First Civilizations

Every civilization needs a story...

A shared narrative to believe in,

and the most potent narrative is religion.

But how and why did religion become so powerful?

What part did it play

in the birth of civilization?

If you want to pray,

you've got to come to this space.

This is the beginning of religion as we know it.

Religion brought people together.

This leads to the feeling that we are

part of something bigger than ourselves.

Religion helps create a cohesive society

that allows a civilization to form.

Glory and praise forever and ever.

- Amen. - We didn't always live this way.

For 99% of our time on earth,

we had no organized religion.

But then...

We settled down, grew food,

built cities, fought battles,

wrote stories, sold goods, and worshipped gods.

This is the story of that transition...

Stepping stones on the road to civilization.

It's a story set across the globe

in the middle east, central America, Southern Asia...

All of them seed beds of civilization.

Here, our ancestors designed the blueprint

by which we still live our lives.

This is where the modern world began.

The longest-lasting civilization

in the history of the world was in ancient Egypt.

For 3,000 years, the pharaohs ruled,

and their people believed.

It was here civilization and religion

became fused as one.

Every major civilization since

has adopted the same formula.

Religion is the glue that binds us together.

But how did ancient Egyptians come upon this realization?

Archaeologist Jeff Rose

is headed for an ancient watering hole

in Egypt's western desert...

Nabta Playa.

Nowadays, this is all just dry desert,

but 7,000 or 8,000 years ago,

this would have been rolling grassland

with elephants and giraffe.

You would have had groups of herders with cattle

moving around this landscape,

following the water sources that became available.

So, here at Nabta Playa, when the summer rains came,

it would fill up this basin with water,

and all those herders would come and congregate here

around the lake just for the season.

The herders built something sacred.

It's been described as Egypt's Stonehenge.

In reality, it's 2,000 years older.

Begun over 7,000 years ago,

it's one of the oldest religious sites in the world.

It may now look like a jumble of rocks,

but this is where the building blocks of religion

began to emerge.

For over two million years,

we were hunter-gatherers, and hunter-gatherers

typically practice a religion called animism.

Animism is when you... When you see the divine,

you see the spirits of nature all around you.

It's in the sand, it's in the rocks,

the wind, and the water.

It's everywhere.

But when they switch to herding,

this changes their worldview.

While hunter-gatherers roamed freely

across the landscape,

herders settled for weeks at a time

wherever they could find pasture.

This led to a new kind of religion.

The first thing that happens

when people start herding,

they start building sacred spaces.

If you want to pray, if you want to worship,

you've got to come to this space.

And what this does is it brings people together

from all over the place

into this one area to worship together.

The site is huge. 10 square miles of stones

arranged into circles and mounds.

The largest rocks, the megaliths,

were stood on end and placed in lines across the desert.

So, this giant megalith here,

I mean, this thing weighs several tons.

It would have been carried a few miles

just to get it to this point,

and that requires organized labor.

That requires people working together.

We can surmise that they would have had

some kind of spiritual significance to these things

to put that much effort into this.

And if that's the case, we're looking at

some sort of prototype church.

The first monuments were all

inspired by religion...

And often were aligned in a specific direction,

just like the stones at Nabta Playa.

This megalith would have been standing up straight,

and there's a whole line of them,

and they're all pointing to the north.

So, if you think about it, they didn't have compasses back then.

They had no way of knowing which way was north

except for the north star,

the fixed point in heaven that never moves.

That's interesting, because in later Egyptian religion,

we know that the north star

is the entrance into the afterlife.

So, what we could be looking at here

is the very beginnings of the Egyptian belief

in life after death.

At heart, all religion

is the search for meaning, for order,

to explain why things are the way they are.

So, this stone circle could very well be

the world's oldest calendar.

We have here two alignments of stones.

One points north toward the fixed point,

toward the north star...

And then the other alignment here

points 70 degrees to the east.

So, on the solstice, on June 21st,

the sun would have come up

and shone straight through this line,

and it would tell them right when

the summer rains were about to start.

For us, a calendar is a scientific instrument

for predicting the seasons.

But for the ancient Egyptians,

it had a religious significance.

They didn't have this distinction

between religion and science.

The stars, the gods, the seasons, the sun,

they were all linked together.

So, for them, they were just trying to understand

how their world worked.

The calendar has been moved

from Nabta Playa to a museum

180 miles away to preserve it,

along with Egypt's oldest religious sculpture.

This giant rock is no ordinary megalith.

It's been sculpted by the inhabitants of Nabta Playa,

some have suggested in the shape of a cow.

So, we could see the head here, and then the torso here.

What's really strange is it was found

buried beneath a series of collapsed other megaliths.

For the inhabitants of Nabta Playa,

the cow was the center of their world.

These are herders whose life, whose food,

whose milk, whose meat comes from the cow.

One of the astonishing things we find at Nabta Playa

are young cows sacrificed and buried beneath the ground.

Why would you sacrifice something

that is so essential to your livelihood?

And it's possible that these could be

ways of offerings to the gods

to control nature, to bring the rains,

to ensure that their livelihood continues.

What we're seeing here at Nabta Playa,

this is the beginning of religion as we know it.

I mean, now these people have to appeal to the gods

to make sure nature does what they want it to do

in order to survive.

This is exactly how religion operates today.

Religion seems so fundamental

to the human experience,

it may be hard-wired into our brains.

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg

is researching the impact of prayer

on religious believers.

OK, go ahead.

Our father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be they name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread...

We're looking at a variety of

different areas of the brain

to see what areas seem to be

turned on or turned off during intense

religious or spiritual experiences and practices.

And what you can see here are two scans that are done,

one during the prayer state,

one during the res state,

and during the prayer state, you can see that

there's a lot more red activity here

than what you see over here.

This sort of increased blood flow

in the frontal lobe shows up in any mental task

requiring focus and attention.

Give us this day our daily bread...

But the act of prayer

also affects the back of the brain...