Ancient Worlds

Istanbul in Turkey, a city poised between east and west

and between the present and the past.

It's a good place to think about where all this comes from,

not the physical structures of this particular city,

but the invisible web that holds all cities together

and which we humans have been spinning since the time of the very first cities,

some 6,000 years ago.

Civilisation is the best word for it,

one of the most profound innovations in our human story.

Historians today have become a little bit embarrassed

by the word civilisation.

We prefer less exalted terms such as culture, community, or society.

But in telling the stories

of the first great civilisations of the ancient world,

I'm going to be making the case for civilisation itself.

More than 4,000 years ago,

an unknown poet listed the attributes of a successful city,

the place where civilisation was first forged, and where the aspirations

of a civilisation still find their most concrete expression.

The details of the poem are so vivid, they could have been written yesterday.

The warehouses are well provisioned,

and the houses within the city are well built.

Those who bathe before the holidays rejoice in the courtyards.

And foreigners flock to and fro like exotic birds.

The old women are full of good advice.

The old men are full of good counsel.

The young women are full of dancing spirit.

The young men are full of fighting spirit.

And the little ones are full of the spirit of joy.

The people are happy.

Of course, not everybody can be happy.

But I believe that the aspirations expressed in that ancient poem

make as much sense to us now as they did 4,000 years ago.

It's like that when you look down into the well of history.

It gets dark so quickly.

But then just sometimes,

you catch a glimpse of something at the bottom, alive and moving.

Then suddenly you realise that it's your own reflection looking back at you.

That's the story that I want to tell to you now.

It's not the story of ancient worlds long past,

it's the story of us, then.

When we talk about the ancient world,

we tend to think of rare and exotic artefacts

or the monumental remains of epic architecture.

But these are just the empty shells that got left behind

when the tide of history turned.

The living creatures, the civilisations that once inhabited these shells,

were rarely if ever static or stately.

They were dynamic, chaotic, and always threatening to spin out of control,

because civilisation is based on an improbable idea

that strangers can live together in dense urban settings,

forging new allegiances that replace the ties of family, clan or tribe.

It's an idea we're still coming to terms with today.

But one of the best ways to understand the challenges

is to look at how our ancestors tackled them the first time around.

In Baghdad, people know all too well just how precious civilisation is,

and how vulnerable.

The ancient Greeks believed that the cornerstone for all successful societies

was Eunomia, good order.

Lose that and you're in danger of losing everything.

Today, slowly and painfully,

Iraqis are struggling to put back together

the good order that dictatorship, regime change and civil war tore apart.

They live with the hope that things will be better one day.

It's a tall order but not an impossible one.

In this part of the world, it's a story that's been played out again and again

from the time of the very first cities,

which appeared in this region some 6,000 years ago.

We're in southern Iraq,just north of Basra, and I'm on my way to the place

where this experiment in a new way of being human was first tried.

The ancient Greeks called this region Mesopotamia,

the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

But this is also the land between two seas,

the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea,

known to us as the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

It is also the land between mountain and desert,

lagoon and salt marsh,

and all of these geographical features have to be borne in mind

when considering the birthplace of the first civilisations.

Geography versus history.

It's impossible to know which takes precedence.

There's no getting away from the brutal facts of nature.

Rivers that flood will dry up,

rainfall that's intermittent, mountains that are impassable,

deserts that are hostile.

Applying this kind of analysis to Mesopotamia,

where the summers are hot, the winters are cold,

and rainfall is low, I'd sum it up like this.

Difficult, but not impossible.

No Garden of Eden, but no howling wilderness either.

People had occupied this marginal land for a thousand years

before the cities came.

They arrived as pastoralists with their herds

but they stayed on as farmers,

clinging close to the riverbanks

in scattered communities of one or two thousand people at most.

But then,just under 6,000 years ago, a remarkable thing happened.

People left the security of their family compounds and tribal villages.

They came together with other strangers

to create something far more complex,

a city, a society, a civilisation.

The first place we know of where this radical experiment was tried is here.

The ancient city of Uruk.

So here it is, Uruk, the mother of all cities.

Nowadays, as you can imagine, it's quite difficult to get to.

But I'm glad I did.

Athens, Rome, Constantinople,

London, Paris, New York.

If you traced the family trees of all these great cities,

they'd all lead back here, to this dry and dusty corner of southern Iraq.

Nowadays, there's not much to see.

But 5,000 years ago,

this was home to 40, or perhaps 50,000 people.

A population density unprecedented in human history.

In the mythology of Mesopotamia, Uruk was built by Gilgamesh,

two thirds god, one third human.

The great epic poem, The Legend of Gilgamesh,

contains a proud description of his city.

Go up, pace the walls of Uruk,

study the foundation terrace, and examine the brickwork.

Is not the masonry made of kiln-fired brick?

And did not the seven sages lay its foundations?

Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk.

In fact, if anything,

The Legend of Gilgamesh understates things.

The walls that surrounded Uruk were nearly 10 kilometres in length,

enclosing an area of six square kilometres.

Now, just to give you a point of comparison,

classical Athens at its height was no more than five square kilometres.

And even Imperial Rome was little more than 10.

So, by the measures of the ancient world,

these first cities were neither small nor insignificant.

Right from the very start, they were big players.

Starting just under 6,000 years ago, the archaeological record at Uruk

reveals a period of intensive building and rebuilding,

which went on for four or five centuries.

In that period, a dozen or more large public buildings were built,

temples, palaces, assembly halls.

We don't know for sure what they were,

but they were all of different shapes and sizes,

and they used novel building techniques like these cone mosaics,

which once lined the walls here.

You get the feeling that behind the restless building and rebuilding,

the people of Uruk were searching for ways through architecture

to express the new social structures that had come to be in their new city,

the shape of things to come.

But what kind of a society was being built at Uruk?

And why had it come about?

The answer can be found in the need to satisfy

the most basic of all human needs, hunger.

Civilisation might have its head in the clouds,

but it marches on its stomach.

This is the Euphrates,

one of history's great rivers, 1,700 miles from source to delta.

There's a lot of debate about where the name comes from,

but some say it's derived from the Akkadian word, phrat,

which means fruitful.

And it's certainly that,

provided its waters can be got to the farmers' fields.

Agriculture, growing crops rather than raising livestock,

pre-dates the first cities by thousands of years.

But at some point, and quite suddenly,

agricultural activity in Mesopotamia became more intensive

and on a larger scale than had ever been seen before.

It may have been in response to an environmental crisis,

a prolonged period of drought

or the sudden change in the course of the river

following a cataclysmic flood.

For the first time since people had started living in this marginal land,

their survival would have depended on finding ways to manage the waters,

forcing them to think beyond the narrow concerns of their clans

and finding common cause with other clans,

building dams and digging canals to bring the water to the crops

on which all their lives now depended.

The social consequences of this co-operation were profound.

Those farmers weren't just digging ditches and sowing barley,

they were planting the seed from which the tree of civilisation would grow.

But what turns the farmer in his field into a citizen of a city?

To answer that question I travelled 600 miles north from Uruk,

over the border into present-day Syria,

to another ancient city, Tell Brak.

The Syrians call this area Al-Jazeera, the Island,

because it's situated between the Euphrates to the south

and the Tigris to the north.

And the waters of both created an island of fertility

in a sea of desert and mountain.

And that is Tell Brak.

It looks like a hill, but that impressive hump is actually man-made,

the result of thousands and thousands of years of occupation,

which has raised the level of the site 50 metres above the surrounding plain.

Tell Brak stands as an impressive monument

to the compulsive city building activities of our ancestors.

Excavations have been going on here since the 1930s,

when the British archaeologist, Max Mallowan,

accompanied by his new bride, the crime writer Agatha Christie,

first started working on Tell Brak.

Among Mallowan's finds were these distinctive eye amulets,

which had also been found in great numbers at Uruk.

This suggests that people from Uruk may have travelled north,

bringing their radical new ideas with them.