Seven wonders of the ancient world is a four-part history documentary series hosted by Archaeologist, Scholar and Author John Romer, who takes us on a tour to visit the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World". We'll journey back to Ancient Greece and take a look at the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and two Statues, the Colossus of Rhodes, a Statue of the Greek sun-god Helios and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia a giant seated figure, made by the Greek sculptor Phidias around 435 BC at the sanctuary of Olympia, Greece, and erected in the Temple of Zeus there. Zeus is the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus.
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00:00Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek scribe wrote out a dazzling list of wonders.
00:18And it's seen in the mind's eye, he said, can never be destroyed.
00:32To this day, that magic list still haunts the modern world.
00:48So powerful is the ancient dream
01:17that the classic list of seven wonders still encourages competition,
01:21and brand new lists of wonders too.
01:25In opinion polls, the Sydney Opera House is regularly rated as the single greatest wonder of the modern world.
01:38You find that these modern lists of wonders are a real odd lot.
01:42They're not the biggest or the fastest or anything you might expect.
01:46They're really things like opera houses that are too small for grand opera,
01:51or very old high-rises that King Kong once fell off of,
01:56or the footprints of the first men on the moon.
01:59Strange things. Dams, bridges, rusty now most of them,
02:04obsolete airplanes, Disneyland, Vegas, things that people want to see before they die.
02:10Things that fill them with wonder.
02:14So what is wonderful?
02:17Well, our ideas of wonderful are the same as those defined by the ancient Greeks 2,500 years ago.
02:25They're things that seem filled with the idea of human imagination, of ambition and achievement.
02:32They're part of a new religion that fuels the modern world just as it fuelled the ancient Greeks.
02:38And so, you know, the story of the history of wonder,
02:43the story of how those ancient images of it went from Greece right up until today,
02:48are really the story of the modern imagination.
02:52And it's the most extraordinary tale.
03:08THE OPERA HOUSE
03:22Climbing up inside the opera house is a bit like climbing up inside the pyramids.
03:27You travel through the scenery of the human imagination,
03:31back to the most ancient ghosts of wonder.
03:39THE WANDERER
03:44This wonder was born in the mind of a Danish architect, Jørn Hudson.
03:50It took three years of computer processing
03:53to calculate the curves that he had quickly sketched upon a pad.
04:09TITANIUM
04:14Titanium and resin hold it all together.
04:17Loose drawings made concrete with 60s high tech.
04:27Like the ancient Greeks, though,
04:30Hudson was still in the business of making beautiful, wonderful shapes.
04:39Nowadays, though, the very nature of wonder is changing.
04:43It's not the hardware anymore, it's not the buildings,
04:46it's the software that designs them.
04:49It's not great statues anymore, it's the pill.
04:52It's the telephone, the thing that joins all the buildings in the world,
04:56not just one building.
04:58It's process.
05:00And that, you know, in a strange way,
05:02takes us right back to the beginnings of modern civilisation,
05:05back to the beginnings of wonder at the pyramids of Egypt.
05:15Process is what you're looking at here.
05:18The Egyptian pyramids are not just amazing monuments,
05:21but the residue of a process that impoverished an entire nation.
05:26Thousands upon thousands of people labouring for decade after decade.
05:33They made the sole surviving ancient wonder, the oldest, too.
05:38Of all the ancient wonders,
05:40the pyramids are the only one on everybody's all-time list of wonders.
05:53This, then, is where it all started,
05:56this long journey of the human imagination that reaches till today.
06:03MUSIC FADES
06:21In the first century, Pliny, that most sensible Roman,
06:25called the pyramids idle and foolish exhibitions of royal wealth.
06:30By that time, they were already some 2,500 years old
06:35and their true purposes had been lost.
06:43Clearly, the pyramids are the tombs of kings,
06:46but they're also something else as well.
06:48To the ancient Egyptians, they stood as friends.
06:53For as they built the pyramids,
06:55the Egyptians had invented the notion of the sacred state.
06:59The pyramids, therefore, were proof that their kingdom was in order
07:03and joined on to eternity.
07:08Just as we do today, the ancient Egyptians of later ages
07:12came to stand in the sand and marvel at the pyramids.
07:16What, then, were the processes by which these two things were made,
07:21the pyramids and the state together?
07:30MUSIC FADES
07:44The first thing you did when you started to build a pyramid
07:48was to dig a hole for the royal burial chamber.
07:52Egyptian kings had always been buried in the ground
07:55and they were very traditional people.
07:58Actually, for its time, this burial chamber is rather old-fashioned,
08:04but it's the size here that impresses you.
08:07If this had ever been finished,
08:09it would have been the biggest tomb ever made inside a pyramid.
08:18This hole for the burial chamber had to be in good strong stone,
08:22on a ridge overlooking the Nile, close to the royal city of Memphis.
08:29Here, then, you can see how a pyramid was built
08:33because this one was never finished.
08:36The king, Jedefro, only lived for a few years
08:40between the builders of the two great pyramids, Cheops and Khefren.
08:44This is an unfinished pyramid
08:47from the era of the greatest pyramids of them all.
08:59When they'd finished making the hole for the burial chamber,
09:03the pyramid makers then mobilised the entire available population of Egypt
09:08to move blocks the size of this one up to the pyramid.
09:12But how on earth did these ancient people move these huge stones?
09:17Well, for 3,000 years, nobody asked the question
09:20because the ancient Egyptians were happily trundling these big blocks around.
09:24Everybody knew how it was done.
09:26But then they went and the Christians came
09:28and they thought the ancient stones had been moved by the power of God.
09:32They thought that if you got a little piece of papyrus and wrote a prayer on it,
09:36stuffed it under the stones,
09:38that you could shoot an arrow and the power of the prayer
09:41would send the stone up to the pyramid plateau behind the arrow.
09:44Medieval times, rabbis thought that Moses had done it
09:47with the slave gangs of ancient Israel.
09:50In the 19th century, British archaeologists,
09:52who, after all, were working in a colonial situation,
09:55saw that it was done by millions of coolies with firm governance,
09:59just like the British had provided.
10:01Today, of course, we've got a lot of ecologically ingenious situations
10:05with, you know, bearded professors who come along with bits of wood
10:08and suggest that if you wet this and dry that out, it all zooms up in the air.
10:12In fact, the truth is a lot simpler.
10:14A few years ago, there was a congress of retired archaeologists
10:18in a village in France,
10:20and these elderly gentlemen, without too much physical effort,
10:23pushed huge blocks of stone down the high street in a test,
10:26using mud and water.
10:28These blocks move like they're on ice, if you get it going right.
10:31And these people were very skilful.
10:33These were the guys that had just made the Great Pyramid itself.
10:37It was a very simple technology and a very complex organisation.
10:41The reverse, the absolute reverse of the modern world.
10:44That's why we're here.
10:46The absolute reverse of the modern world.
10:48That's why we find it so mysterious.
10:59The pyramids of this first great age of pyramid building
11:03are not just the first large stone structures in the world,
11:06not just the largest either, but also the most accurate.
11:11Egyptian pyramids are far more than just a nation
11:14shoving around blocks of stone.
11:16They are set precisely on the points of the compass.
11:19Their corners are near perfect right angles,
11:22and the length of their four sides is virtually the same.
11:31With dimensions of 600 and 700 feet and more,
11:34the maximum error in them is a matter of a few inches.
11:45To later ages, such magical geometry,
11:48such extraordinary accuracy, was supernatural.
11:53Medieval Arab writers said that the pyramids
11:56had been built to measure time.
11:58Time itself, they wrote, is frightened of the pyramids.
12:02Eminent European mathematicians and astronomers
12:05searched for links between the Great Pyramid
12:08and the Egyptian pyramids.
12:10Such theories were often based
12:12on the internal chambers of the Great Pyramid,
12:15whose corridors and chambers were made with deadly accuracy.
12:19There were three burial chambers.
12:21The first was cut into the rock
12:23under the centre of the pyramid in the traditional way.
12:27Later on, a second corridor was cut,
12:30and a third was cut into the rock
12:32under the centre of the pyramid in the traditional way.
12:37Later on, a second corridor was cut
12:40and a second burial chamber built at its end.
12:43But this, too, was never finished,
12:45and once again another corridor,
12:47the huge, unique Grand Gallery of Wonder in itself,
12:51was extended into the high heart of the pyramid,
12:54and a third burial chamber set at its ending.
13:07To many Westerners of the past 100 years or so,
13:11such fearful symmetries betrayed the hand of God
13:15just as did the Holy Bible.
13:17If this was so, the measurements of these ancient stones
13:21held the history of the future in them
13:24just as did the Book of Revelations.
13:27Counting out the years from the Bible's story of creation,
13:31they measured out the corridors
13:33They measured out the corridors
13:35through the ages of Adam and the patriarchs,
13:39through the prophets and the kings,
13:42the life of Jesus,
13:44and up to the doorway of the highest burial chamber,
13:48which, they claimed, marked the year 1914,
13:52the same year that, according to these Westerners of the 1920s,
13:56had seen the beginning of the greatest calamity
13:59the world had ever known.
14:02Suddenly, then, the future lay in here,
14:06in King Cheop's great burial chamber.
14:11Can you imagine, then, these modern mystics,
14:15the secrets of history, the future and their ruler?
14:19They slowly approach the ending of the world.
14:231928.
14:26Hmm. Clearly crazy. It doesn't work.
14:30In some strange way,
14:32these people had hit on something of the ancient mentality,
14:36something of that grasping for eternity.
14:39These air shafts go straight up to major stars,
14:43right to the outside of the pyramid.
14:45This building is locked into heaven.
14:48The floor, if you extend it out from here,
14:51180 feet, the pyramid above
14:54is exactly half the size of the Great Pyramid in its entirety.
14:58There's a magical geometry going on here.
15:01These walls are so accurately constructed,
15:04north, south, east and west,
15:06that they're hundreds of a degree out.
15:08The sarcophagus, before the tourists got at it,
15:12was so perfect that only the most modern measuring instruments
15:16can find out discrepancies in its size.
15:20So the ancients, too, were interested in a sort of eternal perfection.
15:25The pyramid was placed in the heart of Egypt, in the heart of heaven.
15:28The Nile, after all, flows from south to north.
15:31The sun crosses it from east to west.
15:33They were grasping for eternity
15:35and made this room as hard as a diamond and as perfect as they could.
15:39So the king and Egypt would last for all eternity.
15:56After the Egyptians came the Greeks and Romans,
16:00who said that geometry itself had come from Egypt
16:03and made a list of seven wonders.
16:06Then came the Christians, who shunned such pagan things.
16:10Not even the pyramids are mentioned in the Bible.
16:13To them, all real wonders were the works of God.
16:17For a while, the Greeks and the Romans
16:20For them, all real wonders were the works of God.
16:24For a while, the seven ancient wonders seemed to disappear.
16:29But these astonishing stones in the desert endured,
16:33and pilgrims still walked through the sand to see them.
16:42So memories of the ancient wonders flickered in the West's imagination.
16:48And then the ancient lists were rediscovered, printed, published,
16:52read again, and far away in Christian Rome,
16:55the ghosts of wonder rose.
16:59So a giant statue of an emperor
17:01that had stood here beside Rome's largest amphitheatre
17:05was identified as the colossus that had stood upon the Isle of Rhodes.
17:10And the Colosseum took its name
17:13from one of the seven wonders of the world.
17:18Slowly, the city filled with ancient wonders.
17:23The tombs of the ancient emperors of Rome seemed like hanging gardens.
17:28And there were obelisks and pyramids.
17:30No-one knew the difference now.
17:32And temples, too, and giant statues.
17:36Now Rome, not Babylon, was filled with stars and zodiacs.
17:41It became a magic city,
17:43surrounded with a wall of iron enclosing seven hills,
17:47one for each day of the creation
17:49and one for the creator's rest.
17:55And there were 365 squares in Rome,
17:58365 squares in Rome.
18:01And there were 365 squares in Rome.
18:04365 streets.
18:06365 palaces for the popes.
18:09And each palace had 365 steps.
18:12And each step was covered with bread enough to feed the world.
18:18It was a dream of poor people,
18:20imagining a legendary past,
18:22a past of endless wealth and wonder.
18:26Slowly, though,
18:28the ancient ghosts of wonder found a place again
18:31in humankind's imagination and ambition.
18:34And then it was
18:36that the finest images of all the seven wonders were created,
18:40at that magic moment when scientific study had begun.
18:44Yet all those ancient memories and myths were still alive.
18:49About 1520,
18:51a Dutch artist, Martin van Heemskerk,
18:54travelled down to Rome and was completely fascinated.
18:58Years later, he produced a set of drawings of the seven wonders
19:02that brought them back to life again.
19:05Heemskerk set his seven wonders
19:07on a stage which everybody knew and could enjoy.
19:11They were published as a set of prints and were very popular.
19:15And still a century later,
19:17tapestry weavers were using his designs
19:20in sets of noble hangings
19:22that portrayed the seven ancient wonders of the world.
19:29That's perhaps the most famous of Heemskerk's seven wonders,
19:33the great colossus of Rhodes astride the harbour.
19:37Actually, it wasn't Heemskerk's idea, that figure.
19:40It never really stood like that, of course.
19:42What happened was that a traveller went to Rhodes,
19:45heard a local story, put a drawing of it in a geography book.
19:49Heemskerk's pinched the drawing, which was just of this figure,
19:52but he set it in this wonderful, magical landscape
19:55and he's telling the story of the colossus.
19:57See, what's going on? There's an Arab raid.
20:00See those little boats going in with Christian galley slaves pulling away?
20:05There's the local people praying to the colossus for help
20:08and here's the Arab workman demolishing the great face of the statue.
20:12So he's really bringing the seven wonders alive, you might say.
20:17This one, well, this brings it alive in a different sort of way.
20:21It tells another story.
20:23Not the destruction of one of the wonders, but actually it's building.
20:27You see, there's the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus,
20:30there's the goddess suitably clothed in northern style
20:33and there's the master masons all chipping away and making the columns.
20:38Now, this is where this one gets a bit interesting
20:41because this column here actually fits beside the doorway
20:45and this guy here is said by some to be King Solomon
20:49and this is the building of Solomon's temple.
20:52See, what happened in medieval times was that the seven wonders were pagan,
20:56were taken over by another set of wonders,
20:59so the pyramid becomes Noah's Ark,
21:01the temple of Artemis becomes the temple of Solomon.
21:04Look, there's something else very interesting in this tapestry here.
21:09These poor workers that made these things in Brussels
21:12really had to follow these grand designs,
21:14but in the borders they were allowed to do their own thing.
21:18And these guys in their little dark workshops
21:20were thinking about the seven wonders of the world,
21:23not the grand vision, but the little common, ordinary visions.
21:27And so you get up there another of the Gothic seven wonders,
21:31the magic bird, the phoenix, that builds its funeral pyre
21:35and is lit by the sun and as it burns to death it rises in resurrection.
21:39It's an image of Jesus Christ.
21:41There's another very local wonder here too.
21:44That's a little hot spring by the French town of Grenoble.
21:47Very wonderful to have warm water without having to heat it.
21:59There were other visions of the seven wonders,
22:02visions less benign and far more frightening.
22:05And these too haunt our modern cities.
22:09Dreams that started in a Roman wood.
22:12Dreams of pain and love and death.
22:38This weird building is a sort of Renaissance time lock.
22:43The entrance to a dream of the seven wonders of the world.
22:50The entrance too to a garden made in the 16th century by Vicino Orsini,
22:55a retired soldier, a clever, cynical man amusing his friends.
23:02Here the seven wonders have become a set of riddles in a sacred grove,
23:07a little wood filled with footnotes, paradox and sheer terror.
23:37Orsini turns the colossus of the seven wonders into a wrestling madman
23:41tearing his opponent right in half.
23:45The old soldier who conducted massacres on behalf of the Pope
23:49shows us the darker side of valour and presents us with a tortured paradox.
23:55Orsini himself nudges you as you walk around his nightmare.
23:59If Rhodes took pride from its colossus, he says,
24:02so this one in my wood is glorious too.
24:08An old Venetian woodcut in a dream book
24:11showed Orsini this vision of the ancient mausoleum.
24:15His sculptors copied the wind vane trumpeting victory at the top
24:20and stood it on a tortoise.
24:23It's a slow, cynical victory, this, then.
24:27One moving into the jaws of hell.
24:31And on the very mouth of hell itself,
24:33Orsini wrote Dante's famous words,
24:37Abandon all thought, ye who enter here.
24:44Another of these woodcuts showed a monk's erotic dream,
24:48two lovers looking at the ruins of an ancient city in a forest.
24:53Orsini, too, made a brand-new dream.
24:56These, then, are the very first examples
24:59of Westerners taking pleasure in ruins.
25:03A pleasure now that drives a worldwide media industry
25:07and a multi-billion-dollar tourist trade as well.
25:12Here, at last, is hope.
25:16And here, at last, is hope.
25:20And here, at last, is hope.
25:23Here, at last, is hope.
25:26The light of the world, the Pharos of Alexandria,
25:29one of the seven wonders drawn for Orsini by a friend.
25:33But the world is barely balanced on a monster's head
25:36and is surrounded by a grove of four-faced gods.
25:42It's a very modern dream, then,
25:44a dream that takes the seven wonders
25:46and uses them to make a grand new statement.
25:49A little later on, this same device
25:52would place the ghosts of wonder
25:54into almost every modern city in the world.
25:59One man alone,
26:01the man who made the drawing of Orsini's lighthouse for him,
26:04the artist and aquarian Piero Ligurio,
26:07had started the seven wonders
26:09on their journey from this lonely wood.
26:13There you are.
26:15Volume 34 of The Antiquities of Rome
26:18by Piero Ligurio.
26:20There were once hundreds of these.
26:22There's only a few of them left now.
26:24This one's kept in Piero's hometown of Naples.
26:27Piero, there's not much known today.
26:30I'm afraid you're right.
26:32I'm afraid you're right.
26:34I'm afraid you're right.
26:36I'm afraid you're right.
26:38I'm afraid you're right.
26:40Piero, there's not much known today.
26:43In fact, he's best known
26:45for mucking around with Michelangelo's designs and getting the sack.
26:48He really didn't like Michelangelo.
26:50Michelangelo wasn't a scholar.
26:52Piero Ligurio was,
26:54and he was a new and different sort of scholar.
26:57Older people, really, had just looked at the books
27:00and conjured up the past from that.
27:02They'd ended up with a past which was full of dragons and alchemists
27:05as well as wise men, but a very distant thing.
27:08But Piero saw the past as a great machine
27:11that had sort of distracted and strewn its bits across the landscape,
27:15and he studied the bits and put them together with the ancient texts.
27:19So, here's a book then that describes all the monuments of Rome,
27:23written by hand. These were never printed.
27:25That's why they're so precious.
27:27Most of these monuments have gone today.
27:29Look, here's a section on the king of the gods.
27:32Altar, altar, coin, drainpipe, statues.
27:35Slowly, Piero's putting together that ancient world,
27:38putting it back with the texts.
27:40See, earlier on, in Bomazzo,
27:42the ancient world had been sort of a place of fairies and dragons and alchemists.
27:47But here, Piero's really starting to get down to it.
27:50He sees the past's world as a machine.
27:54And in this machine, the seven wonders plays a very special role.
28:00Just look what he has to say about some of his gods.
28:03Here's the goddess Artemis, for example,
28:05whose greatest temple was Ephesus, as Piero well knew.
28:08Piero knew almost as much about Artemis as we do today.
28:12This is his beautiful drawing of her.
28:14He saw her, really, as the mother of the universe.
28:18A bit like the Virgin Mary, really.
28:20He saw her, as he saw that ancient universe,
28:23as an age in which all of humankind was symbolised
28:26and portrayed in the most amazing way.
28:30The climax of Piero's work on antiquity
28:33is this extraordinary map, which he had printed in 1561.
28:38It shows the city of Rome.
28:40For most Westerners, it was always thought of
28:43as really the climax of pagan civilisation.
28:46For Piero, of course, that meant it had to be filled with wonder.
28:50It had to be filled with wonder.
28:52It had to be filled with wonder.
28:54It had to be filled with wonder.
28:56For Piero, of course, that meant it had to be filled with wonder.
29:00Each one of these wonders somehow symbolising
29:02the necessary bits of the great machine.
29:05So, if we look across his map, it's not only a wonderful map of Rome,
29:09but it is filled with the wonders of the world.
29:12There, for example, are hanging gardens.
29:14To Piero, this meant the beautiful balance of man and nature.
29:18There are some pyramids.
29:20They were not only granaries, like the Bible said,
29:22but held the wealth of the human soul.
29:25So, to guide people through the streets and down the rivers.
29:29But, you know, it wasn't just the map of Rome
29:32that really Piero achieved this wonderful fusion of myth and archaeology.
29:37It did another map of the port of Rome that ran off the side.
29:41There, it's all put together.
29:43So many of the wonders.
29:45There's a colossus standing to tell you
29:47that you are coming to the centre of civilisation.
29:50There's a lighthouse, too, to guide your boat into the harbour
29:53and your soul towards civilisation, too.
29:56And there's a great arcade embracing not only sailors, but the soul itself.
30:06Was all of this an inspiration for the squares of Rome?
30:10Or was Piero simply ahead of his time?
30:13At St Peter's, Bernini's great arcade
30:16seemed to echo Piero's famous drawing of the ancient port of Rome.
30:24And all those wonders are still here, too,
30:27now exorcised by Christian popes.
30:31The Egyptian obelisk, which Piero called a pyramid,
30:35is crowned now with a golden cross.
30:38And Piero's pagan port is now a haven for the faithful,
30:42ringed by colossal statues of the saints.
30:46And the Pharos lighthouse?
30:48Well, that's St Peter's.
30:50The lantern on the church,
30:52sending out the light of faith into the darkness of the world.
30:57And the Pharos lighthouse?
30:59Well, that's St Peter's.
31:01The lantern on the church,
31:03sending out the light of faith into the darkness of the world.
31:27Street by street, square by square,
31:30all Rome was filling with dreams of wonder.
31:34A theatre full of brand-new wonders,
31:37echoing the ancient ghosts.
31:56Haunting visions of antiquity,
31:59of Alexander, elephants and Pharos.
32:10Of pyramids and mausoleums,
32:12of magic kings and queens and vast, vaulting temples.
32:18And, of course, of the ancient gods.
32:27Huge ambitions and astounding images
32:30spilling out across the Western world.
32:33The ancient ghosts of wonder.
32:56The ancient ghosts of wonder.
33:14It was an Austrian architect
33:16that finally brought the seven wonders down to earth.
33:19Johann Fischer von Erlach took time off from redesigning Vienna
33:23to produce really the first work of art history in the world.
33:26And the seven wonders are right at the front.
33:28It's a title page, magnificent black-letter script.
33:31And here, immediately, are the seven wonders.
33:34This is the seven wonders as process.
33:36This is not the seven wonders as marvels and miracles.
33:40Here we've got a picture of Babylonia
33:42and he's working out how the gardens are irrigated.
33:45He also points out that this is the biggest brick building ever made.
33:48Very important.
33:50Same at the pyramids.
33:51He points out this is the biggest stone building ever made.
33:54How did people do that?
33:56We're into logistics.
33:58So when we get to Zeus,
33:59this is not only the biggest ivory statue ever made,
34:02but he's also worrying about how you accommodate it in a temple.
34:05You know, you're really looking at the beginning of the modern world.
34:09Mausoleum.
34:12Great temples, Artemis.
34:14He describes it as the perfect mixture of marble and stone.
34:17You see, he's very involved in numbers.
34:19Not entirely involved in numbers.
34:21He's still got the wonderful old Colossus of Rhodes
34:24striding across the harbour wall.
34:26This is still the age when Louis XV's courtiers
34:29were killing children in black masses, after all.
34:32But nonetheless, this is a modern man thinking about the modern wonders.
34:36Here's the lighthouse.
34:38The description underneath tells you how it was made.
34:48In the 18th century, though,
34:50the same century as Von Eyler,
34:52wonder itself was slowly transforming,
34:55changing to span the world.
34:58A brand-new sense of wonder was starting to emerge.
35:06The world was changing.
35:08The world was changing.
35:10The world was changing.
35:12The world was changing.
35:14The world was changing.
35:20On Sunday 12th August, in the year of our Lord, 1770,
35:24two rather anxious men puffed their way up this hill.
35:28Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy
35:31and the botanist Joseph Banks.
35:40This is the hill of Lizard Island.
35:44He was exploring the entire east coast of Australia.
35:47Now, of course, he wasn't the first man to come here.
35:51The Aborigines had been here so long,
35:53they'd seen the sea come into the land
35:55and the corals grow in the warm water.
35:57There'd been Javanese here too, and Chinese.
36:00But Cook's party were the first people
36:03with a real modern vision to come here,
36:05people with a modern sense of property and ownership.
36:09And they were prepared to back that with guns.
36:13At that time, men like Cook were mapping the entire world,
36:18marking out, taking control.
36:22In the century that followed,
36:24railways, airstrips, roads,
36:26cables of a dozen descriptions went right around the planet,
36:30encompassing the whole world in a net.
36:33And that grand, uncontrolled, unexplored nature,
36:37the world in which man had lived since the beginning of time,
36:40the seven wonders, would all but disappear.
36:47As they climbed, though, in burning heat and very high humidity,
36:53they weren't thinking of all that.
36:56They were actually looking for a way out of a most deadly trap.
37:03The trap was made of living coral.
37:06As Captain Cook sailed north up the Australian coast,
37:10the solid wall of the Great Barrier Reef
37:13had pushed him ever closer to the shore.
37:19For 1,000 miles or more, Cook successfully avoided it,
37:23inching behind small boats sent out to spot underwater hazards.
37:30On June 11th, though, the Endeavour hit a reef and stuck fast,
37:35as the waves rocked her back and forth,
37:37the sharp coral soared through the Endeavour's hull.
37:42The sailors saw some of the planks of the keel floating to the surface.
37:46They threw everything they could lay their hands on overboard
37:50and managed to refloat her.
37:52After a desperate week of gales,
37:54they found a crocodile-infested inlet
37:57where they beached the Endeavour and started to repair her.
38:06Five weeks later, they were back at sea,
38:09still inching through the world's most dangerous stretch of water,
38:13still threatened by the coral
38:15and finding the reef moving ever closer to the land,
38:19feeling, as Cook says,
38:21entirely trapped on this most alien shore.
38:31They had climbed the hill of Lizard Island
38:34highest on the reef
38:36to look for a way out of the coral barrier into the open sea.
38:40From the top of the hill, Cook saw a way out,
38:43a narrow passage through the reef,
38:45and took the necessary compass bearing.
38:48The very next day, the Endeavour sailed triumphantly
38:51through the perilous little channel,
38:53through the great barrier and out into the high, wide sea.
38:58These days, Cook's labyrinthine trap
39:02is counted as one of the wonders of the world.
39:05The great barrier reef, as large as the state of California,
39:09the world's largest living organism
39:12and the only one that you can see from space.
39:16What Cook saw as a terrifying hazard
39:19is something most modern people want to see before they die.
39:23Dive here and it's incredible.
39:25400 different corals, 1,500 species of fish,
39:29400 molluscs and wonderful animals like whales and turtles
39:33fly over it and it looks like a chain of opals lying in the sea.
39:38But only a microscope can show you the details
39:41of the coral polyps that made it all.
39:49To see the wonder of this place,
39:51to see it in the way we see today,
39:54you need the sort of equipment that Captain Cook never knew,
39:58aqualungs, cameras, aeroplanes, space capsules and microscopes.
40:03All this has made a very different world for us.
40:12Though Cook would never know it,
40:14his maps and plans of unknown seashores
40:17have become part of a basic grid of this brand-new universe,
40:21where there are wonders of a very different type,
40:24wonders of nature manipulated and observed.
40:42Spanning a canyon on the Colorado River,
40:45the Boulder Dam is the world's largest concrete structure
40:49and costs pyramids of cash.
40:52Its waters irrigate California.
40:57Its turbines light Las Vegas
40:59and nature is manipulated on a scale not seen before.
41:09Now, the great grand natural world is trapped
41:13and newly linked to humankind.
41:16Building from powerful basic forces, using natural laws,
41:20we make electricity and all the other modern energies.
41:25We have made a brand-new world with very modern wonders.
41:47Like most modern buildings,
41:49the Las Vegas Pyramid and Sphinx are only temporary.
41:53They have built-in obsolescence.
41:59Ancient wonders, though,
42:01the built-fetched pyramids and sphincters
42:04have been built from the ground up.
42:09The pyramids have been built from the ground up.
42:13Ancient wonders, though,
42:15were built for ever and for courtiers and kings.
42:20This, though, is the democratisation of wonder.
42:24People play in modern pyramids.
42:27They are called and warned and entertained by them.
42:32Here, though, the world's largest beam of light,
42:35which I'm told you can clearly see from space,
42:38may be turned off in ten years' time.
42:44MUSIC
43:04Clearly, the real wonder is somewhere else.
43:08Now, perhaps, the cities, with their wiry nerves,
43:12have themselves become a wonder.
43:14They're not the kind of thing traditionally called wonderful,
43:18yet they are wonderful, as wonderful as a landscape,
43:22and like a landscape,
43:24they are shaped continuously by natural force.
43:38Ancient people also thought that they were linked with nature,
43:42that the prisms of the pyramids
43:44refracted the divine order of the universe
43:47onto the ancient state of Egypt.
43:51Our true beginnings, then,
43:53where wonder and the modern mind were made,
43:57are here at Pharaoh's Magic Mountains.
44:07MUSIC
44:37.