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00:00I don't know.
00:33These programmes almost always begin with a blank page, and in my case a blank mind, trying to find some
00:40kind of single trigger that will kick off the show, an idea, and then suddenly whatever it is springs to
00:54mind and away you go.
01:01Sometimes, as in the case of this programme, all it takes to change everything is this.
01:09One word.
01:16History was changed by one word.
01:18The word meant and the Son, as in the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and the Son together.
01:25The word was filioque, and the whole of Catholic theology rested on it.
01:30So when the Greeks dropped the word, the Pope hit the roof.
01:49The papal fuss went on for 400 years, with Rome threatening to chuck the Greeks out if they didn't put
01:55filioque back, and them saying,
01:57Oh, yeah, and finally, in 1053, they got the boot, about which they could have cared less, living as they
02:06did in imperial Constantinople.
02:20No, there's nothing wrong with the music.
02:22It's just that the great Greek city on the Bosphorus, called Constantinople, is today the great Turkish city on the
02:30Bosphorus, called Istanbul.
02:33Today, Turkish Islamic, back then, still Greek Christian.
02:37So, you know what problem I'm about to mention.
02:42The fact that the Greeks here had no idea what was about to hit them.
02:46Well, in their position, nor would you have.
02:47I mean, we're talking about a superpower here.
02:50This place was a crossroads of the world.
02:52So being threatened by some tinpot Roman Pope was a little bit like Luxembourg versus America.
02:58So who needed a bunch of illiterate louts over in Europe anyway?
03:02Well, by mid-15th century, with the Turkish artillery outside the walls, they did.
03:08So in very short order, there was an obsequious diplomatic mission over in Italy, asking the Pope for help.
03:14All right to the Pope, but ad filioque to your services.
03:18What a memory.
03:19All right, the Greeks said, we will.
03:22Too late, as you can see.
03:34In 1453, the Turkish army took Constantinople, changed the name to Istanbul, and everything went instantly Islamic.
03:43And all of a sudden, those Greek diplomats off in Italy, haggling with the Pope about a rescue mission, and
03:49filioque, and other matters now kind of irrelevant, had two problems.
03:56Nowhere to come home to, and no job.
03:59Fortunately, however, they could do one thing their Italian hosts couldn't.
04:08Speak Greek.
04:09So they gave the Europeans language lessons, and kicked off what we call the Renaissance, because when the Italians got
04:15a sight of the books these guys had brought along with them, they went nuts.
04:20All the ancient Greek philosophers, the scientists, the technology, the literature, which the Greek exiles now obligingly translated.
04:30And one particular Italian obligingly passed around in editions of 1,000 at a time, because he'd invented a way
04:37to print scribble.
04:44The printer in question was called Aldo, and he lived in Venice, which, as you were no doubt expecting, takes
04:53us to sunny Italy.
05:12Now, Aldo invented a way to print scribble because of the funny way change always happens.
05:19The first version of a new invention looks like the old thing it replaces.
05:24The first car looked like a carriage.
05:27The first movie looked like a play.
05:29So Aldo had to print stuff that didn't look like printing, but manuscript.
05:37When life was all parchment and scribble, people abbreviated a bit like this.
05:48They would have thought the way we write words out in full like that was pretty dumb.
05:55So the first printers had to make their printing look like handwriting, like this.
06:03At the time, full joined-up writing was, as you can see, a pretty laborious business if you wrote it
06:10out in full.
06:11No good to a hot-shot businessman who was going to lose his shirt if the contract wasn't ready in
06:16triplicate in the next ten minutes.
06:18So they scribbled, anything to save a bit of time and close the deal, which is what makes manuscript reading
06:28today such a pain.
06:33So that printer, I said, printed scribble, did that because in 1501, in Venice, he came up with a print
06:41equivalent of scribble.
06:42We call it italic.
06:44Look how small it is.
06:46And that's a good thing for another reason, because the most expensive thing in the whole of printing, typeface, leather
06:52binding, printing press, wages, is paper, which italic saved by being small.
07:05But the real reason Aldo made a million was because everybody travelled on horseback and little books fit in your
07:12saddlebag.
07:13Italic was so successful, everybody wanted it.
07:16So in no time at all, there was a new problem.
07:19Book overload.
07:26The book overload problem was solved by an Elizabethan spy-turned-librarian called Bodley, with this radical new idea.
07:35A catalogue.
07:36And if you take a quick squint at it, you'll see why so many people feel uncomfortable in libraries.
07:42I mean, look at how easy to get out this stuff is.
07:49I don't think.
07:52Especially if you happen to be certain 17th century Massachusetts natives who were looking for an education.
07:59Which they were.
08:02Well, a couple of them were.
08:04Once the university at Harvard had started, not long after Bodley, with a degree programme that included Native Americans.
08:17Things might have gone bad between them and the colonists later on, but at the beginning the relationship was peaceful.
08:24And the Puritans were keen to educate them and, of course, convert them to Christianity.
08:28So they built a special annex to the new college at Harvard, and two Native Americans got BAs.
08:36And then, in 1671, the son of the colony's governor was over in England looking for somebody to run Harvard
08:42College.
08:43And who should he meet but the 17th century's top educator and offered him the job.
08:49The guy was a Czech called Komensky, who was all exercised by the way technical knowledge was extremely difficult to
08:56get at.
08:57So he'd come up with an amazing new kind of book called The Visible World in Pictures.
09:03The words describing animals and plants and machines right next to drawings of the things themselves.
09:11Ho-hum to you.
09:12But back then, a revolutionary, industrial approach to knowledge that got him the Harvard offer, which he turned down,
09:20and that might have been the end of training for industry.
09:23But for the Cavaliers versus Roundheads business.
09:31The English Civil War was brief, so I'll be.
09:34Free Church Puritans behead King, go Republican, make life hell for Church of England Royalists.
09:39Then they win, and the Free Church Puritans get their comeuppance.
09:44Banned from public office and universities, most of them then find it difficult to get any kind of job.
09:54Well, there were only two places for them to go.
09:57Trade and industry.
09:59And fortunately for us, that's where most of them went.
10:02All the great scientists and technologists and innovators and financiers of the time,
10:07people like James Watt, for instance,
10:11were all Church of England rejects.
10:13Which is why religious intolerance kicked off the Industrial Revolution,
10:17and brought the chemistry it needed, and the gobbledygook that generated.
10:23Thanks to an overweight Swede called Basilius.
10:34Basilius spent most of his life in health spas,
10:37taking care of his hypochondria and blowing his blowpipe,
10:42which he took everywhere with him.
10:45See, back then, people used to keep rock collections.
10:50Stones, I mean.
10:51And Big B would heat them up with his blowpipe and analyse them.
11:01This trick went over very big at parties,
11:04and Basilius loved parties.
11:08And then, in 1812, he ruined my life.
11:12Because it's Basilius you have to thank for all that stuff we used to hate in chemistry class.
11:16Basilius. Remember the poem?
11:18Here is the grave of Woody Smith.
11:19Alas, he is no more.
11:21For what he thought was H2O,
11:25was H2SO4.
11:26Ho, ho.
11:29This is all, Basilius.
11:31The letters are for the Latin names of the stuff,
11:34and the little numbers are for the proportions it's in.
11:40Basilius did one other thing to make his mark on history.
11:43Earlier in his life, he'd blowpiped a strange rock found in a Swedish iron mine.
11:49It turned out to be a new element.
11:51And funnily enough, he didn't name it Brasilium or Swedonium, as you'd expect.
11:57He called it Cerium.
12:00After the newly found asteroid Ceres.
12:03Well, found and then lost.
12:06The strange thing is,
12:08the astronomer who'd found Ceres knew where to look.
12:11Until he lost it.
12:12Because back in 1772,
12:15somebody had discovered how numbers were involved in planetary distances.
12:20If, say, the sun to Mercury was one unit,
12:23the sun to Venus would be two,
12:25to Earth, four,
12:26sun to Mars, eight,
12:28sun to something, 16,
12:30and sun to Jupiter, 32.
12:32I said something, here, because they hadn't discovered the asteroids.
12:38Until, in 1801, an Italian called Piazzi finds the first one.
12:43Calls it Ceres, tracks it for about three degrees across the sky.
12:48Gets thick.
12:50When he's better, it's too cloudy.
12:53Next time he's able to look,
12:55Ceres is gone!
12:56Panic!
12:57So a German math genius called Gauss works out a way to calculate orbits from very little data,
13:04which is what Piazzi has, to put it mildly, like three sightings,
13:07and tells them where to look.
13:10One year later, to the day,
13:13there's Ceres exactly where Gauss said it would be.
13:16Right in the middle of what we call the asteroid belt.
13:24This amazing discovery made his name.
13:27Gauss, I mean.
13:29Got him the astronomer's job at the University of Göttingen,
13:32where they thought so highly of him,
13:34they preserved his brain.
13:38Still there.
13:40Mind you, Gauss is a very clever fellow.
13:42He helps to invent the telegraph before Sam Morse does,
13:45and he gets all worked up about a strange, ancient language
13:51called Sanskrit.
14:15The first the West gets to hear about Sanskrit
14:18is when a Welshman called Jones is made a judge in Calcutta.
14:22Now, he's interested in Sanskrit because Indian law is written in it,
14:25and he is, after all, travelling around dispensing Indian justice.
14:29So, the first kind of Sanskrit he sees is this stuff.
14:34Sanskrit legalese.
14:35Doesn't take him long to recognise that this is much older than Latin or Greek.
14:41So, he writes a grammar.
14:44Totally turns on the guy who got Gauss into Sanskrit, remember?
14:47A fellow called Grimm,
14:49who promptly traces Sanskrit all the way back to what he calls
14:52the Indo-Europeans,
14:54everybody's ancient ancestors,
14:56which is exactly what Grimm's fellow Germans are desperate for,
15:00because it gives them a sense of identity.
15:05The key thing for the Germans at the time
15:08is they need something to be proud of,
15:10because Napoleon's army has recently totally clubbered them.
15:22So, when a German philosopher called Herder
15:25jumps on the Indo-European bandwagon
15:27and comes up with the idea of an ancient Germanic Aryan culture
15:31older than the Greeks,
15:32they go for it with all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery.
15:36In no time at all,
15:37there are fake medieval paintings going up all over the place,
15:41with all that Indo-European pizzazz
15:43covering room after room of equally fake medieval castles,
15:48with the latest electric light and Teutonic music to match.
16:01But the search for ancient origins
16:03was also to kick off something
16:05this particular fake castle might just remind you of.
16:09But, grandmother, what great big cries you have!
16:13Walt Disney and all that.
16:15But his modern stories are only a later, very cleaned-up version
16:18of what it was that got this kind of entertainment started.
16:22inspired by Herder and those Indo-European myths
16:26that generated one of the best-selling children's books of all time.
16:30And the wolf said,
16:32Ah, better to eat you with, my dear!
16:34Ah, better to eat you with, my dear!
16:38Everyone! On the count of three, I need everyone to scream!
16:41One, two, three!
16:45Oh, wait, before everything gets too gory,
16:50I'd like to introduce someone very special to you
16:53who can let you know
16:54where the story of Little Red Riding Hood comes from.
16:57Oh, very good!
16:57Um, James, let's have a big round of applause!
17:02James, where did this fairy tale come from?
17:06Why, the fairy tales by the brothers at Grimm!
17:08Oh, he's so smart!
17:12You'll recall one of the two brothers, Grimm,
17:14was that guy who was into ancient Sanskrit,
17:16which then got both of them into ancient folk stories.
17:21Oh, my goodness!
17:22And as for that remark about cleaned-up versions,
17:25well, in the original Yarns,
17:26the ugly sisters get their eyes pecked out,
17:29the witches get cooked alive,
17:31the wolf eats both Little Red Riding Hood and the grandmother,
17:34Rapunzel gets pregnant,
17:35and Sleeping Beauty's really about necrophilia.
17:37I mean, what?
17:38Even the Grimm's themselves turned it all down
17:40for the second edition.
17:42Oh, she told her story and her tears were dried,
17:45and her father went after that wolf she had spied.
17:49But the really strange thing was,
17:51when the Grimm's went looking for story material,
17:53they found the same stories turning up
17:56as far apart as Sweden and Iran.
17:59I'll tell you why, once this lot's finished.
18:02And happily ends our tale
18:05of Little Red Riding Hood...
18:13The End!
18:33In 1865, an English folklore freak called Tyler
18:37travelled around the world trying to solve the mystery.
18:40Why did pyramids turn up in so many different places,
18:43for instance, in China or Egypt or, here, in Indonesia?
18:47And all the carvings told the same kind of stories.
18:50How the world began, how nature worked,
18:53how to get to heaven, the way to live a good life,
18:56how to find the truth.
18:57There had to be something linking
19:00all these ancient folk tales and myths.
19:15Tyler argued that if Indo-European
19:19had gone from one ancient language
19:21to the battle of the modern world,
19:25maybe, way, way back,
19:27we'd all started from one single ancient culture,
19:30and that you could still see that
19:32in modern people's customs,
19:34like throwing salt over your shoulder,
19:37which is a habit that probably goes
19:38all the way back to the Stone Age.
19:40So maybe places like this
19:42weren't as foreign, say, to Westerners
19:44as they might appear.
19:54When Tyler stopped travelling,
19:57he went back to England
19:57and kind of invented cultural anthropology,
20:01and became the director
20:02of the first real anthropology museum,
20:04the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
20:13It was places like this
20:15that finally got Westerners around
20:17to realising that maybe all those tribes
20:19and rituals and myths
20:20that we dismissed as primitive
20:23weren't.
20:24That their cultures
20:26were as valid in their own way
20:28as ours were.
20:30Well, that's it.
20:32This programme began with one word,
20:35filioque,
20:36when the church tried to make everybody
20:38back in the 11th century
20:39behave the same way, remember?
20:53Ironic that it should have led us
20:55to cultural anthropology,
20:56probably the best tool
20:58in the pluralist world
20:59of the 21st century,
21:00to help us understand and value
21:02how different we all are.
21:05So, having started with one word,
21:08here's two.
21:36The evening started with Doctor
22:03Transcription by CastingWords
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