WEBVTT

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Eurasia: the world's largest land mass.

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Some 10,000 kilometers from the Pacific
to the Atlantic ocean.

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A formidable distance, 
even in today's world.

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And yet over that vast distance,

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human beings have pursued
one of history's greatest enterprises:

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The Silk Road.

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A tremendously profitable trade route

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and so much more.

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For thousands of years,

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exotic goods,

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new technologies,

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conquering armies,

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and brilliant ideas

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traveled along the Silk Road.

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Silk Road trade helped to build empires

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and to break them.

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It fanned the fires of revolution.

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Drove great explorations,

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and forged powerful bonds
between far away peoples.

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The Silk Road made human beings realize

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that there are other people out there,

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and it opened the eyes 
of the east and the west.

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This is the story of how Silk Road trade 
made so much more than money.

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It's the epic tale of how the Silk Road
helped create a world;

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a world that created us.

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2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire
seemed unstoppable.

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Rome had conquered much of Europe

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and was sending its legions beyond
the eastern Mediterranean

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to the Middle East

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-- gateway to the riches of Asia.

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But a journey to the east 
could become a road of blood.

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In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian
town of Carrhae,

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the Parthians — an empire blending
Persian and Greek cultures —

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confronted a Roman army.

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The outcome of the battle
seemed beyond doubt.

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Some 40,000 Romans
faced only 10,000 Parthians.

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And Rome's legions
were Europe's finest foot soldiers.

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There was just one problem.

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The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.

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The Parthians, they were cavalry.

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They were horse archers.

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Versatile. Rode like the wind.

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What the Romans did
was what the Romans always did.

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They took a fixed position.

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They were ordered into a hollow square
defending all sides.

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But that was nothing 
to the Parthian horse archers

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because they could just ride
around them, and they did.

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They galloped around and around 
and around and around,

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shooting as they went.

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Thousands and thousands of arrows
loosed into those Romans.

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What the Romans eventually did 
was they were ordered to go into testudo.

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That's that Roman formation
where they lock their shields together

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and put the next layer
of shields to make a roof.

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Testudo is Latin for tortoise.

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But the Parthians 
had the answer to this tortoise.

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They had a hammer 
to break open its shell.

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The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,

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a Greek word meaning 
"clothed in full armor".

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Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.

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The cataphract was the ancient world
equivalent of a battle tank.

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At Carrhae, charging cataphracts
broke open the testudo.

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Exposing the Romans inside
to more arrow attacks.

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Some 30,000 Romans 
were killed or captured.

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Parthian losses were minor.

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It was one of Rome's 
worst military defeats.

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But it may have been 
something else as well.

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A Roman historian wrote

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that the Parthians dazzled the Romans

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with banners made of a beautiful fabric:

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silk.

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That may only be a legend.

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But around the time of Carrhae,

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Romans began coveting Chinese silk,

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and China began selling silk to Rome

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in exchange for fine
Roman glassware and gold.

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Inspiring the name
we give Eurasian trade today:

NOTE Paragraph

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the Silk Road.

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But long before Romans and Parthians
fought at Carrhae,

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trade between the peoples of Eurasia
were shaping lives,

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making new things possible,

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and changing the world.

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At Carrhae, the Parthians 
won with a style of warfare

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that had evolved centuries earlier

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and thousands of kilometers away.

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On the steppes of Central Asia,

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an ocean of land,

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where victory in battle, and life itself,

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depended on moving 
very far, very fast.

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Thousands of years 
before the battle of Carrhae,

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a transportation revolution 
took place on these vast plains.

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There's good evidence for the existence
of domesticated horses

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in what is today Kazakhstan
and southern Russia by 3500 BC.

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And we actually think that probably
horses were domesticated

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and began to be ridden 
500 or maybe 1,000 years before that,

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maybe as early as 4500 BC.

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The domestication of the horse

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was the first step
towards cavalry warfare.

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But the second step 
would be a long time coming.

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The first use of horses in warfare 
was with chariot warfare,

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and we have that well established
Tutankhamun's chariot,

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which many people have seen
in museum exhibits.

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And we know that people
were using chariots in warfare

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starting in the Near East
in about 1600, 1700 BC..

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Horses were not used as organized cavalry

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until after about 900 BC,

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almost 1,000 years 
after chariot warfare began.

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And it's always seemed odd to me
that cavalry began after chariotry.

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Chariotry is very difficult to manage.

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You have to train horses to work together.

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They have to pull this clumsy vehicle

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that has two people in it:
a driver and a warrior.

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Training the units to work together,
very difficult thing to do,

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whereas jumping on the back of a horse
is an easy thing.

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So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?

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I think the real reason 
that cavalry waited

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is that you needed to have
really three innovations.

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The earliest evidence for the recurved bow
is in Shang Dynasty, China,

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probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.

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Shang emperors communicated 
with their ancestors

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by heating animal bones or turtle shells
until they cracked

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and then interpreting
the patterns made by the cracks.

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One of these so-called oracle bones

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is carved with the Chinese 
character for bow

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— the earliest known image
of a recurved bow.

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And in the tomb of Lady Fuhao

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— an imperial consort 
and renowned military commander —

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archaeologists found more evidence.

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It's a thumb cover 
for drawing bow string

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and there's another piece that went
in the middle of a recurved bow,

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a hand grip.

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The bows themselves are not preserved,

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so, it's a difficult thing to identify
the origins of the recurved bow.

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The different components of it

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probably came from different places
geographically.

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Just how far the recurved bow
traveled across Eurasia

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was revealed in 2005 at Yanghai,
in China's Xinjiang region.

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Wooden bows rarely survive 
burial in the ground,

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but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate
preserved one

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in a 3,000-year-old tomb.

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Other grave goods 
and the human remains

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found in the Yanghai tombs

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confirmed that the bow was made
by the Scythians,

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a highly sophisticated culture
that originated in southern Russia

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and migrated on horseback

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across the length and breadth of Eurasia.

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The true birthplace 
of the recurved composite bow

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remains an archaeological mystery.

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But there is no doubt 
that 3,000 years ago

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anyone who fought on horseback
would have found it revolutionary.

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A bow is as strong as it is long.

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It derives its strength from its length.

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And the recurved bow 
packs the same length

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into this very short bow

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that can be swung over the horse's rear 
and over the horse's neck.

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And it was much, much easier 
to use on horseback.

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And the recurved bows are
technologically quite difficult to make.

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It took a long time to develop
the craft of bow making to that point.

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The recurve all these sinewy bends
— reflex and deflex —

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that gives it in-built spring.

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But that can only be created
with composite materials.

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What we mean by that is
it's made of a number of materials.

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The heart of it is wood, usually beech.

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And then you have horn,
horn from a water buffalo,

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and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.

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That, when you bash it,

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you can tease apart
and get these very fine fibers,

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fibers with tremendous tensile strength.

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That has elasticity and spring,

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and it stops the bow bursting apart.

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These are all materials that enhance
the power, the spring of the bow.

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But only if bow makers
could solve a very big problem.

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How to keep such a powerful bow

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made from so many different materials

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from breaking up when its own power
was pulling it apart?

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Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,

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some unknown genius discovered the answer.

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This is the swim bladder of a sturgeon
— a fish from the Black Sea.

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And if you start to break these up 
then put it in hot water,

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and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.

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This simple idea of making a glue
out of a swim bladder of a fish

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was a technological breakthrough
of immense consequences.

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It is what enabled
the composite bow to exist.

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And in turn the composite bow
was a military revolution

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of far-reaching consequences.

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The composite recurved bow
gave birth to a new kind of warrior

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the horse archer.

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The horse archer was able
to shoot from the saddle

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in part because of the new technology
of the composite bow.

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They were short, compact bows,

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and that meant that you 
can shoot them from horseback.

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You see I can cross
to the other side of the horse,

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I can turn and shoot behind.

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It's much more suitable
for shooting on horseback.

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Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,

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whether as enemy or friend,

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wanted a recurved composite bow.

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By the early first millennium BC,

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it was in use from east Asia
to eastern Europe.

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A recurved bow gave a horse archer
unprecedented killing power.

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But it didn't make him a cavalryman.

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Before horse archers could fight
as an effective military force,

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they needed a large supply
of identical arrows.

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And that didn't exist.

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Arrowheads were a variety 
of different sizes and weights.

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Some were made of bone.

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Some were made out of flint.

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Some were made out of bronze.

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All of them would be individually made

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and you had to adjust your shot
for the weight of different arrows.

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Also a unit of soldiers 
who were firing at the same time

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would be firing arrows
of slightly different weights

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and they might go different distances.

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One of the features of a stone arrowhead
is its flattened rear

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But how did it connect 
with the arrowshaft?

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It can only be tied to the shaft
by rope or ox tendons.

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But what about the disadvantages?

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First, the released arrows 
tend to change direction easily.

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Second, they are likely to fall off,

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One of the technological innovations

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was the invention
of the socketed arrowhead.

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They were made of bronze, usually,

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and they were made in a mould 
and cast in a mould,

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so that an infinite number 
of socketed arrowheads of the same weight

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could be made from the same mould.

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Making socketed projectile points 
was actually a big deal.

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You have to have a mould with a core
where the socket is going to be

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that you can pour molten metal around

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so that it's the same thickness 
all the way around.

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Making arrowheads
of the same size and weight

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was another Central Asian
technological revolution.

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For the first time, mounted warriors
could unleash

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coordinated arrow attacks 
on their enemies.

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With arrowheads of the same weight,

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every time you drew the bow to shoot

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you knew that you were firing an arrow

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that was exactly the same weight
as the last arrow that you fired,

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so you could determine
the range and the distance well.

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And also all of the archers 
that were firing

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were firing arrowheads
at the same weight at the same time.

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So the distance for all of them 
would be the same.

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With a socketed arrowhead

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you can directly insert 
the head into the shaft.

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It look like this.

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So what are the advantages
of this type of arrowhead?

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Its improvements greatly enhanced

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the lethality and efficiency
of ancient arrows.

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Even in the chaos of war, the shooter 
could aim t the target easily.

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He wouldn't loose the direction
by aiming t the target quickly.

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This ivention is a giant leap 
in the development of human history.

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Archaeologists believe that sometime
in the second millennium BC,

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socketed bronze arrowheads
began spreading east

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while the composite 
recurved bow spread west.

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Sometime around 900 BC,

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socketed arrowheads and recurved bows

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met in the Tarim Basin area 
of Central Asia,

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brought together by traders,
warriors, and migrating nomads.

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After about 700 BC, you begin to see
thousands and thousands of arrowheads

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and dozens of arrowheads
in a single quiver in a grave.

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It's like they're being mass produced.

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Bronze socketed arrowheads
turned central Asia into an arsenal,

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but cavalries still couldn't exist

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until warriors could become soldiers.

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It was really the age of heroic warfare

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— individuals going out 
and doing great deeds by themselves

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and attracting glory for their own name.

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And this is the kind of warfare
that's described

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in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey," 
or in the "Rigveda,"

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a religious text that's at the deep roots
of modern Hinduism.

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What had to change
was a psychological change

00:20:32.503 --> 00:20:35.099
in the nature of the warrior.

00:20:35.759 --> 00:20:39.152
You had to change
from individuals to units

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:39.262 --> 00:20:42.983
working under the command
of a commanding general,

00:20:43.152 --> 00:20:46.468
who would attack and retreat
upon command.

00:20:48.305 --> 00:20:52.343
The psychological change 
from the heroic warrior to the soldier,

00:20:53.735 --> 00:20:57.461
probably is a feature of urban warfare.

00:20:57.891 --> 00:21:00.384
The armies that were associated

00:21:00.384 --> 00:21:04.198
with the great cities 
of Mesopotamia and Iran.

00:21:06.516 --> 00:21:11.536
That psychology had to spread 
northward up into the steppes

00:21:12.168 --> 00:21:16.350
and be accepted by warriors
in the steppes,

00:21:16.652 --> 00:21:19.336
in the same area 
where the recurved bows

00:21:19.396 --> 00:21:22.090
and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.

00:21:24.630 --> 00:21:27.214
While recurved bows were spreading west

00:21:27.244 --> 00:21:29.656
and socketed arrowheads
were spreading east,

00:21:29.676 --> 00:21:32.922
the concept of military discipline
was spreading north.

00:21:36.462 --> 00:21:38.905
Sometime around 900 BC,

00:21:39.085 --> 00:21:42.561
all three combined
in the heart of central Asia.

00:21:44.861 --> 00:21:47.169
When those three things came together,

00:21:47.169 --> 00:21:51.922
cavalry became a really deadly form
of military force.

00:21:55.182 --> 00:21:59.542
A force that would severely test
the ancient world's most powerful armies.

00:22:02.318 --> 00:22:03.836
2,000 years ago,

00:22:03.846 --> 00:22:07.500
as the Romans pushed east 
to expand their empire,

00:22:08.340 --> 00:22:10.652
China was pushing west.

00:22:13.224 --> 00:22:15.063
And like the Romans,

00:22:15.093 --> 00:22:18.376
the Chinese encountered
a formidable enemy on horseback.

00:22:23.008 --> 00:22:26.584
The Xiongnu were nomads
from the Central Asian steppes.

00:22:28.044 --> 00:22:30.964
Armed with recurved bows
and socketed arrows,

00:22:30.964 --> 00:22:34.660
they fought under commanders 
as a disciplined military force.

00:22:38.250 --> 00:22:41.093
They raided Chinese villages

00:22:41.483 --> 00:22:44.956
and plundered the growing trade
between East and West,

00:22:46.304 --> 00:22:48.915
and no one could stop them.

00:22:49.745 --> 00:22:55.806
The Xiongnu was the migraine
of the ancient world for the Chinese.

00:22:56.820 --> 00:23:01.401
They simply just kept coming
and they would not stop.

00:23:04.731 --> 00:23:12.270
The Xiongnu wanted the finest
material goods produced by the Chinese.

00:23:16.115 --> 00:23:18.742
That is why they raided.

00:23:23.311 --> 00:23:27.025
Imagine you're a villager in China
and these men come from nowhere.

00:23:27.055 --> 00:23:29.196
They come from over the hill 
without warning,

00:23:29.286 --> 00:23:30.919
tearing into your village.

00:23:30.937 --> 00:23:33.294
They shoot the headman, 
they shoot your husband.

00:23:33.334 --> 00:23:34.822
They chase the women out.

00:23:34.862 --> 00:23:38.426
There is no hiding place
and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.

00:23:38.436 --> 00:23:41.649
They're in and they're out 
and they take the stuff and they go.

00:23:44.788 --> 00:23:47.693
China sent its military might
against the Xiongnu.

00:23:49.819 --> 00:23:51.696
The famed Terracotta Warriors

00:23:51.716 --> 00:23:54.504
reveal the size and power
of Chinese armies.

00:23:56.543 --> 00:23:59.883
But the Chinese fought on foot
and from chariots.

00:24:02.723 --> 00:24:05.683
Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.

00:24:07.030 --> 00:24:12.857
A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu
moved like a flock of birds over the land,

00:24:13.227 --> 00:24:15.600
impossible to control.

00:24:16.420 --> 00:24:20.101
Once mounted warfare really
became deadly and effective,

00:24:20.261 --> 00:24:22.666
it became a real problem.

00:24:22.856 --> 00:24:27.669
If you're a farmer, the nomads know
where you're going to be all the time.

00:24:27.729 --> 00:24:31.276
Your house is in the same place
12 months of the year,

00:24:31.445 --> 00:24:35.321
and when your crops become ripe,
you have to harvest,

00:24:35.548 --> 00:24:39.257
and the nomads know when that season is.

00:24:40.187 --> 00:24:43.152
Whereas when you're trying
to strike them back,

00:24:43.172 --> 00:24:45.759
it's impossible to know
where they're going to be

00:24:45.799 --> 00:24:47.698
or when they're going to be there.

00:24:47.868 --> 00:24:50.017
You have to search to find them.

NOTE Paragraph

00:24:53.188 --> 00:24:58.168
To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese 
needed soldiers who could fight like them.

00:25:01.089 --> 00:25:03.077
They needed cavalry.

00:25:06.198 --> 00:25:09.357
There are manuals of warfare
that were written

00:25:09.367 --> 00:25:12.638
to instruct Chinese warriors

00:25:12.638 --> 00:25:16.694
on how to counter the tactics
and the methods of the Xiongnu.

00:25:17.824 --> 00:25:20.522
Those manuals introduced 
the idea of cavalry

00:25:20.572 --> 00:25:22.641
to the Chinese military.

00:25:23.151 --> 00:25:26.266
The Chinese military
had not really used cavalry

00:25:26.306 --> 00:25:28.801
before about probably 350 BC.

00:25:30.628 --> 00:25:34.009
Chinese military, at first 
with some resistance

00:25:34.029 --> 00:25:36.750
from the old aristocratic families, said:

00:25:36.870 --> 00:25:39.004
"Well, my father fought on a chariot,

NOTE Paragraph

00:25:39.034 --> 00:25:40.871
"and his father fought on a chariot,

00:25:40.891 --> 00:25:44.809
"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot
in my long robes like my ancestors."

00:25:46.409 --> 00:25:49.020
But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors

00:25:49.050 --> 00:25:51.742
traded their traditional
long, flowing robes

00:25:52.462 --> 00:25:56.665
for shorter tunics that didn't get
in the way of fighting on horseback.

00:25:59.165 --> 00:26:05.109
Eventually, the practicalities
forced them to get rid of their robes,

00:26:05.162 --> 00:26:07.968
to put on riding trousers,

00:26:08.008 --> 00:26:10.786
to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,

00:26:10.981 --> 00:26:14.655
and they, too, became 
a mighty horse archer force.

00:26:19.656 --> 00:26:23.613
Chinese cavalry became experts
at shooting the recurved composite bow,

00:26:25.623 --> 00:26:30.134
and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.

00:26:34.132 --> 00:26:36.403
While its cavalry trained,

00:26:36.473 --> 00:26:41.043
China agreed to Xiongnu demands
for payments of money and silk

00:26:42.343 --> 00:26:45.283
until the year 133 BC,

00:26:46.103 --> 00:26:49.249
when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay.

00:26:53.218 --> 00:26:55.696
And sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.

00:27:30.952 --> 00:27:33.645
Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.

00:27:37.305 --> 00:27:40.802
And China seized
new territories in the steppes,

00:27:42.932 --> 00:27:46.654
pacifying trade routes 
and opening new horizons.

00:27:52.030 --> 00:27:55.019
On one hand, 
we have this perpetual conflict

00:27:55.119 --> 00:27:59.400
— in Chinese culture would be
the Xiongn and the Han Chinese

00:28:00.381 --> 00:28:03.985
that created incessant warfare.

00:28:05.390 --> 00:28:08.557
On the other hand, it is this conflict

00:28:08.567 --> 00:28:11.954
that demolished physical boundaries.

00:28:12.995 --> 00:28:17.054
Even territory boundaries 
were constantly being pushed farther,

00:28:17.154 --> 00:28:20.144
pushed back between the two forces.

00:28:20.554 --> 00:28:26.029
This was a stimulus for exchanges,

00:28:26.753 --> 00:28:28.876
for political changes,

00:28:28.876 --> 00:28:32.607
for new ideas, for artistic traditions.

00:28:36.057 --> 00:28:38.684
It was also a new era for the Silk Road.

00:28:40.488 --> 00:28:43.677
A fortune in Roman gold 
traveled east

00:28:43.677 --> 00:28:46.138
in exchange for Chinese silks.

00:28:51.400 --> 00:28:53.940
And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan

00:28:54.000 --> 00:28:57.355
made its own fortune 
selling another luxury to China:

00:28:59.565 --> 00:29:00.868
jade.

00:29:03.915 --> 00:29:06.613
Silk Road caravans passed 
through this border station

00:29:06.613 --> 00:29:08.988
on China's western frontier.

00:29:10.839 --> 00:29:13.380
So many of them carried Kushan jade

00:29:13.430 --> 00:29:16.570
that this station became known 
as the Jade Gate.

00:29:21.860 --> 00:29:25.450
Chinese aristocrats
coveted jade for its beauty

00:29:25.493 --> 00:29:27.414
and something more.

00:29:30.034 --> 00:29:33.659
They believed that jade 
would keep them alive forever.

00:29:36.789 --> 00:29:39.538
The ruling elite commissioned 
jade burial suits

00:29:39.558 --> 00:29:42.327
to preserve their bodies in the grave.

00:29:45.617 --> 00:29:48.722
They believed that, upon death,

00:29:48.762 --> 00:29:51.822
all the orifices should be plugged in

00:29:51.842 --> 00:29:56.076
to preserve the spirit inside the person.

00:29:56.966 --> 00:30:00.347
And this notion of jade

00:30:00.347 --> 00:30:05.318
as a material with protective power
in the afterlife,

00:30:05.368 --> 00:30:08.348
is further enhanced by the fact

00:30:08.348 --> 00:30:11.062
that they built an armor

00:30:11.062 --> 00:30:16.876
made of thousands
of pieces of jade.

00:30:17.916 --> 00:30:20.120
And of course, if you're the emperor,

00:30:20.120 --> 00:30:25.855
your jade armor would be made
from the finest jade

00:30:26.997 --> 00:30:29.731
from the western regions.

00:30:30.451 --> 00:30:33.523
During the Roman empire,
Silk Road trade flourished

00:30:33.569 --> 00:30:36.522
as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies

00:30:36.532 --> 00:30:39.173
kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.

00:30:46.743 --> 00:30:48.568
China had leveled the battlefield

00:30:48.629 --> 00:30:51.282
with nomad raiders from the steppes.

00:30:57.492 --> 00:30:59.757
But Central Asian horse archers

00:30:59.757 --> 00:31:02.717
were about to carve
their names on History.

00:31:04.452 --> 00:31:08.912
In the 4th century CE., Europe was invaded
by a Central Asian people

00:31:09.042 --> 00:31:12.174
whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.

00:31:18.664 --> 00:31:22.464
The Huns, who fought their way West,
all the way to Rome.

00:31:32.708 --> 00:31:35.214
European peoples
like the Goths and Visigoths

00:31:35.268 --> 00:31:37.703
— the so-called barbarians —

00:31:37.713 --> 00:31:39.410
fled before their onslaught,

00:31:39.440 --> 00:31:41.894
and sought refuge in Roman territory.

00:31:43.684 --> 00:31:46.662
When the Huns withdrew
from the Roman world,

00:31:46.732 --> 00:31:49.439
those barbarian refugees stayed.

00:31:55.449 --> 00:31:58.197
And the rest is History.

00:32:02.387 --> 00:32:05.882
The western Roman empire 
was plunged into chaos

00:32:07.766 --> 00:32:10.655
as barbarian tribes, 
dissatisfied with their lot,

00:32:10.685 --> 00:32:13.835
rebelled against Roman authority,

00:32:14.138 --> 00:32:17.303
and weak Roman emperors 
failed to crush them.

00:32:21.743 --> 00:32:26.209
As Rome declined, migrating 
horse archers, called the Avars,

00:32:26.209 --> 00:32:30.436
carved their own country 
out of eastern Europe,

00:32:30.436 --> 00:32:33.949
bringing with them 
another Asian military innovation:

00:32:36.739 --> 00:32:38.252
the stirrup.

00:32:41.755 --> 00:32:44.703
This Chinese statue 
from the fourth century CE,

00:32:44.783 --> 00:32:48.092
is the earliest known
depiction of stirrups.

00:32:52.572 --> 00:32:54.788
Some 300 years later,

00:32:54.788 --> 00:32:57.218
an Avar horseman
was riding with these stirrups

00:32:57.264 --> 00:32:59.440
across Hungary.

00:33:05.428 --> 00:33:07.277
By the eighth century CE,

00:33:07.287 --> 00:33:11.633
the stirrup had spread
from one end of Eurasia to the other

00:33:11.831 --> 00:33:14.997
and mounted warfare
was entering a new era.

NOTE Paragraph

00:33:18.083 --> 00:33:19.959
The importance of the stirrup

00:33:19.989 --> 00:33:24.087
relates to what kinds of weapons
can you use from horseback,

00:33:24.198 --> 00:33:28.682
and it made it possible to use 
certain kinds of weapons from horseback

00:33:28.682 --> 00:33:31.389
that you couldn't use without stirrups.

00:33:31.409 --> 00:33:33.958
Those weapons are the long sabre.

00:33:34.228 --> 00:33:37.720
You have to lean over and absorb shock,

00:33:38.062 --> 00:33:40.669
if you're going to use
a long sabre in battle.

00:33:40.699 --> 00:33:44.998
And the stirrups allow the rider 
to absorb the shock of contact

00:33:44.998 --> 00:33:47.308
with a stationary target.

00:33:47.788 --> 00:33:50.382
The other big weapon 
that was possible with stirrups

00:33:50.422 --> 00:33:54.074
was a seated lance held under the arm.

00:33:54.354 --> 00:33:58.796
You could stab somebody with the lance
and then remove it,

00:33:58.956 --> 00:34:01.992
riding past them without stirrups.

00:34:02.521 --> 00:34:07.639
But if you seated it under your arm
and used the lance as a shock weapon,

00:34:07.814 --> 00:34:10.428
it would knock you
off the back of the horse

00:34:10.468 --> 00:34:12.431
if you didn't have stirrups.

00:34:12.441 --> 00:34:16.693
So stirrups made it possible to use
long swords and lances

00:34:16.812 --> 00:34:19.598
as shock weapons 
against stationary targets

00:34:19.608 --> 00:34:21.930
and keep your seat.

00:34:21.936 --> 00:34:27.150
And of course that made it possible
to have really heavy mounted warriors.

00:34:28.090 --> 00:34:31.877
Now, the rider becomes 
a unit with the horse.

00:34:32.237 --> 00:34:35.295
He's so anchored with his stirrups,
anchored with this,

00:34:35.295 --> 00:34:37.535
and then with his long lance

00:34:37.585 --> 00:34:41.395
he becomes a single projectile unit.

00:34:43.320 --> 00:34:48.942
Man, horse, saddle, lance, 
all locked together for the impact charge.

00:34:52.762 --> 00:34:55.753
This was the age of the medieval knight.

00:35:01.108 --> 00:35:02.929
A medieval knight's power

00:35:02.969 --> 00:35:06.744
came from combining the Asian stirrup
and the ancient shock tactics

00:35:06.794 --> 00:35:10.868
of the Persian cataphract
with a European invention:

00:35:11.431 --> 00:35:13.788
articulated plate armor.

00:35:15.930 --> 00:35:19.354
Strong enough to protect the wearer 
from sword and lance thrusts

00:35:20.765 --> 00:35:24.918
while light enough to allow him 
to move freely on horseback

00:35:24.988 --> 00:35:26.769
and on foot.

00:35:29.519 --> 00:35:33.639
Heavy cavalry had never been
a more potent weapon of war.

00:35:35.719 --> 00:35:38.954
Medieval mounted warfare 
could be warfare

00:35:38.984 --> 00:35:42.707
that generated
a lot of force on the rider,

00:35:43.089 --> 00:35:45.175
a high impact warfare.

00:35:46.785 --> 00:35:49.517
In that case, the mounted warrior
is being used

00:35:49.577 --> 00:35:53.117
really as a shock weapon
to strike the enemy.

00:36:00.259 --> 00:36:03.229
But even Europe's 
formidable mounted knights

00:36:03.239 --> 00:36:06.634
would be outfought
by Central Asian cavalry

NOTE Paragraph

00:36:08.859 --> 00:36:12.129
that burst out of the steppes 
and changed the world.

00:36:16.821 --> 00:36:21.677
The largest conquest empire
that the Earth has ever seen

00:36:23.647 --> 00:36:27.743
was created by pastoral nomads
from Central Asia.

00:36:35.962 --> 00:36:37.929
In the 13th century,

00:36:37.929 --> 00:36:40.632
the Mongols conquered 
as far West as Poland

00:36:40.656 --> 00:36:43.328
and as far East as the Sea of Japan.

00:36:47.978 --> 00:36:52.019
Mongol armies combined the devastating
shock tactics of horse archers

00:36:52.259 --> 00:36:55.445
with a highly sophisticated
military organization.

00:36:57.796 --> 00:37:02.794
They could gather quickly
and march to distant battlefields.

00:37:04.690 --> 00:37:08.103
Then the cavalry could reach
the enemy's battlefield

NOTE Paragraph

00:37:08.162 --> 00:37:11.111
before they set up defenses

00:37:11.164 --> 00:37:16.014
which could deter their enemy
psychologically and strategically.

00:37:16.864 --> 00:37:21.052
It is said that the cavalry came suddenly

00:37:21.542 --> 00:37:25.241
like something falling fro the sky.

00:37:25.522 --> 00:37:29.485
and disappeared quickly

00:37:29.515 --> 00:37:32.625
leaving no trace at all.

00:37:32.715 --> 00:37:35.633
Western, especially European historians,

00:37:35.663 --> 00:37:41.281
wrote that the Mongols appeared 
far away like several spots

00:37:41.508 --> 00:37:46.011
but would suddenly gather
before you, like dark clouds.

00:37:46.311 --> 00:37:50.284
Unexpected attack was the core

00:37:56.474 --> 00:38:00.091
The Mongols have gone down
in History as bloodthirsty killers,

00:38:00.895 --> 00:38:04.359
but they were also sophisticated,
open-minded,

00:38:04.359 --> 00:38:06.661
often generous conquerors.

00:38:08.671 --> 00:38:11.237
They pacified the Silk Road.

00:38:16.777 --> 00:38:18.783
Trade between West and East

00:38:18.783 --> 00:38:21.530
flourished under 
this Mongol-enforced peace,

00:38:21.580 --> 00:38:23.646
the Pax Mongolica.

00:38:26.376 --> 00:38:29.079
Before the age of Pax Mongolica,

00:38:29.129 --> 00:38:33.496
banditry was a very serious
problem for traders,

00:38:33.575 --> 00:38:36.039
for caravans, along the Silk Road.

00:38:37.089 --> 00:38:40.561
The reputation of Genghis Khan
and his descendants

00:38:41.433 --> 00:38:45.797
created peace and safe passage
along the Silk Road

00:38:45.867 --> 00:38:53.773
because bandits were so afraid
of the Mongol soldiers.

00:38:54.243 --> 00:38:56.821
The Pax Mongolica,

00:38:57.221 --> 00:39:05.071
the control of trade and exchange

00:39:05.499 --> 00:39:08.389
that was made possible under the Mongols

00:39:08.449 --> 00:39:12.334
connected China with Europe
and with the Near East

00:39:12.397 --> 00:39:16.196
in a really close way 
for the first time in world History

00:39:16.586 --> 00:39:19.423
And that had a profound effect

00:39:19.490 --> 00:39:22.547
on the development
of European civilization.

00:39:24.355 --> 00:39:26.479
Protected by the Pax Mongolica,

00:39:26.479 --> 00:39:30.181
and anxious for good relations 
with the Mongol empire,

00:39:30.245 --> 00:39:34.099
Europeans began traveling East 
as never before.

00:39:36.243 --> 00:39:38.745
Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats

00:39:38.815 --> 00:39:41.346
flowed East along the trade routes,

00:39:43.386 --> 00:39:46.833
bringing back popular Asian goods
like cloth and spices

00:39:48.562 --> 00:39:51.975
and tales of the wealth 
and wonders of the East,

00:39:52.145 --> 00:39:56.265
some true, some fabulous, 
but all fascinating.

00:39:57.906 --> 00:39:59.571
From Europe to China,

00:39:59.581 --> 00:40:03.557
Silk Road trade spread 
new knowledge of far-away lands.

00:40:04.567 --> 00:40:09.079
The Silk Road made human beings realize

00:40:09.229 --> 00:40:12.077
that there are other people out there,

00:40:12.117 --> 00:40:15.975
and it opened the eyes 
of the East and the West.

00:40:19.672 --> 00:40:23.699
The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa
reaped huge rewards.

00:40:27.048 --> 00:40:29.951
Their merchants traveled safely
throughout Eurasia

00:40:31.681 --> 00:40:34.102
and founded trading posts on the Black Sea

00:40:34.142 --> 00:40:37.173
to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.

00:40:38.805 --> 00:40:42.831
Their Silk Road profits funded
magnificent art and architecture.

00:40:45.404 --> 00:40:49.333
But their competition frequently
plunged them into war with one another.

00:40:51.644 --> 00:40:56.149
In one of these wars, Genoa captured
a prosperous Venetian merchant

00:40:56.189 --> 00:40:58.101
named Marco Polo.

00:40:59.091 --> 00:41:02.774
Imprisoned by the Genoese, 
Polo dictated the story

00:41:02.823 --> 00:41:06.257
of his Silk Road journey to China
to a fellow prisoner.

00:41:09.170 --> 00:41:13.078
Today, experts debate whether
Marco Polo really visited China

00:41:14.308 --> 00:41:16.866
or was simply retelling stories

00:41:16.916 --> 00:41:19.264
he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.

00:41:23.666 --> 00:41:26.991
But there's no debate 
that "The Travels of Marco Polo"

00:41:27.051 --> 00:41:31.256
was one of the most influential books
in all of human History.

00:41:32.036 --> 00:41:34.241
It tantalized Europe with tales

00:41:34.241 --> 00:41:37.926
of China's immense wealth 
and advanced civilization.

00:41:45.190 --> 00:41:49.887
And years before Marco Polo was telling
those tales in a Genoese prison,

00:41:52.717 --> 00:41:57.556
a Chinese invention was making
its way across Eurasia to the West.

00:42:02.566 --> 00:42:05.105
Something created centuries earlier

00:42:05.105 --> 00:42:08.815
when an experiment ended very badly.

00:42:19.455 --> 00:42:23.755
Ancient Chinese alchemists
prepared potions of lead or mercury

00:42:23.755 --> 00:42:26.050
for their aristocratic patrons

00:42:26.060 --> 00:42:29.402
who believed that drinking these metals
would help them live forever.

00:42:32.748 --> 00:42:36.934
Instead, those concoctions killed them 
or made them insane.

00:42:38.804 --> 00:42:41.684
Another deadly combination was sulfur

00:42:41.684 --> 00:42:45.634
heated with an organic nitrate
found in soil throughout China,

00:42:48.041 --> 00:42:50.750
known today as saltpeter.

00:42:52.950 --> 00:42:55.465
When alchemists experimented
with this formula,

00:42:55.525 --> 00:42:57.668
it burst into flame,

00:42:57.678 --> 00:42:59.741
injuring the alchemists,

00:42:59.822 --> 00:43:01.186
(Explosion)

00:43:01.256 --> 00:43:03.923
and burning down their laboratory.

00:43:05.943 --> 00:43:10.536
From that disaster was born 
a chemical mixture like none other.

00:43:15.036 --> 00:43:18.193
It may have failed
as an elixir of immortality,

00:43:18.193 --> 00:43:22.554
but it would prove to be
a potent agent of death.

00:43:25.273 --> 00:43:29.427
This Chinese Buddhist scroll 
dating from around 950 CE,

00:43:29.427 --> 00:43:32.819
depicts demons surrounding
a seated Buddha.

00:43:34.259 --> 00:43:39.465
One demon holds what the Chinese called
a "huo quiang", or fire lance.

00:43:42.352 --> 00:43:44.886
It's the earliest known image of a weapon

00:43:44.906 --> 00:43:48.328
powered by that deadly mixture 
of saltpeter and sulfur.

00:43:51.518 --> 00:43:55.739
Known to history as gunpowder.

00:44:01.094 --> 00:44:03.545
In the early 13th century,

00:44:03.545 --> 00:44:06.695
the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.

00:44:07.205 --> 00:44:11.635
The Jin Dynasty's army fought back 
with exploding gunpowder bombs.

00:44:15.755 --> 00:44:18.860
But as the Mongols conquered 
more and more of China,

00:44:18.860 --> 00:44:22.368
Han Chinese artillerymen
joined their armies

00:44:22.418 --> 00:44:26.162
and marched West, bringing
their gunpowder weapons with them.

00:44:29.142 --> 00:44:32.284
The Mongols attacked 
Russian and Polish cities

00:44:32.294 --> 00:44:34.720
with exploding fire bombs.

00:44:36.120 --> 00:44:39.973
And Europeans found out the hard way 
what gunpowder could do.

00:44:44.396 --> 00:44:46.763
By the end of the 13th century,

00:44:46.763 --> 00:44:49.986
the formula for gunpowder 
was known as far West as England,

00:44:51.754 --> 00:44:55.953
and Europeans were inventing 
their own versions of the new weapons.

00:44:59.873 --> 00:45:04.479
It wasn't long before this Chinese 
invention changed European history.

00:45:08.385 --> 00:45:11.051
On 26th August, 1346,

00:45:11.417 --> 00:45:14.332
near the village of Crecy
in northern France,

00:45:14.692 --> 00:45:18.407
the armies of France and England
prepared to fight.

00:45:26.940 --> 00:45:30.543
Mounted on their war steeds, 
encased in their armor,

00:45:30.583 --> 00:45:33.959
the flower of French nobility 
formed their battle line,

00:45:42.728 --> 00:45:46.087
while the English deployed 
a very different force.

00:45:50.197 --> 00:45:52.966
Thousands of expert archers.

00:45:59.966 --> 00:46:04.555
The French sent their higher Genoese
crossbowmen to attack the English

00:46:04.575 --> 00:46:07.650
before French knights annihilated them.

00:46:14.813 --> 00:46:17.429
But the English king, Edward III,

00:46:17.429 --> 00:46:20.537
had spent years training his longbow men.

00:46:24.517 --> 00:46:27.576
And all that training
was about to pay off.

NOTE Paragraph

00:46:41.426 --> 00:46:46.505
Nothing like this had been seen
on a western battlefield up to this time.

00:46:46.685 --> 00:46:51.754
The first time that a volley of arrows 
was unleashed by the archers at Crecy

00:46:52.214 --> 00:46:55.329
would have represented 
something completely new

00:46:55.369 --> 00:46:58.513
to many of those
in the French army watching it.

00:46:58.553 --> 00:47:01.150
A cloud of arrows descending towards them.

00:47:02.440 --> 00:47:04.713
It would have been frightening,

00:47:04.733 --> 00:47:07.630
and of course the effect
was almost immediate.

00:47:11.660 --> 00:47:15.957
Showered by English arrows, 
the Genoese turned and ran,

00:47:17.318 --> 00:47:19.917
and according to medieval 
accounts of the battle,

00:47:19.917 --> 00:47:23.136
they were also panicked 
by another English weapon.

00:47:32.031 --> 00:47:35.156
Giovanni Villani, writing
very soon after the battle,

00:47:35.206 --> 00:47:39.563
says in his chronicle that 
so loud and intimidating

00:47:39.693 --> 00:47:42.235
was the noise created by the guns

00:47:42.355 --> 00:47:45.418
that they thought God was thundering.

00:47:48.997 --> 00:47:51.909
"The English guns cast
iron balls by means of fire.

00:47:52.689 --> 00:47:54.950
"They made a noise like thunder

NOTE Paragraph

00:47:55.020 --> 00:47:57.625
"and caused much loss
in men and horses."

00:48:04.835 --> 00:48:07.373
Noise like that would have been 
unprecedented

00:48:07.413 --> 00:48:09.911
to the soldiers on the battlefield.

00:48:10.538 --> 00:48:13.668
Nothing in their lives
could have prepared them

00:48:13.668 --> 00:48:15.464
for a a bang of that size

00:48:15.464 --> 00:48:19.539
and accompanied by smoke
and acrid sulfur smell,

00:48:19.662 --> 00:48:22.219
which would hang in the air.

00:48:22.409 --> 00:48:25.043
The impact of which, of course,
they couldn't see

00:48:25.063 --> 00:48:27.387
until men around them dropped.

00:48:29.087 --> 00:48:32.119
Not even professional soldiers 
like the Genoese

00:48:32.298 --> 00:48:36.039
would have experienced anything 
like this before in their lives.

00:48:36.189 --> 00:48:38.776
That would have been terrifying,

00:48:38.806 --> 00:48:41.759
and it's no wonder
that they scattered and ran.

00:48:44.019 --> 00:48:49.721
They turned and fled into the face
of the oncoming French cavalry charge.

00:48:50.100 --> 00:48:53.205
The French cavalry were now
coming onto the battlefield

00:48:53.204 --> 00:48:55.310
and they were appalled

00:48:55.310 --> 00:48:59.000
at these people they'd hired
running away.

00:49:01.270 --> 00:49:03.830
And they cursed them
and they rode into them,

00:49:03.850 --> 00:49:06.675
and as many Genoese fell to French hooves

00:49:06.725 --> 00:49:09.643
as they did to English 
arrows and gunshots.

00:49:11.813 --> 00:49:14.220
And the French knights, 
all 12,000 of them,

00:49:14.220 --> 00:49:16.099
double the size of the English army,

00:49:16.101 --> 00:49:18.531
they came charging down onto the English.

00:49:21.911 --> 00:49:26.031
And they, too, fell to the English arrows
and the English gunshot,

00:49:27.621 --> 00:49:30.431
and they came again and again and again.

00:49:30.501 --> 00:49:32.846
15, 16 times, they came.

00:49:34.706 --> 00:49:36.716
And their horses were ripped to shreds

00:49:36.716 --> 00:49:39.133
and the men were thrown from their horses.

00:49:39.203 --> 00:49:40.633
And those that weren't thrown,

00:49:40.653 --> 00:49:43.218
they had the opportunity
that the dagger men rushed in

00:49:43.218 --> 00:49:45.517
and they brought these knights down.

00:49:50.787 --> 00:49:54.609
This was a moment in History
where the world changed.

00:49:54.789 --> 00:49:58.715
It spelled the beginning of the end 
for the medieval knight.

00:50:01.772 --> 00:50:04.215
The Battle of Crecy
has gone down in history

00:50:04.215 --> 00:50:07.413
as one of the earliest uses 
of gunpowder weapons

00:50:07.563 --> 00:50:10.507
on a European battlefield.

00:50:17.987 --> 00:50:19.945
Some 500 years after,

00:50:19.985 --> 00:50:22.664
it burned down 
a Chinese alchemist's workshop,

00:50:22.752 --> 00:50:26.081
gunpowder had become 
destiny's weapon of choice.

00:50:28.566 --> 00:50:31.614
After Crecy, it was only a matter of time

00:50:31.614 --> 00:50:35.276
until the fates of peoples and nations
were decided by the gun.

00:50:40.126 --> 00:50:42.367
Within two centuries,

00:50:42.387 --> 00:50:45.307
Europeans would use their powerful 
gunpowder weapons

00:50:45.347 --> 00:50:47.907
to dominate the world,

00:50:51.747 --> 00:50:55.826
creating empires that would evolve
into today's global trading culture,

00:50:59.832 --> 00:51:03.378
which binds people together
by commerce instead of the gun.

00:51:10.019 --> 00:51:13.459
But before Europe could embark 
on its empire-building adventure,

00:51:14.799 --> 00:51:16.529
its medieval social order

00:51:16.529 --> 00:51:19.589
would be shattered
by a catastrophic event.

00:51:21.409 --> 00:51:25.184
One that would forge a new Europe
in a crucible of horror.

00:51:29.154 --> 00:51:31.631
While guns thundered at Crecy,

00:51:31.643 --> 00:51:34.932
something else was spreading
along the Eurasian trade routes.

00:51:39.607 --> 00:51:43.749
Something that would kill
tens of millions of Europeans.

00:51:48.509 --> 00:51:51.400
An apocalyptic destruction of human life

00:51:52.350 --> 00:51:55.585
that would lay the foundations
of the modern world.

00:52:18.095 --> 00:52:20.920
At the Battle of Crécy in 1346,

00:52:21.261 --> 00:52:24.876
the English won 
an historic victory over France,

00:52:27.836 --> 00:52:31.299
helped by a Chinese invention
that had traveled to Europe.

00:52:40.339 --> 00:52:42.065
Gunpowder.

00:53:18.785 --> 00:53:20.977
And in the same year of 1346,

00:53:21.517 --> 00:53:24.741
some 2,000 kilometres east of Crécy,

00:53:25.241 --> 00:53:29.367
another battle was taking place 
on the shores of the Black Sea.

00:53:33.677 --> 00:53:38.209
A Mongol army had been laying siege
to the Crimean port city of Caffa,

00:53:38.729 --> 00:53:42.730
a Silk Road trading post belonging
to the Italian city of Genoa.

00:53:45.514 --> 00:53:48.390
The Mongols were masters 
of siege warfare.

00:53:51.340 --> 00:53:55.343
But Caffa was still holding out
after more than two years.

00:53:58.983 --> 00:54:02.154
Suddenly, the Mongol army was decimated.

00:54:02.954 --> 00:54:06.894
Not by Caffa's defenders, 
but by an unknown disease.

00:54:10.005 --> 00:54:12.515
The Mongols quickly ended their siege.

00:54:13.125 --> 00:54:14.965
But before they left Caffa,

00:54:14.995 --> 00:54:18.060
they loaded their siege engines 
with the corpses of their dead

00:54:18.330 --> 00:54:21.131
and flung them over the city's walls,

00:54:21.481 --> 00:54:25.179
believing that the stench of death
would kill the defenders.

00:54:29.959 --> 00:54:31.712
Medieval chronicles say

00:54:31.712 --> 00:54:34.724
that Caffa's defenders
did die by the thousands,

00:54:35.114 --> 00:54:38.241
but not from the smell of death.

00:54:42.311 --> 00:54:44.908
One year later, in 1347,

00:54:44.958 --> 00:54:48.957
the same disease that had killed
the Mongols at Caffa

00:54:49.142 --> 00:54:51.779
was killing people in Constantinople.

00:54:53.429 --> 00:54:58.907
By 1348,it was killing people 
across Western Europe.

00:55:02.238 --> 00:55:06.807
By 1350, it was killing people
as far away as Greenland.

00:55:11.447 --> 00:55:14.362
And terrified Europeans
had given it a name.

00:55:16.982 --> 00:55:19.119
The Black Death.

00:55:20.879 --> 00:55:26.485
In just under a decade, 
from 1347 to 1356,

00:55:27.175 --> 00:55:31.401
the Black Death killed a
t least 25 million Europeans.,

00:55:31.511 --> 00:55:34.649
one third of Europe's population.

00:55:38.829 --> 00:55:40.766
Today, most scholars believe

00:55:40.766 --> 00:55:43.880
that the Black Death was 
an outbreak of bubonic plague.

00:55:44.460 --> 00:55:48.059
that was transmitted to humans
by infected fleas living on rats.

00:55:52.006 --> 00:55:54.716
And we believe
that it spread across Eurasia

00:55:54.868 --> 00:55:58.348
by hitching a ride with armies,
ships, and caravans

00:55:59.228 --> 00:56:02.253
along trade routes 
that were already ancient

00:56:02.363 --> 00:56:05.030
by the time of the Black Death.

00:56:07.740 --> 00:56:10.460
Micro-organic travelers of all kinds

00:56:10.480 --> 00:56:13.610
have moved across Eurasia
for thousands of years.

00:56:15.214 --> 00:56:19.032
A bio-migration that has had 
as big an impact on history

00:56:19.032 --> 00:56:23.775
as the more famous exchanges
of new technologies and luxury goods.

00:56:24.805 --> 00:56:27.352
And as a recent discovery shows,

00:56:27.362 --> 00:56:30.400
tiny living things 
moving along the Silk Road

00:56:30.440 --> 00:56:33.324
brought life as well as death.

00:56:34.584 --> 00:56:36.989
We were putting together some new methods

00:56:37.057 --> 00:56:39.221
of looking for early agriculture,

00:56:39.251 --> 00:56:42.155
and for that we needed to do a survey

00:56:42.262 --> 00:56:45.459
of all the finds of early crops in Europe.

00:56:47.163 --> 00:56:49.221
When you looked at a map of all of Europe,

00:56:49.231 --> 00:56:52.103
then you could see
there were these Chinese crops

00:56:52.135 --> 00:56:55.027
in small numbers very early on in Europe.

00:56:57.017 --> 00:57:00.208
"Very early on" was around 2,000 BC,

00:57:02.485 --> 00:57:05.244
when a Chinese grain
called broomcorn millet

00:57:05.326 --> 00:57:09.011
appears in the Eastern European
archaeological record.

00:57:10.061 --> 00:57:13.730
The actual crop itself
will decay or be eaten,

00:57:14.169 --> 00:57:16.178
but rather fortunately,

00:57:16.218 --> 00:57:19.642
if it's cooked and over-burnt,
it turns to carbon.

00:57:19.675 --> 00:57:23.387
That will stay in the archaeological
record for a long time.

00:57:27.368 --> 00:57:29.965
In the Chinese province of inner Mongolia,

00:57:30.445 --> 00:57:33.923
archaeologists are studying
the origins of broomcorn millet,

00:57:34.631 --> 00:57:37.596
one of the world's oldest domestic crops.

00:57:40.346 --> 00:57:44.293
We are looking at a broomcorn millet field
of almost 16 acres

00:57:44.543 --> 00:57:47.342
The cultivation of broomcorn millet
in this place

00:57:47.402 --> 00:57:49.834
dates back to nearly 8000 years ago.

00:57:49.949 --> 00:57:53.826
It's the earliest area of human-cultivated
broomcorn millet in the world.

00:57:53.896 --> 00:57:56.170
After broomcorn millet's birth
in this place,

00:57:56.170 --> 00:57:58.048
it spread to the West from the East.

00:57:58.048 --> 00:58:00.049
It spread to Europe.

00:58:01.499 --> 00:58:04.308
Since it originated from the East
and then spread to Europe,

00:58:04.313 --> 00:58:06.637
it can be regarded 
as an important contribution

00:58:06.637 --> 00:58:09.479
of our Eastern civilization
to the Western counterpart.

00:58:11.999 --> 00:58:14.966
But it isn't clear just how and why

00:58:15.136 --> 00:58:19.275
broomcorn millet travelled thousands
of kilometres across Eurasia,

00:58:19.806 --> 00:58:22.845
through some of the world's
harshest environments,

00:58:22.925 --> 00:58:25.505
all the way to Europe.

00:58:27.185 --> 00:58:31.450
Millet's long journey may have begun
simply because it travelled so well.

00:58:35.160 --> 00:58:38.662
Millets are essentially cereals, 
but they're very small.

00:58:39.482 --> 00:58:41.618
And because they have very small grains,

00:58:41.648 --> 00:58:43.301
they're hardy and they're tough,

00:58:43.301 --> 00:58:45.418
and they can grow quite fast.

00:58:45.448 --> 00:58:47.586
Broomcorn millet, at a push,

00:58:47.906 --> 00:58:50.635
can get from seed to seed in 45 days.

00:58:53.225 --> 00:58:55.290
You can plant a seed in the ground

00:58:55.300 --> 00:58:58.761
and 45 days later, 
in the right conditions,

00:58:58.801 --> 00:59:00.808
you may have plants.

00:59:00.865 --> 00:59:02.642
That's incredibly fast.

00:59:02.722 --> 00:59:04.996
So, if you're moving around parts of Asia,

00:59:05.050 --> 00:59:07.739
where, on the one hand, 
there's a long winter,

00:59:07.779 --> 00:59:09.304
a short growing season,

00:59:09.374 --> 00:59:12.378
and you can't particularly r
ely on rainfall,

00:59:12.468 --> 00:59:16.087
then something that gets a move on
in terms of its growth cycle

00:59:16.115 --> 00:59:18.220
is very valuable.

00:59:21.260 --> 00:59:24.692
There are accounts of communities
that are on horseback

00:59:25.172 --> 00:59:28.497
for quite a lot of the time
and herding animals and so forth,

00:59:28.497 --> 00:59:32.263
but for that short season of the year

00:59:32.313 --> 00:59:33.879
that millet grows in,

00:59:33.879 --> 00:59:36.738
they can actually 
sow the millet on horseback,

00:59:36.948 --> 00:59:39.287
trample it in with the horse's feet,

00:59:39.509 --> 00:59:41.599
and then either leave 
a few teenagers there

00:59:41.599 --> 00:59:44.081
to scare the birds off 
for a couple of months,

00:59:44.169 --> 00:59:47.539
come back two months later, 
and harvest the crops.

00:59:51.369 --> 00:59:53.819
Millet was a highly mobile grain,

00:59:53.849 --> 00:59:55.664
but there wasn't any evidence

00:59:55.714 --> 00:59:58.941
of how it might have travelled
from its home in northern China.

01:00:02.167 --> 01:00:08.610
Until archaeologists found signs 
of millet cultivation around 2500 BC

01:00:09.102 --> 01:00:13.224
in the foothills of the Tian Shan
Mountains in central Asia.

01:00:16.064 --> 01:00:18.035
At that point we asked ourselves,

01:00:18.045 --> 01:00:20.246
"Well, what is it about these foothills?"

01:00:20.300 --> 01:00:22.133
You know, "Why the foothills?"

01:00:23.333 --> 01:00:25.590
Clearly, it's about water.

01:00:26.630 --> 01:00:29.521
If one travels across the centre of Asia,

01:00:29.605 --> 01:00:32.213
one realizes why water is a key.

01:00:32.323 --> 01:00:35.922
And wherever you are in Asia, 
it can be very dry, of course.

01:00:36.112 --> 01:00:38.740
But if one goes uphill to those foothills,

01:00:38.740 --> 01:00:40.638
then one has somewhere

01:00:40.748 --> 01:00:44.440
where there will be streams
running off the mountains and water.

01:00:47.165 --> 01:00:50.202
Archaeologists found that around 1,000 BC,

01:00:50.212 --> 01:00:53.679
millet farmers left theTian Shan foothills

01:00:53.749 --> 01:00:56.271
and their reliable water supply

01:00:56.291 --> 01:00:59.367
and began moving
into much harsher environments.

01:01:00.017 --> 01:01:03.765
We can see the confidence of farmers

01:01:03.905 --> 01:01:06.944
spreading out from where
the water is really safe

01:01:07.054 --> 01:01:09.653
to areas where you have to know more

01:01:09.653 --> 01:01:13.143
about the water and the landscape 
and the geography,

01:01:13.163 --> 01:01:16.882
both into the steppes to the north
and to the desert to the south.

01:01:19.573 --> 01:01:23.663
Millet's local migrations
may have linked it with the world.

01:01:24.347 --> 01:01:27.057
Migrating millet farmers
in search of water

01:01:27.077 --> 01:01:29.227
may have settled near trade routes.

01:01:33.067 --> 01:01:35.657
And long-distance travelers
would have chosen routes

01:01:35.657 --> 01:01:38.597
near reliable sources of food and water.

01:01:43.087 --> 01:01:48.935
I think very much 
those traders are definitely working

01:01:49.076 --> 01:01:51.956
through networks
that are already centuries old.

01:01:53.502 --> 01:01:58.702
It's at least a millennium
before you see something crystallizing

01:01:58.732 --> 01:02:01.327
that you can start calling the Silk Road.

01:02:04.717 --> 01:02:08.153
Another discovery has revealed 
that this ancient grain migration

01:02:08.163 --> 01:02:11.319
wasn't only from East to West.

01:02:14.249 --> 01:02:17.755
Wheat was transmitted from West to East,

01:02:17.865 --> 01:02:21.162
arrived in China and was accepted
as our main staple.

01:02:21.322 --> 01:02:26.598
This reflects the transaction
between Eastern and Western cultures.

01:02:29.528 --> 01:02:32.439
The Eurasian steppe, acting as a route

01:02:32.439 --> 01:02:35.297
for early exchanges between
Eastern and Western cultures.

01:02:35.359 --> 01:02:38.686
is the predecessor
of the ancient Silk Road.

01:02:38.742 --> 01:02:41.596
Ethnic migration, the fusion of cultures,

01:02:41.746 --> 01:02:44.910
and the flow of trade
are ll embedded in this road.

01:02:46.755 --> 01:02:50.092
Trading millet and wheat
between China and Europe

01:02:50.162 --> 01:02:52.840
may have done much more than feed people.

01:02:54.590 --> 01:02:58.330
It may also have enabled
profound social change.

01:03:02.450 --> 01:03:05.320
Seeds germinate at one time of year

01:03:05.410 --> 01:03:08.070
and are harvested another time of year,

01:03:08.120 --> 01:03:11.230
and that's kind
of hardwired into their biology.

01:03:11.290 --> 01:03:13.900
And so farming is a one-season activity,

01:03:13.970 --> 01:03:16.590
and there are things going on
at other times of year.

01:03:16.630 --> 01:03:19.235
And during the second millennium BC,

01:03:19.255 --> 01:03:21.262
a number of societies are doing something

01:03:21.262 --> 01:03:23.127
which is quite radically different,

01:03:23.127 --> 01:03:28.173
and that is putting more
than one season in a single year.

01:03:29.486 --> 01:03:31.981
Crops like millet 
are really useful for that,

01:03:32.011 --> 01:03:35.218
in that if you are a western farmer,

01:03:35.278 --> 01:03:37.624
with wheat and barley fields

01:03:37.624 --> 01:03:39.967
reaching maturity during the summer,

01:03:39.987 --> 01:03:41.101
and you think

01:03:41.228 --> 01:03:44.166
"Right, with the same plot of land,
"I want to increase production.

01:03:44.696 --> 01:03:48.851
"And so, I want another crop
after I've harvested the first crop."

01:03:49.581 --> 01:03:52.465
You can't do a long season, 
large-grain crop

01:03:52.465 --> 01:03:54.449
like wheat and barley again,

01:03:54.533 --> 01:03:57.166
so, something that's short and sharp
like millet

01:03:57.166 --> 01:03:59.269
you can tag on to the end of it

01:03:59.319 --> 01:04:02.237
and catch another season 
before the winter's set in.

01:04:05.297 --> 01:04:08.586
Interestingly, when you get to China, 
it's the converse.

01:04:08.606 --> 01:04:11.026
You have this short season crop
already there,

01:04:11.036 --> 01:04:13.311
and by rearranging your life,

01:04:13.321 --> 01:04:17.658
you can bring a long season crop
such as wheat and barley in at that stage.

01:04:17.722 --> 01:04:20.789
So the implications are, 
with the same plot of land,

01:04:21.139 --> 01:04:25.285
you could basically get 
two harvests rather than one.

01:04:25.372 --> 01:04:28.263
So, two sets of calories rather than one.

01:04:31.673 --> 01:04:35.409
It may release some of the community
to not farm at all

01:04:36.015 --> 01:04:40.852
and occupy roles within cities,
or as craftspeople, or leaders.

01:04:43.152 --> 01:04:45.744
If we look at the second millennium BC,

01:04:45.744 --> 01:04:47.345
what we certainly see

01:04:47.345 --> 01:04:50.621
is at the same time 
as multi-cropping is there,

01:04:51.241 --> 01:04:54.633
then there are a lot of the community,

01:04:54.706 --> 01:04:57.462
are not farmers, 
but instead metalworkers,

01:04:57.532 --> 01:05:00.165
or kings, or priests, or something else.

01:05:00.165 --> 01:05:02.038
And so what we see evidence of

01:05:02.038 --> 01:05:07.767
is multi-cropping allows a non-farming
sector within the community.

01:05:09.792 --> 01:05:14.370
So, what we have is a small, 
not very impressive-looking seed,

01:05:14.400 --> 01:05:17.812
but because of the way it grows
and because of its biology,

01:05:17.812 --> 01:05:20.279
it has a massive impact

01:05:20.345 --> 01:05:22.466
in changing the productivity

01:05:22.496 --> 01:05:25.287
of the heartlands of western farming.

01:05:27.637 --> 01:05:30.319
So, those western farmlands
could, in the same area,

01:05:30.387 --> 01:05:32.753
produce two crops rather than one,

01:05:32.803 --> 01:05:35.343
and that enabled a whole series of things

01:05:35.401 --> 01:05:38.900
that we associate 
with the word "civilization."

01:05:43.290 --> 01:05:47.770
Finding Chinese millet in Europe
and European wheat and barley in China

01:05:47.960 --> 01:05:51.095
suggests that long before the Silk Road,

01:05:51.195 --> 01:05:55.117
East and West were introducing 
one another to new foods,

01:05:56.277 --> 01:05:58.665
and that the movement of crops

01:05:58.665 --> 01:06:02.239
may have helped create
the earliest East-West trade routes.

01:06:05.269 --> 01:06:08.016
And in the deserts of far western China,

01:06:08.066 --> 01:06:10.477
archaeologists
have discovered another way

01:06:10.477 --> 01:06:12.889
living organisms
could travel the Silk Road.

01:06:15.219 --> 01:06:18.156
This is Xuanquanzhi relay station,

01:06:18.156 --> 01:06:21.635
an archaeological site 
near the town of Dunhuang,

01:06:21.949 --> 01:06:24.591
a major stopping point on the Silk Road.

01:06:29.011 --> 01:06:31.967
2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty,

01:06:32.017 --> 01:06:36.815
Xuanquanzhi was a very busy
and very cosmopolitan place.

01:06:39.535 --> 01:06:43.272
According to records 
written on bamboo and wood

01:06:43.342 --> 01:06:45.661
unearthed from Xuanquanzhi

01:06:45.817 --> 01:06:49.312
Xuanquanzhi was not only serving
as a relay station,

01:06:49.312 --> 01:06:52.807
but also as a place to receive 
caravans and government officials.

01:06:52.849 --> 01:06:56.008
During the Han Dinasty, 
the major officials received here

01:06:56.008 --> 01:06:59.248
included the king of Kholan Kingdom
from the Western Regions,

01:06:59.279 --> 01:07:02.331
the king of the Wusun, 
also called the Issedones

01:07:02.331 --> 01:07:05.384
and the king of the Kangu, 
also called the Sogdians.

01:07:05.564 --> 01:07:08.911
At most, the number of received guests
would be over 1000.

01:07:11.921 --> 01:07:16.669
Therefore, this place was filled up
with a mixture of people from all regions.

01:07:17.909 --> 01:07:20.118
It would be used for merchants,

01:07:20.118 --> 01:07:22.945
and it would also be used
for government business.

01:07:22.975 --> 01:07:24.729
People could travel long distances

01:07:24.729 --> 01:07:27.004
knowing that there was somewhere
they could stay

01:07:27.024 --> 01:07:29.315
be refreshed and recover,
change their horses,

01:07:29.335 --> 01:07:32.240
and then move on
to the next relay station.

01:07:34.120 --> 01:07:37.648
The wonderful thing about
the Xuanquanzhi trading post

01:07:37.658 --> 01:07:43.112
was that it's in a part of the country
that is not built up now,

01:07:43.179 --> 01:07:47.095
and the environment, very, very dry
and often very cold in the winter,

01:07:47.145 --> 01:07:49.813
means that things
are preserved there very well.

01:07:49.823 --> 01:07:52.800
So, a lot of the things 
- inside that trading post -

01:07:52.890 --> 01:07:55.557
have survived instead of decomposing.

01:08:01.119 --> 01:08:04.247
Excavators were especially excited
to find something

01:08:04.267 --> 01:08:07.276
that perhaps only
an archaeologist could love:

01:08:09.486 --> 01:08:12.921
the 2,000-year-old equivalent 
of toilet paper.

01:08:14.081 --> 01:08:16.957
In China, they wrote back,
in the Han dynasty times,

01:08:16.997 --> 01:08:19.738
how they would have a stick 
with cloth wrapped on the end

01:08:19.738 --> 01:08:21.424
for people to wipe themselves with.

01:08:21.424 --> 01:08:24.444
There were quite a few 
of these sticks thrown into the latrine

01:08:24.454 --> 01:08:27.209
as if people discarded them
in there when they'd finished.

01:08:27.209 --> 01:08:30.566
These sticks have been found
at some other excavations in China as well

01:08:30.566 --> 01:08:32.532
but what's great about this relay station

01:08:32.532 --> 01:08:34.663
is we still have the cloth
wrapped on the end

01:08:34.663 --> 01:08:37.318
and we still have the human faeces on.

01:08:38.048 --> 01:08:41.782
So, we scraped off 
the dried faeces from the cloth

01:08:41.851 --> 01:08:43.664
and took them to the lab.

01:08:43.754 --> 01:08:45.832
We found four different
species of parasite

01:08:45.832 --> 01:08:47.910
in those who used this latrine.

01:08:47.989 --> 01:08:51.076
Two of the species are spread by faeces

01:08:51.076 --> 01:08:54.374
contaminating your food
or your hands or your drink:

01:08:54.414 --> 01:08:56.688
roundworm and whipworm.

01:08:56.888 --> 01:08:59.802
Another species was a kind of tapeworm

01:08:59.812 --> 01:09:03.859
that they probably acquired
by eating raw or undercooked pork.

01:09:04.289 --> 01:09:07.477
And then, we found
the really exciting find,

01:09:07.477 --> 01:09:09.606
which was the Chinese liver fluke.

01:09:11.326 --> 01:09:13.978
This is a small flatworm

01:09:13.978 --> 01:09:16.630
that lives in eastern and southern
China and in Korea.

01:09:17.326 --> 01:09:20.226
It can only survive in marshy, wet places.

01:09:20.306 --> 01:09:25.384
But here, we found it 1500 kilometres away
from anywhere that has it in modern times.

01:09:27.002 --> 01:09:29.780
So, it wasn't what we expected to find.

01:09:29.820 --> 01:09:33.094
It was brilliant that we could find it
on the Silk Road.

01:09:33.164 --> 01:09:35.321
The liver fluke requires a lifecycle

01:09:35.321 --> 01:09:37.538
where it passes through freshwater snails,

01:09:37.599 --> 01:09:39.918
and through small fish
and then, bigger fish.

01:09:39.938 --> 01:09:43.308
If you cook the fish, 
then you don't get the liver fluke.

01:09:43.368 --> 01:09:46.498
But if you eat the fish raw, 
then it hatches out in your stomach,

01:09:46.508 --> 01:09:49.408
migrates through your body, 
crawls into the liver,

01:09:49.438 --> 01:09:50.893
and then develops there.

01:09:51.483 --> 01:09:54.910
There was no way that people
in the area of this relay station

01:09:54.910 --> 01:09:57.289
could have caught it 
in that particular area

01:09:57.289 --> 01:09:59.303
because it was far too dry.

01:09:59.323 --> 01:10:00.766
There were no lakes.

01:10:00.776 --> 01:10:03.674
There were no freshwater snails
and fish for them to infect.

01:10:04.962 --> 01:10:10.296
The discovery of the liver fluke
is of great importance.

01:10:12.836 --> 01:10:17.787
It indicates that the caravans 
or government servants

01:10:17.944 --> 01:10:21.546
brought their excrement,
as well as diseases ,here

01:10:21.597 --> 01:10:25.739
over thousands of kilometers
of travel to this place, Xuanquan station.

01:10:30.262 --> 01:10:33.328
With state of the art overseas analysis,

01:10:33.410 --> 01:10:36.769
we are comparing it with similar
evidence originating in Europe.

01:10:36.839 --> 01:10:39.723
to figure out whether the liver was spread

01:10:39.723 --> 01:10:42.584
from China's eastern 
coastal area to Europe

01:10:42.614 --> 01:10:45.540
or if it was spread from Europe to China

01:10:45.540 --> 01:10:48.058
or if the disease spread 
between these two areas.

01:10:48.058 --> 01:10:50.075
We are doing some further research.

01:10:51.725 --> 01:10:54.493
The finds at Xuanquanzhi have shown

01:10:54.503 --> 01:10:58.582
that humans could carry diseases
long distances along the Silk Road.

01:11:03.892 --> 01:11:07.379
Another discovery has revealed
what could happen when they did.

01:11:13.354 --> 01:11:18.119
In 2009, German scientists began
investigating a puzzling discovery

01:11:18.840 --> 01:11:21.713
in the Bavarian town of Aschheim.

NOTE Paragraph

01:11:25.684 --> 01:11:31.647
About 20 years ago a graveyard was found 
which contained more than 400 individuals.

01:11:32.097 --> 01:11:38.153
We dated it back to a period from 
around the 5th century to the 7th century.

01:11:38.443 --> 01:11:41.395
It was exciting for us 
that there were a lot of graves

01:11:41.411 --> 01:11:44.365
that contained more than one person

01:11:44.385 --> 01:11:51.192
around 20 graves 
where 2 to 5 people were buried

01:11:53.142 --> 01:11:56.971
Aschheim looked like any other cemetery

01:11:56.971 --> 01:11:58.885
that we would expect to find here

01:11:58.885 --> 01:12:00.892
except for these multiple burials

01:12:00.912 --> 01:12:05.352
These people were buried together
in one grave and that made us curious.

01:12:05.366 --> 01:12:07.148
And we asked ourselves why exactly

01:12:07.148 --> 01:12:09.380
these people were buried
together in one grave

01:12:10.880 --> 01:12:14.609
The Aschheim mass burial 
was an archaeological enigma,

01:12:15.128 --> 01:12:17.447
but there was one crucial clue.

01:12:19.377 --> 01:12:23.316
The bodies had been buried
during the 6th century CE.

01:12:29.736 --> 01:12:34.099
In the 6th century, a terrifying illness
called the Plague of Justinian

01:12:34.419 --> 01:12:37.115
ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire.

01:12:41.744 --> 01:12:47.786
It killed 30 to 50 million people
in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

01:12:49.379 --> 01:12:52.590
nearly half of all the people on Earth.

01:12:52.890 --> 01:12:57.075
Historians tell us that thousands
of people were lying on the street

01:12:57.175 --> 01:12:59.218
and that tens of thousands

01:12:59.218 --> 01:13:01.590
were dying at the peak of the plague,

01:13:01.650 --> 01:13:05.118
so many that they could not be buried.

01:13:05.189 --> 01:13:09.882
The corpses were thrown 
into watchtowers and sealed inside

01:13:09.882 --> 01:13:13.394
because no one knew what to do with them.

01:13:13.484 --> 01:13:17.791
So, this epidemic is quite comparable
to the Black Death.

01:13:17.888 --> 01:13:21.014
We asked ourselves what
the multiple burials were about

01:13:21.014 --> 01:13:24.975
and chose to screen for plague pathogen

01:13:26.511 --> 01:13:30.522
The Justinian plague arrived
in Constantinople on ships from Egypt,

01:13:32.533 --> 01:13:34.677
but what the disease was

01:13:34.677 --> 01:13:37.543
and where it came from 
remained unknown.

01:13:39.674 --> 01:13:42.304
The team investigating
Aschheim's mass burial

01:13:42.334 --> 01:13:45.366
hoped its bones might reveal the answer.

01:13:45.473 --> 01:13:50.290
We tested more than 20 individuals,
analysing their DNA

01:13:50.300 --> 01:13:55.116
and found small fragments 
of plague DNA in four individuals,

01:13:55.517 --> 01:13:58.820
Just on this young woman, 
on one young woman,

01:13:58.890 --> 01:14:01.483
there was enough DNA
to be able to analyse it really well.

01:14:01.483 --> 01:14:03.418
And that is this individual.

01:14:03.438 --> 01:14:06.207
This woman has quite open skull sutures.

01:14:06.227 --> 01:14:09.996
This is how we know 
that she died quite young.

01:14:10.096 --> 01:14:14.770
We would estimate this individual's age 
at approximately early 20s.

01:14:14.915 --> 01:14:17.543
In this case, we would see

01:14:17.543 --> 01:14:20.957
if we could find the plague pathogen

01:14:21.007 --> 01:14:24.962
and to do that we prefer to use teeth

01:14:25.013 --> 01:14:28.109
like these teeth here.

01:14:28.429 --> 01:14:30.578
Teeth with a lot of root

01:14:30.848 --> 01:14:34.332
because the root contains DNA

01:14:34.342 --> 01:14:37.006
and because it is embedded in the jaw.

01:14:37.065 --> 01:14:42.035
It is well protected there, 
and the DNA is preserved there best.

01:14:42.152 --> 01:14:46.234
And then we took this tooth 
to the laboratory

01:14:46.364 --> 01:14:50.186
to extract and examine the DNA
with chemical methods.

01:14:51.118 --> 01:14:54.040
And when we had looked at the DNA 
of this individual

01:14:54.107 --> 01:14:57.357
we determined that
we had actually found Yersini pestis,

01:14:57.377 --> 01:15:01.577
the plague pathogen, the Black Death's.

01:15:01.721 --> 01:15:04.415
What we could also determine

01:15:04.465 --> 01:15:09.785
is that this pathogen did not develop
in Europe but evolved in Asia

01:15:11.259 --> 01:15:14.201
Studies like the Aschheim DNA project

01:15:14.211 --> 01:15:17.804
have concluded that 800 years
before the Black Death,

NOTE Paragraph

01:15:17.917 --> 01:15:21.149
a plague traveled the Silk Road

01:15:21.149 --> 01:15:25.455
and that centuries later,
the Black Death followed it in its path.

01:15:29.358 --> 01:15:30.892
Most scholars now agree

01:15:30.892 --> 01:15:34.256
that the Black Death
originated in central Asia

01:15:35.785 --> 01:15:37.727
and that it first reached Europe

01:15:37.727 --> 01:15:40.983
on Italian merchant ships 
returning from the East.

01:15:51.933 --> 01:15:55.106
The Black Death killed 
with incredible speed.

01:16:00.026 --> 01:16:03.942
Victims had only 
a week to a few hours to live.

01:16:07.372 --> 01:16:10.330
Entire towns and monasteries 
were wiped out,

01:16:11.230 --> 01:16:13.794
and no one knew what to do.

01:16:16.554 --> 01:16:19.119
It may have spread about five miles a day,

01:16:19.189 --> 01:16:24.097
which is a lot faster than a lot 
of modern bubonic plague outbreaks.

01:16:25.703 --> 01:16:29.950
Whether it was because of the rate
at which people fled from it

01:16:29.990 --> 01:16:33.138
that spread it faster than it might 
otherwise have been.

01:16:34.038 --> 01:16:35.620
And it certainly was something

01:16:35.640 --> 01:16:38.302
that had a dramatic effect
on people in Europe.

01:16:38.322 --> 01:16:40.864
They all wrote about it,
they were all scared of it.

01:17:17.804 --> 01:17:19.921
So, they had some concept of contagion

01:17:19.991 --> 01:17:21.515
and the idea that the disease

01:17:21.545 --> 01:17:23.616
could be spread
from one person to another,

01:17:23.616 --> 01:17:25.426
but they didn't know how.

01:17:27.476 --> 01:17:30.060
They had no idea about bacteria

01:17:30.060 --> 01:17:32.762
or the spread of microorganisms
at that stage,

01:17:32.792 --> 01:17:35.613
so, they hadn't worked out 
how a disease was spread.

01:17:35.633 --> 01:17:38.255
But they just realized that one person
seemed to be able

01:17:38.255 --> 01:17:40.267
to spread it to the rest of their family,

01:17:40.277 --> 01:17:43.565
so, they realized something
must be happening there.

01:17:58.566 --> 01:18:00.742
Baffled physicians consulted the works

01:18:00.742 --> 01:18:03.209
of ancient authorities like Hippocrates,

01:18:03.220 --> 01:18:06.654
who lived four centuries
before the birth of Jesus,

01:18:08.904 --> 01:18:12.786
and Galen, who lived 
two centuries after Jesus' death.

01:18:16.696 --> 01:18:20.317
Hippocrates and Galen believed
that illness was a result

01:18:20.377 --> 01:18:23.733
of an imbalance among
four so-called humours:

01:18:24.783 --> 01:18:28.646
blood, phlegm, 
yellow bile, and black bile.

01:18:31.886 --> 01:18:35.821
The theory was that if you had
your four humours in balance

01:18:35.891 --> 01:18:39.045
— your blood, your phlegm, 
your black bile and your yellow bile —

01:18:39.045 --> 01:18:40.410
then you'd be healthy.

01:18:40.416 --> 01:18:41.892
If they came out of balance

01:18:41.892 --> 01:18:44.850
or if you had corruption 
of one of your humours,

01:18:44.850 --> 01:18:47.439
then that would make you unwell.

01:18:47.569 --> 01:18:49.571
So, the treatments that doctors used

01:18:49.579 --> 01:18:52.660
were largely based on their understanding
of humoural theory.

01:18:52.840 --> 01:18:56.237
So, at the beginning, they tried
the normal treatments

01:18:56.247 --> 01:19:00.367
of dietary modification
and bloodletting and baths and so on,

01:19:00.476 --> 01:19:02.125
but they had no effect.

01:19:04.860 --> 01:19:08.661
They believed that bad vapours 
were coming up from the ground,

01:19:08.757 --> 01:19:11.766
making people ill, 
affecting their humours.

01:19:11.786 --> 01:19:15.882
They believed that a strong 
southerly wind was a bad thing

01:19:15.984 --> 01:19:18.308
that made a lot of people ill,

01:19:19.148 --> 01:19:22.305
that it was a combination 
of the alignments of the planets,

01:19:22.365 --> 01:19:26.396
because they believed in astrology 
and its effect on your risk of disease.

01:19:27.766 --> 01:19:31.883
They really didn't have a structured 
medical approach to how to deal with it.

01:19:31.973 --> 01:19:33.781
It took everyone off guard.

01:19:33.801 --> 01:19:36.311
No one knew how to deal with it.

01:19:38.426 --> 01:19:40.638
The doctors were effectively powerless.

01:19:49.048 --> 01:19:52.129
Some citizens attempted another cure.

01:20:02.419 --> 01:20:05.445
Jews in Europe suffered 
fewer deaths from plague.

01:20:07.105 --> 01:20:09.908
That may have been because
they were socially isolated

NOTE Paragraph

01:20:09.948 --> 01:20:13.269
and practiced better hygiene 
than the general population.

01:20:15.479 --> 01:20:17.950
But surviving the Black Death

01:20:17.950 --> 01:20:21.025
cost thousands 
of European Jews their lives.

01:20:22.835 --> 01:20:25.088
All across plague-stricken Europe,

01:20:25.108 --> 01:20:28.559
the already age-old Christian
prejudice against Jews

01:20:28.899 --> 01:20:31.729
exploded into murderous hatred.

01:20:32.239 --> 01:20:35.400
They believed that people 
with leprosy or Jewish people

01:20:35.640 --> 01:20:38.980
may have actually exacerbated the plague
by poisoning people.

01:20:44.820 --> 01:20:48.525
So, this is a sign of how panicked
and how worried everybody was,

01:20:48.575 --> 01:20:52.371
that they were thinking of really 
quite bizarre kind of interpretations

01:20:52.431 --> 01:20:55.414
as to why everybody was becoming sick.

01:21:05.474 --> 01:21:07.477
While mobs murdered Jews,

01:21:07.737 --> 01:21:10.483
physicians tried to stop the Black Death.