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00:00Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek scribe wrote out a dazzling list of wonders.
00:20What's seen in the mind's eye, he said, can never be destroyed.
00:34To this day, that magic list still haunts the modern world.
01:04The captain's searching for a safe harbour.
01:21He's looking for Alexandria in Egypt, on a low and dangerous coast.
01:28The currents here are tricky.
01:37Sailors have swung the lead like that for thousands of years, sounding the rocks and
01:42looking to see if their line has river mud on it, to show they're close to shore.
01:51Before the modern city and its high-rises were built, you saw nothing on this low horizon
01:56until you almost hit the beach.
01:58Of all the seven wonders there, the most practical was the ancient lighthouse called the Pharos.
02:13It stood here.
02:15Built around 285 BC, it was one of the seven wonders of the world.
02:22You could see it for 30 miles out at sea, marking the ancient city and the port, a magic
02:29light that medieval legends said would burn the sails of attacking boats.
02:35The Pharos, though, did more than guide ancient shipping.
02:39It symbolised and celebrated one of humankind's most spectacular experiments, the birth of
02:46the modern city, the magic metropolis.
02:53Once, the long, low coast of Egypt held just a few small fishing villages, some rocks,
03:07some sandbanks and some basking seals.
03:14Then, Alexander the Great arrived.
03:17He was making an empire that would stretch from Egypt to Afghanistan.
03:25Alexander loved cities.
03:28He liked founding cities.
03:30He founded 17 cities that he called Alexandria.
03:32He had a very interesting attitude about cities and architects.
03:37A young man came to see him once called Dinocrates.
03:41He said he had a great idea for a city.
03:44He said, I'll get a landscape and I'll carve it into likeness of you, Alexander, and in
03:50the palm of this figure will be an entire city called Alexandria.
03:55Well, the idea was that the clouds would form around the statue's head and the water would
04:01run down the veins in the arm and feed the city.
04:05Alexander looked at the plan.
04:06I like this boy, he said.
04:08I like the way he thinks, but the city isn't going to work, because the true blood of a
04:13city is not water down the vein, but trade.
04:18So when Alexander founded a city, he thought about trade.
04:21Look, I'll show you what I mean.
04:24The first thing Alexander thought of was a big square marketplace and he put it right
04:29on the beach between the Nile and the sea.
04:33That's the coastline along there.
04:34And then he worked out the various quarters of the city and he put a huge wall around
04:39the whole thing.
04:40Within 20 years, Alexander was dead and the architects had moved on a bit.
04:45They put a causeway in the marketplace, a little island off the coast.
04:50They put a great crossroads in, and at the centre of the crossroads, they put Alexander's
04:55tomb.
04:56He died and was buried in his city.
04:59So the city really, which was full of wonders, walls, palaces, anything you can think of,
05:04had two special wonders, the lighthouse on the island and Alexander's own tomb.
05:10Think of what the man had made.
05:12He'd made a city after his own ideas.
05:14This was a city full of Egyptians, full of Greeks, full of Jews.
05:18It was a multicultural, modern city and it was full of wonders, full of temples and palaces.
05:24It was a new city for a new age.
05:29The list of seven wonders was made in this revolutionary new age.
05:33Two of them, two urban wonders, the Pharos lighthouse and a king's tomb, a mausoleum
05:39by the sea, were subtle symbols of these cities' faith in trade, their anchor and advertisement.
05:48Ancient Alexandria, though, is buried now beneath a modern city.
05:53So there's not a lot to see of the ancient fizz and fury of Alexander's world.
06:00And what there is, is in the museum.
06:03MUSIC PLAYS
06:27I like local museums.
06:30They're full of real things, not antiques bought at auction.
06:35Just bits and pieces found when people were making their garage or putting in traffic lights.
06:44Just loose stones from buried cities.
06:56He's nice, isn't he?
07:01MUSIC CONTINUES
07:06It's a very beautiful fragment of completely vanished Alexandria
07:10from the first great Greek period.
07:13It's made by a Greek. Even the stone comes from Greece.
07:16Everything went past the lighthouse.
07:19Marble, slaves, silk, jewellery, wheat from Egypt.
07:23This was the beginning of El Dorado.
07:26The best work you can possibly get, practically all vanished.
07:44Look at this. Ancient Alexandria, classic Alexandria in a yard and a half.
07:50Here's a Greek altar from somebody's house.
07:52Here's a Greek text on a bit of a statue base.
07:55And here is a native Egyptian, but all dressed up in his best Greek robes.
08:00The Alexandrians loved to show off.
08:02And this, this is quite a rare Hebrew inscription from ancient Alexandria.
08:07The Jews were a very powerful group of Alexandria citizens.
08:11The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, was actually translated into Greek here
08:16in the very shadow of the Pharos.
08:20So the Pharos lighthouse signalled far more than just a safe harbour.
08:27It fell down finally in the earthquake of 1375.
08:35These, perhaps, are some of its sea-washed stones.
08:43It stood on the very tip of the harbour wall.
08:47This splendid old medieval fortress,
08:50built by the Mamluk sultan Qayyut Bey, stands on its foundations.
09:02The Pharos, though, was at least five times higher,
09:06at more than 300 feet, the tallest building of its time.
09:17Today, children come here on trips from school.
09:26And all around them, the medieval walls are studied with much more ancient stones.
09:34There they are, look.
09:36Hieroglyphs of a pharaoh.
09:38Two and a half thousand years after they were built,
09:41Hieroglyphs of a pharaoh.
09:44Two and a half thousand years after they stood on a great obelisk
09:48holding up the door of an Arab fort.
09:56Right in the middle of the fortress, they built a mosque.
10:00Now, the interesting thing about this mosque
10:03is that it isn't orientated, like most are, to Mecca.
10:06This stood on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse.
10:10And so it stands north, south, east and west, like the old lighthouse did.
10:16And if you look up, just for a while, up into this great tower,
10:20what you're looking at, really, is a ghost of the lighthouse.
10:24And can't you see in your mind's eye men and donkeys
10:27carrying fuel up to the light of the tower?
10:31There is a place, though, where you can still see an ancient lighthouse,
10:36well-preserved and standing to this day.
10:3930 miles east of Alexandria, on the same low coastline,
10:44a miniature pharaoh's.
10:48Square, octagonal and round, with an inside staircase.
10:55So, this is not a pharaoh's tower,
10:58but it's a mosque out of the
11:24This is what the real lighthouse in Alexandria looked like,
11:27just 10 times bigger than this one,
11:28with a few statues and an inscription.
11:31Certainly not like those wonderful things
11:32you see in children's books.
11:34Neither did it have a great lens on top.
11:37You often hear stories of how they had a magic lens
11:39which could focus the light and set enemy ships ablaze.
11:43Had none of that.
11:45It had a little fire up here,
11:46and that was probably only turned on
11:48when the fleet went by.
11:50Still, anything, even a tower,
11:52is good for these dangerous waters.
11:54But, you know, this lighthouse wasn't just for ships.
11:59This little one here is above a tomb.
12:02It's part of a tomb complex,
12:04and this light was to guide the spirit of the dead
12:06that was wandering around Egypt back to his body again.
12:17And this, just a little while
12:19after the great lighthouse was made.
12:21So as they started that lighthouse
12:23on the island of Pharos in Alexandria,
12:26those people were saying, look at our new city,
12:28how proud we are of it,
12:30of its wealth and riches and wisdom and learning.
12:33This lighthouse is gonna give a new light
12:35in the ancient world.
12:38So the great lighthouse,
12:39its lantern shielded with sheets of glass,
12:42became the symbol of the city.
12:45But all was not well inside the magic metropolis.
12:48With the city's dazzling mixture of faith and customs,
12:52many Alexandrians felt very lonely and uncertain.
12:56It was the birth of peculiarly modern alienation.
12:59These are the unexcavated tombs
13:18of the ancient kings of Sardis,
13:21the capital of Lydia in Western Turkey,
13:23where money was invented.
13:26Money was the fuel of Alexander's brand new cities.
13:31From the Seven Wonders to the Stock Exchange,
13:34a great part of the modern world started here,
13:37beside these bubbling fields.
13:40The city of Sardis stood at the end
13:42of a legendary trade route
13:44that ran east to Persia in the Silk Road,
13:48with merchants, mercenaries, and kings like Croesus,
13:51whose legendary wealth came from the gold taken,
13:54it is said, from a little stream
13:57that flowed into the city of Sardis.
13:59It was a place of great wealth and prosperity.
14:02It was a place of great wealth and prosperity.
14:05It was a place of great wealth and prosperity.
14:08From a little stream that ran down from the hills
14:12right through the city's ancient marketplace.
14:21Needless to say,
14:22archaeologists have long been interested in Sardis.
14:27They didn't find King Croesus' legendary marketplace,
14:31but what they did find were the very workshops
14:35in which the modern world was forged.
14:38When modern archaeologists dig sites like this,
14:49they always sieve all the dirt they take away.
14:53And to their amazement, the archaeologists working here
14:56found little pearls of gold turning up in their sieves.
14:59What they'd found wasn't the marketplace,
15:02it was the very place,
15:03the smelting places of the gold from the little stream.
15:07What was going on here, you see, was in these little hollows,
15:11they were putting all the gold and the wood,
15:13and it was melting down and they were taking out
15:16these big slabs of gold from the bottom.
15:18Now, this had been going on for thousands of years,
15:20that's not difficult.
15:22What happened next was revolutionary,
15:24because you could never control the purity of this gold.
15:27It had lead, it had silver, it had all sorts of things in it.
15:30But the people here, for the first time, made pure gold.
15:33They took this lovely golden substance, they beat it flat,
15:36they mixed it with salt, they put it in pots and they cooked it.
15:39When they took the gold from the pots,
15:41for the first time in human history,
15:43they made controllable, pure gold.
15:49So, as usual, the very dust of ancient lives,
15:53tiny little relics of the past, suddenly become so important.
15:58You see, people lived and worked here about 600 BC,
16:02just when Croesus and a few other people
16:06were experimenting with the idea of money.
16:10Now, pure gold means that you can make money,
16:13which is always the same.
16:15It's an eternal symbol.
16:17When the goddess Artemis Cybele
16:19was stamped on equal amounts of Croesus gold,
16:22people knew what they had in their hands.
16:26Within 50 years, there were banks, misers, merchants, marketplace,
16:31men who lived by buying and selling this idea
16:34of a single abstract value that you can actually hold in your hand
16:38and come into the world for the first time.
16:42Money, great sacks of money,
16:44had served to build many of Alexander's brand-new cities
16:48and several of the Seven Wonders, too.
16:51As you might expect, when Alexander died in 323 BC,
16:56his empire quickly divided into smaller kingdoms,
17:00each of them ruled by his generals and his bankers.
17:04Each city was alone.
17:08The city's walls became the city's armour,
17:11became so large and so magnificent
17:13that some of them were counted as wonders in their own right.
17:25These tremendous walls, driving for miles across the mountains,
17:29protected the smallish city of Heraclea down by the lake.
17:35They're enormous monuments to a general ancient insecurity.
17:41The new man in his brave new world was quite afraid.
17:46Soft cities set in hard, sharp shells.
17:52Nowadays, though, the pain and energy that made these brutal stones
17:56seems to have seeped away,
17:59and we are left with pleasurable ruins.
18:05Alexander's cities, too, have mostly gone.
18:09In western Turkey, though, a few of them, like Heraclea, still remain,
18:14with all their ruined wonders, their temples and their statues,
18:18half-memories of wonder,
18:21the ancestor of every modern town.
18:35Prayini, in western Turkey,
18:38is the best-preserved of all the Hellenistic cities.
18:45Houses, marketplaces, temples, mausoleums,
18:49rare ruins filled with the fears and hopes
18:52of the people of the magic metropolis.
18:58Visitors to Prayini,
19:01Visit Prayini today,
19:03and you can still taste the authentic flavour
19:06of the people of the Age of the Seven Wonders.
19:14There's those great dark walls again,
19:16guarding the beginnings of the modern world.
19:22The people of the town thought that Alexander once slept in this house,
19:27After Alexander's death, you had to wear white to come into his house.
19:32You see, this isn't just Alexander the Great slept here,
19:36like George Washington slept here or something.
19:38In those days, your heroes became gods,
19:41so Alexander's house became a shrine,
19:43and that's a great altar over there they found portraits of him
19:46and marble offering tables and all the rest.
19:49But nonetheless, it is a genuine Hellenistic house
19:52from the time of the Seven Wonders.
19:54It is a genuine Hellenistic house from the time of the Seven Wonders period.
19:58Normal family dwelling with two storeys,
20:00very high rooms, very small rooms, very dark,
20:04with small windows, not much sunlight coming through,
20:07not a very homey place, in fact.
20:09But then in these great cities,
20:11home, the front parlour, was the middle of the town.
20:25And at the end of every street,
20:28just like London, the name.
20:32But this is the real treasure here,
20:35the treasure of all cities of that period.
20:37This is a fountain, you see,
20:39and the water came out here, ran down there
20:42and ran right down the street and into every house.
20:45Every citizen had to look after his own bit of the water supply system.
20:49Now, the nice thing about the water here
20:52is that the whole system was constructed and paid for by a woman,
20:56the first woman mayor of the place, a lady called Feely.
21:00It's an unusual role for women in society at that time.
21:03In houses, for example, they were kept apart.
21:05But there was nothing actually to stop them entering public life,
21:08and quite often they did.
21:10Feely put in this wonderful aqueduct system,
21:12recording it in an inscription.
21:14There's a lot of civic pride here.
21:23The oil of these cities was money.
21:27Money first functioned here in these ancient agora,
21:31the marketplaces of the ancient cities.
21:33The cities rented out all the shops along the side,
21:36they controlled the prices, they regulated quantities,
21:39they looked after the markets.
21:41What was for sale?
21:43Well, food, slaves and imported goods.
21:46And these great marble colonnades,
21:50well, this is where the ancient citizens, the free men,
21:53just strolled to sniff the breezes.
22:03These cities weren't really cities in the modern sense of the word.
22:07Nothing industrial was ever made here.
22:09There were writers and artists and thinkers and people like that
22:12in very small numbers.
22:14And large numbers of people who just loafed around the place,
22:17big landowners with their slaves,
22:19some small farmers too, and perhaps a few small businessmen.
22:23But these really, well, they're more like recreation cities,
22:27like Palm Springs or Royal Tunbridge Wells.
22:31People had a good time here.
22:33They came down to the marketplace, these grand open spaces,
22:36and sat around on their chairs and talked about the price of wheat
22:40or whether the statue they just made was as good as one of the Seven Wonders.
22:44And if you were very rich and you subsidised the poor for grain,
22:48you might get your name on a stone or even a statue
22:51if you were mayor or something.
22:53It was a good life. It was one that lasted for nearly 1,000 years.
23:09This...
23:11..is the council chamber.
23:13Some 640 of Praney's wealthiest citizens
23:17came into this room to talk,
23:19and they talked about everything from the price of grain
23:22to hiring a city doctor.
23:25These little council chambers, their seats, their space,
23:29the very air in them,
23:31are the real ancestors of modern democracy.
23:34Democracy not in the sense of tribal societies, say,
23:37where everybody gets to say,
23:40but democracy in the sense of a very carefully controlled
23:43and regulated society.
23:45And here, in this mercantile climate,
23:48it produced a dynamic and aggressive society
23:51that is really the ancestor of the modern world.
23:54So, this space here, between these two rows of seats,
23:58this is a real revolution.
24:02If you go back to older societies in this one,
24:05you can walk down a million dusty ancient lanes,
24:08past ancient lives into shadowed temples,
24:11and the cities can be enormous,
24:13but you'll never find a space like this,
24:15with faces looking, sitting opposite each other.
24:19Those ancient societies are instinctive.
24:21They move almost like shoals of fish.
24:23Here, though, men are looking, faces are seeing.
24:26They're watching, they're seeing the other points of view,
24:29they're balancing, they're judging things.
24:31They're making lists like the Seven Wonders.
24:33It truly is the ancestor of the modern world.
24:39Life, then, was something of a race.
24:43And here's where the young men learned to compete in it.
24:47The city's own gymnasium and running track,
24:50with its ancient starting blocks.
24:53I suppose if you were really good,
24:55you got to go to the Olympic Games.
24:59Nothing was too good for the young lions
25:02who came to rule the city in the next generations.
25:05These are the public baths,
25:08served by the aqueduct in marble tubs and marble taps.
25:12But always cold water.
25:14Why is it always cold water and short hair?
25:17Even Alexander was said to be sissy cos he had long hair.
25:20But look at the facilities.
25:22Good non-slip floors.
25:25And, of course, the athletes' footbath.
25:28They all needed footbaths,
25:30so after they washed and scrubbed after their races,
25:34it was off to school.
25:37Next to the wash house, the schoolroom,
25:40with only three walls.
25:42Can you imagine what it was like in here in the winter?
25:44Pretty cold.
25:46This is male bonding land.
25:48But this in the schoolroom, like many schoolrooms,
25:52is covered in the names of its pupils.
25:55The kids have scratched them out down this wall,
25:58so carefully, letter by letter.
26:01You know, the gift of writing Greek
26:05was really only given to these privileged people in these cities.
26:09Practically nobody else in the land wrote or could read,
26:13except a few women, and they seem to have learned at home.
26:16But this was really the centre,
26:18this was the voice that we have today of Greek society.
26:23Right at the heart of every city,
26:26the mausoleums of the founders and the temples of the gods.
26:32There were two sorts of temple,
26:34one in light and marble,
26:36the other in darkness and dark stone.
26:40This is Praini's Temple of Athena,
26:43an exquisitely light building
26:45made by a great architect called Pythias,
26:48and just after he designed and built the first mausoleum,
26:52the king's tomb that was one of the seven wonders of the world.
27:00You know, the thing about Pythias' genius
27:05is not the fact that a guy designed a Greek temple
27:08with a pitched roof and lots of columns down the sides.
27:11People have been doing that for centuries.
27:13It's the care, it's the minuteness of the detail that's so clever.
27:18Look, he's just come from building the mausoleum
27:21and he's gone back to that most classical, simple form of the temple,
27:25and this bit, for example, is 65 feet up in the air.
27:29And just look at it.
27:31It's correct in every tiny detail, like a printed circuit,
27:35but like the most beautiful printed circuit you ever saw.
27:39Genius is in the details.
27:41Just look at what this man is doing.
27:43Absolutely classical exercise in perfection.
28:11That's Athena's temple over there.
28:14I'm off to another one.
28:16No less important to the city, but not quite as beautiful.
28:20It's the sanctuary of Demeter,
28:22the mysterious god of fertility and death.
28:25Demeter's daughter had been kidnapped by the god of Hades.
28:30Every year she went into the underworld
28:32and every year she returned as the sprouting grain.
28:36Now, look, don't get to think
28:39that these ancient Greek religions
28:41are just sort of fourth-form essays in Greek and Roman myths.
28:45This is a real system you can live by.
28:48Think of an example.
28:50There's a beautiful epitaph on a gravestone
28:53that says two parents are writing
28:56to the guy who ferries dead people across to Hades,
29:00and they say,
29:02''Take care of our little boy.
29:04''When he gets out of the boat, please help him
29:06''because he can't walk very well and he's got new shoes on.''
29:09Now, when people are thinking like that
29:12and getting consolation out of a system,
29:14this is a real system that works
29:16and gives them some sort of order for the world.
29:22There's not much left in Demeter's hall of mysteries now.
29:29It always was very plain and simple architecture,
29:32and the things that went on here were so mysterious
29:36that we still don't have the faintest idea what they were.
29:43When the German excavators dug these passages out,
29:48they found extraordinary statuettes buried in them.
29:51Obscene figures, they were, of a goddess called Baobo,
29:55whose face had been strangely mixed up with her genitals.
29:59Don't often see pictures of that in books, do you?
30:02In fact, it's the sort of thing that traditionally
30:05historians have always tended to neglect.
30:08So when you think of these cities,
30:10you don't really think much of eroticism or sexuality,
30:13yet in fact they were filled with it.
30:15There were phallic and epiphallic statues,
30:17there was an extraordinary erotic art going on,
30:20even in the smallest detail,
30:22and a marvellous erotic literature too.
30:24You see, these cities were really seen almost as living organisms,
30:28and the sexuality then was the city's sexuality,
30:31it was the power and potency of the state.
30:34It was, of course, a concept that the Christian city of God
30:38entirely rejected.
30:43The Christians also rejected the Greek idea of death.
30:47An underworld, a dark, cold pit
30:50filled with the shades and spirits of the dead.
30:55And here we reach into the alien heart of the magic metropolis.
31:00I am Morselus, king of Caria.
31:04I was tall, handsome and victorious in war.
31:08I have lying over me in Bodrum
31:10a tomb such as no other dead man ever had,
31:14adorned with marbles of men and horses,
31:17carved as if they were real and in fine marble.
31:22King Morselus is talking to us from the underworld
31:26in the words of a Greek philosopher.
31:29Alexander would have seen King Morselus' great tomb, the Mausoleum,
31:34as he besieged Halicarnassus, now Bodrum in south-western Turkey,
31:39the tomb of the city's founder at the city's centre,
31:43a huge building decorated by the Greeks' most famous sculptors
31:48and one of the seven wonders of the world.
31:51In 352 BC, on the day they buried King Morselus,
31:57they slaughtered a herd of sheep on these steps
32:00and five oxen, too, hamstrung, slaughtered and bled,
32:04so the blood ran down here
32:06towards the greatest tomb the world had ever seen,
32:09one of the seven wonders of the world, a tomb so great
32:12it's given its name to all great tombs ever since as Mausoleums.
32:16This great stone was the plug that sealed the burial chamber.
32:26They used to say, ancient writers,
32:29that King Morselus' tomb seemed to hang over his city in a silver cloud,
32:35but now it's completely floated away
32:38and there's a mark here that gives us a clue
32:42as to where some of it had floated.
32:45See this?
32:47This puzzled classical philologists for years.
32:51In fact, most British people over 50 could tell you exactly what it was.
32:56It's the mark of the British War Department.
33:00The mausoleum was found by a British professor.
33:03It was excavated by a man from the British Museum
33:06and the British Navy and the British Army
33:09with the help of the British ambassador in Constantinople.
33:12They loaded 218 crates of marbles onto HMS Georgian.
33:18The man from the BM put it like this.
33:21The hold is nearly full, he says.
33:23We still have room for sculpture on the deck,
33:26but it might be necessary to load off the guns of Malta.
33:32Not all the mausoleum had sailed off to London, though.
33:36Morselus had left a vast amount of ancient stone behind him.
33:41Long before the archaeologists arrived,
33:44much of it had already ended up as the property of the Knights of Malta
33:48at their great crusader castle in the bay,
33:52the Castle of St John.
33:57Right through the 15th century,
33:59the knights sucked the old city into their fortress.
34:02Every wall of it is made of ancient buildings.
34:05Look, this is how you can see
34:08that some of these reused blocks have actually come from real Greek temples.
34:14That round thing there with this little scalloping edge,
34:18that's a slice of a column, like salami,
34:21and that's a pretty good analogy because this is an Italian knight there.
34:24See his coat of arms?
34:26And above it, to protect his coat of arms,
34:28two more bits of temple set into the wall.
34:32The top one was used by the knights
34:35to keep the weather off of the inscription.
34:37Look under there, it tells you the name of the knight.