History Channel Mankind The Story of All of Us

From the dust of empires,

New forces rise.

New ideas propel us forward.

New beliefs unite us.

And tear us apart.

Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet,

Most species will fail.

But for one, all the pieces will fall into place.

And a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.

This is our story, the story of all of us.

Rome, 455A.D..

At the gates of the imperial palace.

Gaiseric...

Known as the 'spear king',

Chief of a tribe of Germanic warriors: the Vandals.

They've crushed Roman armies in North Africa.

Now they're after the riches of Rome itself.

Trapped inside the palace, the empress, Licinia Eudoxia.

Daughter of a Christian convert,

Widow of a murdered emperor.

She and her children are the last of Rome's ruling family.

The imperial capital is under attack.

Ruling a fifth of the world's population...

...has stretched the empire to breaking point.

Like a supernova,

The empires we've seen on this planet

Have collapsed under their own weight.

A great mass of energy,

There's nothing brighter in the sky.

There was certainly nothing brighter and more powerful

Than the Roman Empire...

...until it wasn't.

Rome, the world's first megacity.

Population: one million.

The most modern city in the world.

Now, in ruins.

An empire in meltdown.

When you think about the Roman Empire

And the complexity of the system that failed,

It's incredibly frightening.

A system that could create the best army in the world,

That could unite the entire Mediterranean region,

The idea that a system like that

can fragment and break apart...

...it's apocalyptic.

Gaiseric's men wreak havoc.

The Roman Empire will never recover.

When you see that kind of horror,

And you're stuck and trapped inside this city,

You start running out of options very quick.

You can't run, you can't hide,

You can't defeat this force.

They will rape,

they will pillage and they will plunder.

But the Vandals are no savages.

They're educated and skilled in warfare,

Thanks to the Romans.

By the time the Vandals arrived in Rome,

They'd been living in the Roman Empire for a long, long time.

These were people who probably spoke Latin,

Who had served in armies alongside Roman soldiers,

They'd been mercenaries,

They'd engaged in trade with the Roman Empire.

Gaiseric has been fighting the Romans since his teens.

Now he's in reach of the ultimate prize:

Eudoxia.

Worth more to the Vandal chief than gold,

Having the empress as his hostage will bring him prestige.

Eudoxia will spend the next seven years

at Gaiseric's side.

Her daughter, forced to marry his son.

The empress of Rome enslaved by a barbarian.

The Roman Empire lasted for five centuries.

At its height, it ruled over 60 million people

And two million square miles.

As it disintegrates,

Barbarian tribes seize their opportunity.

Angles and Saxons push into Britain.

Franks sweep across Gaul,

Giving their name to modern France.

Visigoths seize what is now Spain.

When power collapses at anytime, anywhere,

It creates a vacuum, by definition,

Others come running in, territory gets grabbed up,

Ideas are repudiated, the Romans learned it,

We don't know who's going to be next.

With the collapse of Rome,

Europe reverts to a dark age of war,

famine and savagery.

Many essentials of Roman life are lost for centuries:

The technology to build aqueducts,

The use of coins,

In some areas even writing.

Rome loses 95% of its population.

London is abandoned.

The drama of Rome suggests,

That civilization does not progress in a straight line

Towards more prosperity,

More order, more law, more technology.

It shows us, in the picture,

Amazing things being achieved by the Greeks and the Romans,

And then those things being lost again.

With the fall of Rome,

Europe will fragment and stay divided for 1500 years.

But two new forces emerge,

Key to the story of mankind.

From the frozen north: the Vikings.

From the sun-baked south: the Arabs.

the Arabian Desert, 1,400 years ago.

Buried deep beneath...

...gold.

It'll help build a new civilization,

Founded on a new religion: Islam.

The Mahad Al Dahab mine,

worked by a thousand slaves,

Owned by Al-Hajjaj Al-Bahizi.

From the same tribe as the prophet Mohammed.

Already a mining tycoon,

soon worth his weight in gold.

Gold is an amazing metal,

It's easy to work with, it doesn't tarnish.

And it's so beautiful

That it seems to symbolize wealth and royalty

By its very existence.

All the gold ever mined comes from outer space,

From a time almost four billion years ago,

Known as the 'heavy bombardment'.

Asteroids carrying traces of gold rained down on the earth.

Fourteen million times rarer than iron,

All the gold ever mined would fill

Just three Olympic swimming pools.

Extracting gold in 7th-century Arabia

is dangerous work.

Tunnels, propped up by simple wooden struts.

With each blow, a worker can strike it rich...

...or dig his own grave.

A cave-in at a gold mine in the Arabian Desert.

Owner Al-Hajjaj Al-Bahizi risks his life

To save his men and his investment.

This mine alone will produce 50 tons of gold,

Worth two billion dollars today.

A gold rush sparks a boom in trade

And a new chapter for mankind.

From the trading center of Mecca,

A charismatic leader emerges, the prophet Mohammed,

And a new religion.

In twenty years,

Islam unites the warring tribes of Arabia.

It was a particular genius

of the burgeoning Islamic state,

to use that gold to fund a massive army

that was able to push beyond the Arabian Peninsula,

to create a new kind of empire,

a distinctly Islamic Empire.

From Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia,

Islam spreads across North Africa and into Europe,

Dominating lands once controlled by the Romans.

A new civilization reaches into Spain

And builds a new city:

Cordoba.

Home to a remarkable inventor:

Abbas Ibn Firnas.

Astronomer, engineer, inventor.

He's invented a water clock,

A planetarium, a magnifying glass.

Now, he'll risk his life for a new invention.

A thousand years before the Wright brothers,

He wants to fly.

An extraordinary experiment in an extraordinary city.

Cordoba is home to half a million

Muslims, Christians and Jews.

In Europe's Dark Ages, a beacon of tolerance and learning.

37 libraries, the knowledge of mankind,

Much of it rescued from ancient Greece and Rome.

What one wonders about is,

if Islamic scientists had not played this role

of nursemaid to science,

how would we have gotten here?

Because in the West,

we had lost that with our Dark Ages.

How would science have survived in the West

if it had not been for the Islamic scholars?

Arabs take a great leap forward

In Astronomy, Engineering, Medicine.

They create Algebra and Simplify Math,

With the numbers zero to nine,

Still known as Arabic Numerals.

Ibn Firnas is fascinated by the laws of flight

And has built his own flying machine.

What an extraordinary thing to try to do.

This crazy guy was willing to jump off a building

to improve the state of human knowledge.

"By guiding these wings up and down, I will fly.

"If all goes well, after soaring for a time,

"I will return safely."

Accounts at the time report:

"He attached a couple of wings to his body,

"And from a great height flung himself into the air.

"He flew a considerable distance,

"As if he had been a bird."