Civilisations

I've always felt at home in the past.

For after all, what is the present except an endless chain of memories?

Some of them are translated into stone.

We are all the inheritors of those memories,

and we look after them as best we can.

All this, so we can pass on their revelation to the future.

But every so often, something comes along to shake them from our grip.

In Mosul in a matter of hours,

the forces of ISIS destroyed the work of centuries.

And when they took the ancient trading city of Palmyra,

where the cultures of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Jews

have mixed and merged,

it was feared that exactly the same would happen.

Here in Geneva, a few Palmyrene artefacts have been saved,

stolen before the violence began,

arrested at customs as black-marketeers tried to sell them.

Like this bust of a priest.

His eyes wide open, he seems not dead at all

Just translated to a life elsewhere.

These lovingly carved likenesses of the dead

looted from their tombs,

ended up in exile but saved for posterity.

Saving the art that remained in Palmyra, however,

could come at a terrible price.

Khaled al-Asaad, the chief curator of Palmyra,

was 81 when ISIS took the town.

And when their soldiers demanded he tell them

where the city's artworks had been hidden,

he refused.

They beheaded him in the Roman Theatre,

suspended his mutilated body from a traffic light,

placed his head between his feet,

and attached a placard identifying him as, "Director of Idolatry."”

Or we might say, "Protector of what needs to be saved,

"cherished, passed on as the work of civilisation."

A lot of us spend our days talking about art.

I doubt if very many of us are prepared to lay down our life for it.

But for Khaled al-Asaad, the stones and statues and columns

of Palmyra were more than simply an ensemble of antiquity.

He didn't need a UNESCO certificate to tell him that the significance

of Palmyra was at once both local and universal.

It's there for believers and unbelievers, for east and west

and somehow, it had fallen to him to be the guardian of that inheritance.

We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn't,

but when its opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty

and intolerance and lust for destruction,

we know what civilisation is.

We know it from the shock of its imminent loss

as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.

The record of human history brims over with the rage to destroy.

But it's also imprinted with the opposite instinct

To make things that go beyond the demands of food and shelter.

Things that make us see the world and our place in it

in a different light.

We are the art-making animal.

And this is what we have made.

When did it begin?

That second moment of creation.

The dawning of human creativity.

Where did it begin?

It must have started in Africa,

where homo sapiens first evolved about 200,000 years ago.

On South Africa's cape coast,

Archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation stretching back

around 100,000 years.

In one of those caves, this was discovered.

Seventy-seven thousand years old, a piece of red ochre.

A mineral naturally rich in iron,

etched in a diamond pattern.

The oldest deliberately decorative marks ever discovered.

The pattern may have been a kind of language or a kind of number scoring.

But it's hard to see them as serving any functional need

connected with shelter or sustenance.

They are a design.

And design announces the beginning of culture.

Another 40,000 years pass,

and in northern Spain within a hill so uncannily conical it seems man-made,

that mineral, that red ochre has become paint.

Deep inside a cave,

rudimentary marks have bloomed and multiplied.

Red circles.

There are no brushes.

No sticks to lay on this paint.

They're all applied orally.

Colour swilled in the mouth with saliva

and blown directly onto the rock.

And then, these.

An eruption of design,

not blown onto the surface, but painted.

Contours, outlines, flowing streams of dots.

There's a meaning here, but we don't know what it is.

The signs of a biological compulsion to pattern.

It's what we humans do.

What we want to do. What we can't stop ourselves doing.

Then you come across this.

And in an instant, vast millennia of time just collapse

and you're in the midst of fellow humans

they're hands doing what hands do.

Signalling from a very long way off,

37,000 years distant, in fact.

But this long distance greeting

somehow makes us bond with the makers of this,

because they establish a presence that is palpably alive.

Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves

as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia.

Wherever we went it seems, the urge to signal the presence went with us.

And undeniably, these hand stencils do

what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to.

First, they want to be seen by others,

and then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker.

Like the earliest photographs, the images here are faded and distinct.

But something tantalising is happening.

The realisation that we can, however crudely, represent.

In another cave, further west in Asturias,

20 minutes walk away from any daylight,

are images that are anything but crude.

This was a doubling of the world.

A life copy.

And executed with startling precision of drawing technique.

They even understood modelling.

Anatomical features following the rock wall surface of the cave.

And there were many colours, not just the ubiquitous red ochre

but violets and blacks,

and all those techniques seemed to have been there from the beginning,

tens of thousands of years ago.

When you think about this technique, your head just spins,

because it has to have been, above all, a memory exercise.

They would have had to fix in their mind exact anatomical details

and then transpose them here on the surface of the cave.

And yet, when all that was done,

they managed to preserve miraculously this animal vitality.

This is truly one of the great marvels of the suddenly expanded human mind.

It was in the later years of the 19th century,

that images like these began to be discovered.

The first, and for many years, the most famous

were in the caves of Altamira also in Northern Spain.

Extraordinary paintings of bison, herds of them.

Sleeping, lying, standing.

But as the number of painted caves discovered grew,

it became clear that art and music came into the world together.

The musical instruments were found.

Animal horns.

Flutes made from the bones of vultures.

And even more hauntingly, bull-roarers.

A piece of wood tied to a rope spun around the head

that makes this strange whooping sound.

Recent experiments with these instruments have suggested

that the proximity of painting and music was not accidental.

That they were connected elements in sacred rituals.

I'm using software to test the acoustics in the space.

So we generate this wet sine wave,

and we use that to capture the acoustic of the cave.

And we can look for relationships between sound and paintings.

So the earliest paintings seem to be in these little side areas,

where maybe one person might be there alone.

And the later paintings seem to be in more grand places,

a venue where a few people would have gathered,

somewhere more dramatic that sounds more dramatic.

You can compare these spaces to a cathedral or a temple.

They're places where people came for sacred moments

which were full of imagery and ritual and music.

And it's like going into a place that's kind of underground.

Where you can stop time. Where you can pause and have that special moment,

where you were out of time.

Where you're somewhere else.

Painting is the sound.

The sound making, the music making,

whatever was happening in this sacred ritual

that is the painting.

The painting is what's left of that activity.

Anthropologists and archaeologists

tell us that almost all of ice age painting

had some sort of other-worldly ritual function.

And therefore, it ought not to be seen as art.

Though, of course, religion has been a primary purpose of art

for thousands of years.

In Africa, the animals that dominate European cave paintings

are accompanied by humans.

They appear as stylised elongated figures.

Sometimes they're shown while becoming transformed into beasts.

Men with heads of antelopes,

creatures that could never have been observed from life,

but which arose from the trance-struck imagination of the shamans.

In the rock art of Africa, these hybrids were painted.

In Europe, where there were far fewer of them,

they went three-dimensional.

In 1939, the fragments of this lion-man,

carved from mammoth ivory,

were found in a German cave.

They remained an unsolved puzzle for 30 years

before archaeologists realised that they formed a single figure

made between 35 and 40,000 years ago.

This may be a shaman in the middle of a transformation.

It may be the very first of the beast gods,

around which Pagan religions would build there mythologies.

Perhaps the making of such things was itself a sacred calling.

To see how much work was needed to make a lion-man,

archaeologist, Wulf Hein, embarked on an experiment

to carve a replica using authentic tools and materials.

Without a mammoth tusk, he used a piece of legally-sourced elephant ivory.