomb.
33:09The partially cremated bones of a woman.
33:13Beside her lie the tools of a warrior, spearheads, shin guards and the golden quiver.
33:20What is it doing there? Where does it come from?
33:28This design of quiver is known as a goritos. An arrow case worn on the archer's hip.
33:35The whole point is to enable rapid fire so you can quickly get your arrows, shoot at your enemies as
33:42fast as you can.
33:43Often speed was the decisive factor in who was going to win the combat.
33:47The goritos is unique to an ancient warrior race that flourishes between 900 and 200 BCE.
33:55The Scythians.
33:57The Scythians are a group of nomadic people who lived on the steppe and traveled across broad areas from modern
34:07China and Russia all the way over to the Black Sea.
34:11And they're known as a warrior people.
34:15And this quiver does depict a bloody battle scene.
34:20Finding a Scythian quiver buried with a woman could be momentous.
34:24Because according to legend, the most deadly Scythians were mounted female archers, said to be descendants of the greatest mythical
34:32female warriors of all.
34:34The Amazons.
34:36The Amazons derived from Greek legend.
34:38They were female warriors who would only selectively mate just to produce more warriors, would get rid of the males
34:43usually and just only keep the women and raise the women as effectively warriors.
34:48One of the most famous ones is Penthesilea and she's on a vase at the British Museum.
34:54She was a warrior queen who Achilles fell in love with.
34:59So you get this incredibly poignant scene where their eyes are kind of connected with each other.
35:05Just as Achilles is falling in love with her, he's also killing her.
35:10A wondrous tragic scene that is in itself epic in its legend.
35:18And that's the problem with ancient Greece.
35:20It's packed with mythical stories.
35:22And a lot of them are clearly works of fiction.
35:25Like Pegasus, the flying horse.
35:28Or Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair.
35:31Some of these are utterly fantastical as opposed to actual things.
35:36That doesn't necessarily mean that all of them are.
35:38But we want to tread carefully.
35:42Perhaps the stories of women warriors are just that.
35:46Maybe the quiver simply belongs to the man buried in the tomb.
35:53So who exactly is buried here?
35:56The tomb is dated between 350 and 325 BCE.
36:02A time that spans the reigns of Philip II, Alexander the Great, and Alexander's half-brother, Philip III.
36:10We know that Alexander the Great was buried in Egypt, in Alexandria, the city that bears its name.
36:17So it's not Alexander.
36:19Could it be his father or his half-brother buried with their wives?
36:23So both Philip II and Philip III fit the profile of the bones that were found within the tomb.
36:29So each of them could have been contenders for the identity of the bones.
36:32For 30 years, arguments rage over whether the bodies could belong to Philip II and his seventh wife, Cleopatra Eurydice.
36:41Or Philip III and his teen bride, Adia.
36:47Then, in 2013, osteoarchaeologists make a detailed study of the remains of the woman's pelvis.
36:54The pelvis is actually a really useful part to allow you to work out how old the skeleton's owner was
36:59when they died.
37:00That's because of a part where the pelvis meets the lower part of the spine, and its texture changes quite
37:05significantly during life.
37:07By the early 30s, the surface becomes rougher.
37:10The analysis of the bones' texture suggests that the woman was between 30 and 34 years old when she died.
37:17It changes everything.
37:19This rules out Adia, Philip III's wife, because she would have been much too young.
37:25Historical texts reveal that Philip III was buried with Adia.
37:29So if the body isn't Adia, then the man isn't Philip III.
37:34It has to be his father, Philip II.
37:37He is a legendary warrior.
37:40So does the quiver belong to him, as many scholars believe, rather than the woman buried with him?
37:49We have these sort of associations of weaponry that are often more linked with male warriors or kings even.
37:57That certainly fits with the battle scene on the quiver, depicting an attack on a city.
38:02All the warriors appear to be men.
38:04There are women shown, but they seem to be running for their lives.
38:09For so long, people have thought this couldn't even belong to a woman.
38:14So much so that in the museum there was a plaque included that said,
38:18jewelry is for women, weaponry is for men.
38:21But in 2013, the legs are quite literally kicked out from under that idea by analysis of the woman's bones.
38:29They discovered that there was a very severe fracture to her left tibia, her shin bone.
38:36This could well be the kind of traumatic injury that you find in the skeleton of a warrior.
38:41The injury has left the woman with one leg almost an inch and a half shorter than the other.
38:47And when the team measure the shin guards from the tomb, the left one is shorter than the right.
38:53It's an exact match for the woman's injuries.
38:57The conclusion from this is that the quiver and the associated armor and weaponry belong to the woman and not
39:05the man.
39:05So who is this mysterious warrior woman with the Scythian quiver?
39:12Is she connected to the legendary Amazons?
39:17The obvious choice for the quiver's owner is Philip II's seventh and last wife, Cleopatra Eurydice.
39:24We know they died at around the same time.
39:27But the dating of the pelvis is a problem.
39:29It rules out Cleopatra Eurydice, Philip II's wife, because she was also much too young.
39:35Does that mean the woman is Scythian?
39:39There is one other Macedonian candidate, Alexander the Great's half-sister, Canane.
39:46Her mother is Illyrian, a society where women fight in battle.
39:51And Canane is raised as a warrior princess.
39:54She was famed for being trained in the arts of war.
39:57She's even famed to have killed the queen in battle.
40:00So it does potentially suggest that she is a likely or potential individual who is buried in this grave.
40:07Canane is killed at 34.
40:10It fits the age of the pelvis.
40:12So is it Canane laid to rest next to her father?
40:19One intriguing bit of evidence supports this possibility.
40:22When they excavate the tombs, they realize actually the chambers that were found were not exactly the same level.
40:29There seems to be an elapsed period of time between the main chamber and the other chamber that was found.
40:33So it indicates that the individual buried did not die at the same time.
40:39This fits with Canane, because she dies 13 years after her father, Philip II.
40:45Kinane is a good match for the quiver's owner.
40:48It can't belong to one of the legendary Scythian woman warriors because they are just myths.
40:55Or are they?
40:59Throughout the 20th century, archaeologists investigate ancient Scythian burial mounds known as kurgans.
41:06They found many bodies in addition to the skeletons.
41:11A number of weapons were found, bows, knives, swords, shields.
41:16So these clearly are warrior burials.
41:19They also find four goritos with the bodies.
41:23For over a century, these battle-scarred skeletons are believed to be male, until recent DNA analysis.
41:31About a third of the skeletons appear to be female.
41:35This actually corroborates Herodotus and the other Greek writers who talked about the Scythian female warriors.
41:41This race of Amazons is not entirely mythical, that there was probably a class of female warriors.
41:47The warrior women of Scythia are no myth.
41:50They are real battle-hardened fighters.
41:54So does the quiver belong to Alexander the Great's half-sister, Kinane?
41:58Or to a Scythian warrior?
42:02According to ancient texts, Philip II's son Alexander actually encounters these warrior women.
42:09There was apparently a famous Amazon queen who approached Alexander and apparently spent 13 nights with him.
42:18So it's possible these warrior women are also known to his father, Philip II.
42:24And if the woman in the tomb is Scythian, it explains the presence of a Scythian quiver.
42:31But there is another possibility.
42:33The quiver could be an artful copy of the Scythian style.
42:38Macedonians would have understood how to make intricate, elaborate metal work.
42:42They certainly had the skills to make very beautiful objects.
42:44Making something like the Gurtos that was found in the Macedonian tomb would not have been above their skill set.
42:51Which would explain how Kinane might have got her hands on one.
42:55Perhaps the quiver was a way for Kinane to connect herself to the myth of Amazonian warriors.
43:01It would certainly explain the graphic depictions of battle on the quiver.
43:05If it is Kinane who is buried inside the tomb, what we would have is a female figure who isn't
43:13a mythic, legendary creature like an Amazon, but a real woman, a real empowered warrior figure.
43:21Scythian or Macedonian, this quiver was the weapon of a powerful female warrior.
43:27One who could trace her story back to the most feared and powerful women in all of mythology.
43:33The legendary Amazons.
44:02The legendary Amazons.
44:06Two months ahead of 39 years ago,
44:16the professional mouse dropped by white man behind the cały
Comments