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00:07Around 300,000 years ago, our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa.
00:19For generations, small bands of hunter-gatherers explored the planet,
00:27learning to survive.
00:35Many other species of human walked the Earth alongside us.
00:40But one by one, we supplanted them.
00:47Until only we remained.
00:55For most of our history, our population was tiny and fragile.
01:03Every aspect of our lives determined by the natural world.
01:09And yet, everything would change.
01:23Today, there are about eight billion of us.
01:26Most of us living in cities like this one.
01:30Able to connect in an instant with people across the planet.
01:34And you might think it was inevitable, the result of progress over time.
01:39But surely, our story so far, if it teaches us anything,
01:44is that none of this was a foregone conclusion.
01:50So how did we get here?
01:54How did humanity transform from scattered groups of nomads
01:59into our modern interconnected world?
02:05What happened in that final chapter of our story that took us on a path to this place?
02:13anderes
02:14o
02:14o
02:42On a remote hilltop,
02:44in the far east of Turkey,
02:50stands a prehistoric monument steeped in mystery.
03:12It is so hard to stand here and not have goosebumps.
03:20This is the oldest temple unearthed anywhere on this planet.
03:32It was built 11,500 years ago by Hunter Galleries.
03:38That's 6,000 years earlier than Stonehenge.
03:43And yet somehow, our ancestors were capable of making this.
03:53This is Gobekli Tepe.
04:03There are these incredible T-shaped pillars which would have been holding up a huge roof.
04:11And then if we look at them, they're covered in these engravings.
04:18So this is a fox, there's vultures here, there's bear, there's wild boar.
04:24And here, this one just has to be my favorite.
04:28It's a leopard hunting one of those wild boars.
04:34So notice these holes here.
04:36This was dressed with furs and they were also painted.
04:40So you get the impression of this place as being beautifully colored and textured.
04:48And yet, this incredible feat of architecture
04:54is not the most revolutionary thing about this place.
05:01Gobekli Tepe is not simply a temple.
05:04It is a marker of a species on the cusp of change.
05:19In many ways, these prehistoric builders lived as their ancestors had for thousands of years.
05:27Their days spent foraging and hunting to feed their families.
05:49But they'd made one fundamental change.
05:57After generations spent as nomads following the herds.
06:07Here, at Gobekli Tepe, they stopped moving and settled down.
06:20The evidence for which lies not in the temple itself, but in the rubble surrounding it.
06:35Now, this might not look like much compared to that.
06:39But this small square building is actually the remains of one of the first permanent houses ever built.
06:52That there is a storage vessel.
06:55This is a grinding stone for wild wheat.
06:58And this floor of plaster and stone, this was somebody's home.
07:09This is one of the first villages.
07:19Archaeologists believe maybe a few hundred people were living here permanently.
07:25And calling it home.
07:30For 300,000 years, Homo sapiens roamed freely.
07:37But now, they were gathering together to put down roots.
07:42And so the question is, why?
07:46And why now?
08:03This was a world of plenty.
08:07Warm and abundant.
08:11But the planet had not always been this way.
08:16Only a few generations earlier, Homo sapiens had been fighting for survival.
08:23Through the brutal peak of the last ice age.
08:30Now that local areas could provide plenty of food, people could spend longer in one place.
08:37And when large groups came together to share their bounty.
08:42A feature of our brain had an opportunity to flourish like never before.
08:50Our almost limitless capacity to learn.
09:00An ability with roots that can be traced way back.
09:04Right to the beginning of the human story.
09:13As the distant ancestors of our species were gradually evolving.
09:21They had begun developing larger brains.
09:30But as their brains grew, the way they were organized was evolving too.
09:38Becoming increasingly adaptable.
09:41And more able to change in response to stimulation from the outside world.
09:50Until they became us.
09:54A species brilliant at learning.
09:57Both from our experiences and other people.
10:06The major thing that marks our species as different isn't just the size of our brain.
10:12It's also the way they're organized and their extraordinary flexibility.
10:17Now we call this flexibility neuroplasticity.
10:21Because it's like our brains are plastic.
10:24They adapt.
10:25They alter.
10:26And they change.
10:27It has some profound effects.
10:43Humans have a natural affinity for observing and copying each other.
10:50Giving homo sapiens the ability to have a shared understanding of the world.
11:00At Gobekli Tepe, the symbols of their shared experiences and beliefs are carved into the stone.
11:09And these indicate a bigger shift in our species.
11:14The odd thing about being human is that we are constantly surrounded by a bunch of things that are so
11:21all-encompassing.
11:22And yet we never really think about where they started or where they come from.
11:27I'm talking here about culture.
11:35Ritual, custom, language, art.
11:38Stories and ideas that have been passed down orally through generations and have now found physical form.
11:53Places like Gobekli Tepe became so rich in meaning that our ancestors never wanted to leave.
12:01And culture flourished.
12:06Co-operating and building connections are what our brains are actually set up to do.
12:17Wherever humans settle down, an explosion in creativity followed.
12:23Launching an era of extraordinary innovation.
12:28We can see the results of this shift in the archaeological record.
12:32Which begins to seethe with the debris of new technology.
12:43Our ancestors couldn't have foreseen it.
12:46But one innovation from around this time was to have consequences far greater than they could possibly have imagined.
13:00We start to see the first sparks of something that would come to shape the way we live today.
13:09Wherever there were humans, there was a dramatic rise in the bones of goats and sheep.
13:19Far outstripping the remains of the species they hunted.
13:39These changes reveal a key point in the human story, the moment we began to farm
13:47livestock.
14:01The people had found a safe, reliable way to feed themselves.
14:06They'd stopped chasing their food and started rearing it, providing a regular supply of
14:14milk, cheese and yoghurt, and later textiles like wool, season after season.
14:37The farming of animals marked a watershed moment.
14:43The result of this, I don't think could have been predicted.
14:48This altered relationship that they had with animals altered them, because not long after
14:55they learned how to do this, something fascinating happened.
15:08Their population started to boom.
15:13Now we're not really sure why this happened, but the strongest theory is that people staying
15:18in one place and not moving as much, but also having more food, having more calories, basically
15:24led to mums having more energy for reproduction.
15:35As our numbers rose, settlements began springing up, scattered across an area which we now
15:45call the fertile crescent.
15:55As their populations grew, villages transformed into towns.
16:20And the largest of the towns of the fertile crescent was Chattel Hoyuk.
16:33An early prototype of urban living.
16:43And every single one of these is a house.
16:46That's right.
16:47And you have to imagine, of course, that each of these houses is a box with a roof, but there's
16:52no space really between them, like a beehive.
16:55The fact that they're all tightly up against each other means that the whole thing is much
17:01more structurally sound.
17:03There's literally no gap.
17:05There's no gap.
17:05The only way you can get in the house is to move along the roofs and go down through a
17:10hole
17:11into the house, because there's no streets.
17:23Each dwelling was small and had its door in the ceiling.
17:30The inhabitants lived much of their lives up on the roofs, grinding grain, trading, and feasting
17:41in the bright sunlight above their homes.
17:48In this honeycomb, their animals were kept in pens right next to their living quarters.
17:55Here you can see bits of animal bone.
17:58These are sheep bones from feasting and so on.
18:00But also there are lots of droppings.
18:03And so this is telling us that as well as people living in the village,
18:08they also brought in domesticated animals.
18:16And these farmers left behind intriguing signs that they were here to stay.
18:23What are those holes over there?
18:26These are the ancestors who are buried beneath the floors.
18:30In some houses, there are up to 62 people buried in them.
18:33I mean, Ian, 60-odd people being buried, that's a graveyard in a home.
18:38We've dug up hundreds of burials here.
18:41And what's fascinating is that people were sleeping just a few centimetres
18:46from the bones of their ancestors.
19:04Between the dead, the living, and their animals,
19:09this thriving town was densely packed.
19:16At its height, some people think there were 8,000 people living at Çatalhöyük.
19:21So that's one of the largest settlements on the planet at this point.
19:26And so it's so easy to imagine this straight line from this population boom
19:32to our own huge population of humans on this planet.
19:37And yet that straight line was severely interrupted
19:41because the formula for success that was playing out here
19:46also turned out to be a bit of a disaster.
19:52Our pioneering farmer ancestors couldn't have known it.
19:56But they had opened Pandora's box.
20:06Amongst the many burials of Çatalhöyük
20:12was skull after skull with clear signs of violent impact.
20:20And it's something not only seen at Çatalhöyük.
20:28In many early farming settlements, we start to see the unmistakable signs of violence.
20:38Suggesting the two are connected.
20:45Choosing to live like this in such close proximity with your neighbours,
20:52with the animals which you're breeding, with your rubbish,
20:58in a way that has never been seen before, leads to this cascade.
21:05The densely populated towns had become exposed to new dangers.
21:11Living with their animals spread disease.
21:14Their dependence on crops made them vulnerable to failed harvests.
21:21And with ever-growing competition for the land near the settlement,
21:25people were no longer just battling nature.
21:29They were battling each other.
21:33Suddenly, it must have seemed like this perfect world they'd created was cursed.
21:50Faced with all these challenges, these towns didn't survive or grow into great metropolises.
21:57Instead, growth was followed by collapse and exodus.
22:09And as the early town dwellers left their homes and farms in droves, they faced a choice.
22:17To start again and risk failing.
22:20Or rejoin the vast majority of humans across the globe, still living nomadic lives.
22:40For me, this is one of the biggest mysteries in the history of our species.
22:47Because for the very first settlers, it was a disaster.
22:51They were facing disease and famine.
22:55And yet, at the very same time, across the planet, hunter-gatherers were thriving.
23:02And that way of life, we know works.
23:05Because today, millions of people live like that.
23:09They have made it to the 21st century just like the rest of us.
23:13And yet, we know how this story ends.
23:17Most of us live in huge cities like this.
23:33And so what is it that turned a disaster into a success?
24:02Our early attempts to live together in large numbers had ended in failure and strife.
24:12To make it work, our species would have to find another way.
24:16To make it work, our species would have to find another way.
24:33An answer would lie.
24:48There are bits of our story where geography just does not feel like a fluke.
24:55Where if it was going to happen, it was always going to happen here.
25:01Because beyond the thin strips of green that cut through this arid landscape,
25:07there is very little but sand and death.
25:21This narrow strip of habitable land was the only place to grow food and rear animals.
25:29But to produce enough, they had to control this natural resource.
25:35The people needed to direct the water onto their fields and harvest en masse once a year.
25:44And so, they had no choice but to work together.
25:50Put enough effort in and more and more of this becomes productive farmland.
25:57Giving these guys a massive food surplus that would be collected in huge grain stores.
26:04Attracting more and more people to come and settle here and join this growing revolution.
26:18The people flooded into the Nile Valley, jostling for space.
26:30But now, instead of abandoning their communities when the towns became overcrowded,
26:37they restructured them.
26:46When you live in a small group, you've all got to be good or at least competent at everything to
26:52survive.
26:52But living in a large group, you can suddenly specialise.
26:58Some of you might become really good at a particular kind of textile making.
27:02Others might become stone makers, butchers, bakers, probably not candlestick makers yet.
27:08But all cogs in a huge machine at a scale that had never been seen before.
27:21The people of these busy settlements were increasingly collaborating.
27:28Becoming part of a social group with hundreds or thousands of strangers.
27:35And in the process, laying the foundation for something brand new.
27:49I know archaeologists are constantly pointing at walls and trying to convince people of how important they are.
27:54But this absolutely massive wall is pretty much all that's left of the original city of Abydos.
28:02Abydos being one of the very first cities in the whole world.
28:07But walls like these also indicate a momentous shift in the way humans lived together.
28:14Because to be on this side of the wall meant protection and access to the grain stores.
28:21But to be on that side of the wall meant to literally be without.
28:25Now humans have always been tribal.
28:28We've always been able to act and think as part of a group.
28:31But what places like this prove is that tribalism was scalable to the size of a city.
28:44All along the great rivers of the ancient world.
28:48Huge cities began to appear.
28:51As our ancestors cracked the secret to living at scale.
28:59A change which would propel us forward at an astonishing rate.
29:10As these newly emerging cities grew and their communities became more complex.
29:18They started to change.
29:25Leaving evidence which can still be seen here in Abydos.
29:30Not in the city of the living, but in the city of the dead.
29:45This is Chinat of the living.
29:47And it's so vast, really.
29:51That it was actually originally mistaken for a fort.
29:55But it's a temple dedicated to a human.
30:00A man called Kasikemwe who's actually buried in a cemetery over there.
30:04Not everybody got one of these.
30:07Which means that around here, there were now at least two classes of people.
30:15There was something about cities that was the perfect breeding ground.
30:20For producing not just the haves, but the have-a-lots.
30:28We may never know why some people became wealthier and more powerful than others.
30:35One theory is that those in control of the water could also be in control of the food supply.
30:43But so long as they shared enough to feed the cities, the cities thrived.
30:52Their newly specialized populations invented, made, and traded an unprecedented number of objects.
31:05And in the process created a tool, unassuming at first glance, that would become a powerful instrument.
31:17I know they don't look like much.
31:19They look like just square pieces of bone.
31:24They were found in Abydos, in a tomb, thought to be that of a king known as the Scorpion King,
31:33from about 5,300 years ago.
31:35Now some of these symbols are very recognizable.
31:39That's obviously a bird.
31:42This is a plant of some kind.
31:45And notice the holes in them.
31:47These are effectively labels or tags.
31:52These tags were thought to have been attached to offerings buried in the tomb.
31:56But what they reveal is something happening in the world of the living.
32:02And these symbols represented the provenance where the item that they were attached to came from.
32:10Perhaps they have a quantity as well attached to them.
32:13And then someone had this absolutely revolutionary idea.
32:18What if they strung them together?
32:34With local agreement on their meaning, symbols became words.
32:41Gradually, the rows of images became more complex.
32:50Until...
32:54We stopped labeling and started writing.
33:02Detailed knowledge and culture that had previously been passed down generation to generation to generation
33:10was now able to be preserved in a completely different way.
33:14And the thing with writing is that like so many of the giant leaps forward that we have made as
33:21a species,
33:21I'm thinking here about the invention of agriculture and metalworks and the wheel.
33:26Writing does seem like an idea whose time had come.
33:32Because it doesn't just happen in Egypt.
33:39Again and again, across the earth, we invented forms of writing.
33:51Giving our facts, stories and ideas lasting form.
34:03And we still have no conclusive evidence as to how or even whether these events influenced each other.
34:10Or whether they happened organically as a result of needing to keep track of things at that scale.
34:16But however it happened, once writing was a thing, once it was out there in the world,
34:22then nothing would be the same ever again.
34:31Now, laws, customs and beliefs could be recorded permanently in ink.
34:44But with over 700 symbols, this technology required years of study to master.
34:51And so was the sole preserve of those trained to use it.
34:56Scribes working for the ruling class.
35:03And the ability to send out detailed instructions to people across the land
35:09gave the rulers enormous power to influence, instruct and build.
35:18In 2013, a team of archaeologists were excavating a cave on the Red Sea coast.
35:27When hidden inside, they found ancient fragments of inscribed papyrus.
35:40Preserved there for over 4,000 years.
35:46It's believed to be the oldest ever found.
35:54And a time capsule from the reign of an iconic ruler.
36:00So this is your actual excavation notebook from the time?
36:05Yeah, yeah. Every day I was recording the papyri and we were surprised to find most of them had
36:11the name of a king. And this pharaoh is Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramids.
36:16Not a small pharaoh.
36:18All the material is giving information about this very reign,
36:21which is the very beginning of the Egyptian state, in fact.
36:27Khufu ruled Egypt for almost a quarter of a century.
36:32And one of the world's most familiar structures was built to honour him.
36:38The first of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
36:44We had to wait till the very end of the excavation to have the best preserved papyri.
36:51We only had a small pit left untouched and all the papyri were thrown inside.
36:57Into that one spot that was the very last spot that you decided to look at.
37:00Yeah.
37:02The team discovered around a thousand pieces of papyrus,
37:06revealing a vastly complex construction project.
37:11It belongs to a kind of elite at that time, because we don't think that more than one
37:16percent of the population was able to read and write.
37:20It's a logbook and I can see in the small boxes number of the day of the month.
37:24And for each day this official is giving information about what he has done.
37:29For example here, on the first day of the month, they are sending a boat to Heliopolis
37:35to fetch the food for the workers.
37:36And when it arrives, it's written in red because it's much more important for them than everything else.
37:43About 40 days, you have a precise record of what he is doing.
37:49Egyptians extracted fine limestone blocks that were used for the building of the outer casing of the pyramids.
37:57So what it is all about is that they were bringing stones from the Tura quarries to the pyramid of
38:05Hufu at the end of the reign of this king.
38:07So this is, this is telling us how they built the pyramids basically, this is the administration behind it all.
38:17That, that's absolutely incredible.
38:19So this is a snapshot in time of the building of the Great Pyramid.
38:27And you found it.
38:32Without all those records, I think the pyramid would not have been possible.
38:44You can't really overstate the significance of finding a document like that.
38:50One from such a pivotal moment in history.
38:54And when you read the translation, you definitely do get a sense of what a logistical feat it was.
39:03Building these things.
39:05But, you do also get a real sense of how mundane and bureaucratic it all was.
39:13Just kind of ordinary humans doing ordinary human things.
39:16Between the invention of writing and the building of the pyramids, there were no major technological advancements that we know
39:26of in Egypt.
39:29And so for 4,500 years, people have looked at these and just had their breath taken away.
39:38And wondered, how on earth were they built?
39:42And perhaps the answer is just the simple writing built the pyramids.
39:52And even though they were originally built for the elites, they actually became symbols of national identity.
40:00Which bind huge groups of people together on an unconscious level.
40:09The unit of human cooperation had grown from tribe, to village, to town, to city.
40:20And now, to nation.
40:31But alongside the emergence of these nation states, was a more sinister development.
40:39What had once been tribal skirmishes, became state warfare.
40:47Recorded by the victors in art and writing.
40:53The emerging superpowers began launching military campaigns against their neighbours.
40:59For land, resources, and manpower.
41:05Bringing thousands of captives back as slaves.
41:15Many of the early civilisations follow this pattern.
41:20Of growth, innovation, writing.
41:23And an ever more stratified society.
41:29By 4,000 years ago, we'd clearly made some massive strides for the modern world.
41:35With the rise of these civilisations that were supporting so many more people.
41:40And about 70 million of us walking this planet.
41:46But the disparity in the human condition had never been so wide.
41:54Some people were living gods.
41:56And they would go on to build monuments like these to themselves for centuries.
42:04But many more were slaves.
42:05Who were forced to live in the shadows of the splendour that they'd helped to create.
42:13And humankind's powerful new tool, writing, still remained in the hands of just a tiny number.
42:22If we were going to get to the future, the here and now, as you and I know it,
42:26it was going to require a spark from somewhere else.
42:47It was going to be a spark from somewhere else.
42:49Almost 4,000 years ago, a small group of our ancestors were forced to make a journey
42:56to one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
43:02Through the baking barren waste of the Sinai Desert.
43:10But here, in this desolate landscape, they would change the world.
43:20This place is stunning, and yet a complete and utter death trap.
43:26It was of very little interest to the Egyptian elites.
43:31That is, until someone found something in these mountains.
43:37Lots and lots of copper.
43:42And this stuff, turquoise.
43:45Raw materials that could be transformed into jewels and ornaments of great value.
44:00If you could prize them from this harsh landscape.
44:08Far to the north was the tiny land of Retjenu.
44:12When Egypt demanded laborers for this treacherous mining mission.
44:19It was the unfortunate people of this small, powerless state who had no choice but to answer the call.
44:39I can't imagine what it would have been like to be dragged here to work in the turquoise mines.
44:46In the blazing heat, in the middle of nowhere.
44:54It must have been like being dropped onto the surface of a different planet.
45:05And even the Egyptians probably wondered if they would make it back home.
45:19The Egyptians turned to their gods for protection.
45:23And here, high up on a desolate plateau.
45:27At the furthest edge of their world, they built a temple to ask for it.
45:39A monument which has survived remarkably unscathed for almost 4,000 years.
45:49Frozen in time by the bone dry desert.
46:03This temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor who is the goddess of turquoise and miners.
46:09And they were documenting and celebrating their presence and worshipping their gods.
46:14And each one of these pillars represents one of the missions.
46:20And they are hierarchical.
46:21So you've got the pharaoh at the top and it goes through the ranks.
46:26And you've got stonemasons, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
46:30Until this is the brother of the prince of Rhett Genu.
46:34Rhett Genu is where the miners came from.
46:37And yet the miners are not here on this pillar.
46:41But they would have come through here.
46:43They would have seen this grandeur, this splendor.
46:46Seeing these impenetrable Egyptian hieroglyphics,
46:51the foreign workers also wanted to immortalize their presence here.
46:58But there was a problem.
47:00They weren't part of the elites and so they couldn't write.
47:07So the illiterate miners did what we humans have always done.
47:14They copied what they'd seen and made it their own.
47:32They're not part of their own.
47:32This is one of the tech boys' mines.
47:34And if you look all over the walls,
47:37there are these scratches from where the workers' pickaxes have been.
47:43But here, something else is going on.
47:46There are about 30 or 40 of them all over this place.
47:51Some of these have been copied from hieroglyphics, but some are completely new.
47:55And here's how the system works.
47:56You take the symbol and you say the name,
48:01but you only take the first sound and you discard the rest.
48:05So for example, this here, this is an ox.
48:09You can see the horns and the head here.
48:11To the miners, this would be alif.
48:14Now, alif, just take the first sound, a, discard the rest.
48:19This is another symbol.
48:21This is a symbol for house.
48:22To them, it would be bait.
48:24So you just take the bet sound at the beginning.
48:27And if you put these two together,
48:30you start understanding what you're actually looking at here.
48:33This is the birthplace of the alphabet.
48:41This new script was simpler to learn than hieroglyphics,
48:45because the alphabet did not represent complete words, but spoken sounds.
48:53It was able to convey any thought with only 20 to 30 symbols.
49:02These miners are the ones who gave birth to this,
49:05and their legacy is still with us today and is so important.
49:15In the centuries and millennia that followed,
49:20nearly all the early written languages fell into obscurity,
49:25as those civilizations waned.
49:30But the alphabet would only grow, spreading across the planet,
49:35reshaping and branching into many different forms.
49:41Eventually becoming the most widely used writing system in the world.
49:54of the universe, allowing millions and then billions of ordinary humans
49:59to access knowledge, to communicate and to document their thoughts
50:04and their existence in every corner of the globe.
50:12For me, this is one of the most powerful moments in the human story, because unbeknownst to the underdog,
50:20they had changed the world.
50:22One of civilization's most profound and revolutionary ideas didn't come from an educated elite.
50:29It came from inside these dark and miserable minds through the copying and innovating of lowly migrant workers.
51:02The invention of writing marks an ending and a beginning.
51:08One of the most powerful moments in the world was the most powerful moments in the world.
51:08Because prehistory, so the period before writing,
51:12we could only really piece together using fragments and artefacts.
51:16And now recorded time, history had begun.
51:21And what we see is that as writing spreads, the pace of human innovation accelerates.
51:33Because that is the power of being able to document and lay down knowledge.
51:49Generation after generation, building on the last, retaining and accumulating knowledge.
51:58Stone became bronze, iron became silicon.
52:05And gradually, we built the future.
52:10This is the very final bone of our series.
52:14This is actually one of the three ear bones.
52:18And just like every human bone we've encountered, whether Homo sapiens or otherwise,
52:24it represents a person.
52:28This individual had a family, parents, perhaps children, friends.
52:35But what's particularly remarkable is how much we now know about these ancient ancestors of ours,
52:42thanks to modern temples of knowledge like this one.
52:47The scientists here are able to extract DNA from an individual who, in this case,
52:52lived about 1,600 years ago, from a piece of bone that is so tiny, delicate and precious.
52:58And they're able to ask questions like whether industrialization and agriculture actually affected our DNA.
53:08Whether we're still evolving.
53:12And to think that our knowledge has got to the point where we're even able to entertain such huge questions
53:22from something so tiny.
53:37We can look back on when nature and luck were on our side.
53:43And when they weren't.
53:46Where we made the right decisions.
53:49And where we went wrong.
53:53But what underpins our story and makes it unique
53:58is far more than just our will to survive.
54:02It's our cultural drive to come together.
54:06To learn from and inspire each other.
54:09To go further than what has gone before.
54:15We are the very last species of human to walk this earth.
54:21And the most fascinating thing about our 300,000 year long story
54:26is that we have no idea how much is left.
54:30Is this basically the whole of our story?
54:34Or are we on the first act or even prologue with a long future ahead of us?
54:40We have no idea.
54:42But we are one species with one future.
54:46Now you could never have predicted how we got here.
54:50And where we go next is up to all of us.
55:24In this episode, we filmed at Sarabit Al Khadim.
55:28A 4,000 year old mining complex on the Sinai Peninsula.
55:34Where ancient messages were scrawled on the walls of the mines.
55:41The archaeologists who discovered this mystery script in 1905 called it proto-Sinaitic.
55:48But they had no idea what it said.
55:51And until they could read it, they were ignorant of its true significance.
55:58A remarkable artifact now in the British Museum would be the vital clue
56:03to cracking the ancient code.
56:07This amazing object was discovered in the Hathor Temple in Sarabit Al Khadim,
56:13close to the turquoise mines.
56:15It's a so-called Sphinx and dates roughly about 4,000 years old.
56:22Linguists already knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
56:26What the Sphinx gave them was a key to decipher the script they couldn't read.
56:36So if you look at the piece, we have inscription on both sides.
56:40And I'll show you this side first, where we only have the proto-Sinaitic script.
56:46And then if I turn the swings, this is the most important and most fascinating side.
56:51Because here we have then two different scripts.
56:53On the bottom, proto-Sinaitic, and then you see the hieroglyphic right on top.
57:01The message in hieroglyphics at the top was a dedication to the goddess Hathor.
57:07Linguists deduced that the script below in proto-Sinaitic was saying the same thing.
57:15We can start with the hieroglyphs, which reads Beloved of Hathor.
57:20So we have now the Egyptian goddess Hathor.
57:22Then we have a second part, which allowed us to decipher the proto-Sinaitic language,
57:27because we know it was the same message.
57:30So we were very lucky we found this amazing object.
57:33This is the kind of lottery win for the linguists.
57:37These short corresponding phrases were the key to decoding the miner's writing.
57:44The probably most important aspect of proto-Sinaitic is that it's an alphabetic script.
57:49And if you look at these signs, you probably will not recognize any alphabetic signs we use today.
57:55But the cow head that you see here becomes our A.
58:04Proto-Sinaitic gave birth to the modern alphabet.
58:08And unlock the origins of the most widespread form of writing in the world.
58:18The most widespread form of writing in the world.
58:25The most widespread form of writing in the world.
58:26The most widespread form is !!
58:26They are we decided on this way, right?