These programs almost always begin with a blank page
and, in my case, a blank mind,
trying to find some kind of single trigger
that will kick off the show, an idea.
And then suddenly, whatever it is springs to mind,
and away you go.
Sometimes, as in the case of this program,
all it takes to change everything is this:
History was changed by one word.
The word meant "and the Son,"
as in, "The Holy Spirit
comes from the Father and the Son together."
The word was "filioque,"
and the whole of Catholic theology rested on it.
So when the Greeks dropped the word,
the pope hit the roof.
The papal fuss went on for 400 years,
with Rome threatening to chuck the Greeks out
if they didn't put "filioque" back,
and them saying, "Oh, yeah?"
And finally, in 1053, they got the boot,
about which they could have cared less,
living as they did in imperial Constantinople.
No, there's nothing wrong with the music.
It's just that the great Greek city on the Bosporus called Constantinople
is today the great Turkish city on the Bosporus
called Istanbul--
today Turkish Islamic;
back then, still Greek Christian.
So you know what problem I'm about to mention:
the fact that the Greeks here
had no idea what was about to hit them.
Well, in their position, nor would you have.
I mean, we're talking about a superpower here.
This place was a crossroads of the world.
So being threatened by some tin-pot Roman pope
was a little bit like Luxembourg versus America.
So who needed a bunch of illiterate louts over in Europe anyway?
Well, by mid-15th century,
with the Turkish artillery outside the walls, they did.
So in very short order,
there was an obsequious diplomatic mission over in Italy
asking the pope for help.
"AII right," said the pope,
"but add 'filioque' to your services."
What a memory.
"AII right," the Greeks said, "we will."
Too late, as you can see.
In 1 453, the Turkish army took Constantinople,
changed the name to Istanbul,
and everything went instantly Islamic.
And all of a sudden, those Greek diplomats off in Italy
haggling with the pope about a rescue mission
and "filioque" and other matters now kind of irrelevant
had two problems:
nowhere to come home to and no job.
Fortunately, however, they could do one thing
their Italian hosts couldn't:
speak Greek.
So they gave the Europeans language lessons
and kicked off what we call the Renaissance,
because when the Italians got a sight of the books
these guys had brought along with them,
they went nuts--
all the ancient Greek philosophers,
the scientists, the technology, the literature,
which the Greek exiles now obligingly translated
and one particular Italian obligingly passed around
in editions of 1,000 at a time,
because he'd invented a way to print scribble.
The printer in question was called Aldo, and he lived in Venice,
which, as you were no doubt expecting,
takes us to sunny Italy--
Now, Aldo invented a way to print scribble
because of the funny way change always happens.
The first version of a new invention looks like the old thing it replaces.
The first car looked like a carriage.
The first movie looked like a play.
So Aldo had to print stuff that didn't look like printing,
but manuscript.
When life was all parchment and scribble,
people abbreviated a bit,
like this.
They would have thought the way we write words out in full,
like that, was pretty dumb.
So the first printers had to make their printing
look like handwriting, like this.
At the time, full joined-up writing was, as you can see,
a pretty laborious business if you wrote it out in full--
no good to a hot-shot businessman
who was going to lose his shirt if the contract wasn't ready
in triplicate in the next ten minutes.
So they scribbled--
anything to save a bit of time and close the deal,
which is what makes manuscript reading today such a pain.
So that printer I said printed scribble
did that because in 1501 in Venice,
he came up with a print equivalent of scribble.
We call it "italic."
Look how small it is.
And that's a good thing for another reason,
because the most expensive thing in the whole of printing--
typeface, leather binding, printing press, wages--
is paper,
which italic saved by being small.
But the real reason Aldo made a million
was because everybody traveled on horseback,
and little books fit in your saddlebag.
Italic was so successful, everybody wanted it,
so in no time at all, there was a new problem:
book overload.
The book overload problem was solved
by an Elizabethan spy turned librarian called Bodley
with this radical new idea:
a catalog.
And if you take a quick squint at it,
you'll see why so many people feel uncomfortable in libraries.
I mean, look at how easy to get at this stuff is.
I don't think,
specially if you happened to be
certain 17th-century Massachusetts natives
who were looking for an education, which they were.
Well, a couple of them were
once the university at Harvard had started,
not long after Bodley,
with a degree program that included Native Americans.
Things might have gone bad
between them and the colonists later on,
but at the beginning, the relationship was peaceful,
and the Puritans were keen to educate them
and, of course, convert them to Christianity.
So they built a special annex to the new college at Harvard,
and two Native Americans got B.A.s.
And then, in 1671,
the son of the colony's governor was over in England
looking for somebody to run the Harvard college,
and who should he meet but the 17th century's top educator
and offered him the job.
The guy was a Czech called Komensky,
who was all exercised by the way technical knowledge
was extremely difficult to get at,
so he'd come up with an amazing new kind of book
called "The Visible World in Pictures"--
the words describing animals and plants and machines
right next to drawings of the things themselves.
Ho-hum to you, but back then,
a revolutionary industrial approach to knowledge
that got him the Harvard offer, which he turned down,
and that might have been the end of training for industry
but for the Cavaliers versus Roundheads business.
The English Civil War was brief, so I'II be.
Free-church Puritans behead king, go republican,
make life hell for Church of England royalists.
Then they win,
and the free-church Puritans get their comeuppance.
Banned from public office and universities,
most of them then find it difficult to get any kind of job.
Well, there were only two places for them to go:
trade and industry.
And fortunately for us, that's where most of them went.
AII the great scientists and technologists and innovators
and financiers of the time,
people like James Watt, for instance,
were all Church of England rejects,
which is why religious intolerance kicked off the industrial revolution
and brought the chemistry it needed
and the gobbledygook that generated
thanks to an overweight Swede called Berzelius.
Berzelius spent most of his life in health spas
taking care of his hypochondria and blowing his blowpipe,
which he took everywhere with him.
See, back then, people used to keep rock collections--
stones, I mean--
and big B. would heat them up with his blowpipe
and analyze them.
This trick went over very big at parties,
and Berzelius loved parties.
And then, in 1812, he ruined my life,
because it's Berzelius you have to thank
for all that stuff you used to hate in chemistry class.
Remember the poem:
Here is the grave of Willie Smith.
Alas, he is no more,
for what he thought was H2O
was H2SO4.
Ho, ho.
This is all Berzelius.
The letters are for the latin names of the stuff,
and the little numbers are for the proportions it's in.
Berzelius did one other thing to make his mark on history.
Earlier in his life,
he blowpiped a strange rock found in a Swedish iron mine--
turned out to be a new element.
And funnily enough,
he didn't name it Berzelium or Swedonium, as you'd expect.
He called it cerium
after the newly found asteroid Ceres--
well, found and then lost.
The strange thing is,
the astronomer who'd found Ceres knew where to look until he lost it,
because back in 1772, somebody had discovered
how numbers were involved in planetary distances.
If, say, the sun to Mercury was 1 unit,
the sun to Venus would be 2;
to Earth, 4; sun to Mars, 8;
sun to something, 16;
and sun to Jupiter, 32.
I said "something" here
because they hadn't discovered the asteroids
until, in 1801,
an Italian called Piazzi finds the first one,
calls it Ceres,
tracks it for about three degrees across the sky,
gets sick.
When he's better, it's too cloudy.
Next time he's able to look, Ceres is gone.
Panic!
So a German math genius called Gauss
works out a way to calculate orbits from very little data--
which is what Piazzi has, to put it mildly,
like three sightings--
and tells him where to look.
One year later to the day,
there's Ceres exactly where Gauss said it would be--
right in the middle of what we call the asteroid belt.
This amazing discovery made his name--
Gauss, I mean.
Got him the astronomer's job at the University of Gottingen,
where they thought so highly of him, they preserved his brain.
Still there.
Mind you, Gauss is a very clever fellow.
He helps to invent the telegraph before Sam Morse does,
and he gets all worked up
about a strange ancient language called Sanskrit.
The first the West gets to hear about Sanskrit
is when a Welshman called Jones is made a judge in Calcutta.
Now, he's interested in Sanskrit because Indian law is written in it,
and he is, after all, traveling around dispensing Indian justice.
So the first kind of Sanskrit he sees is this stuff:
Sanskrit legalese.
Doesn't take him long to recognize
that this is much older than Latin or Greek.
So he writes a grammar, totally turns on the guy
who got Gauss into Sanskrit-- remember?
Fellow called Grimm,
who promptly traces Sanskrit all the way back
to what he calls the Indo-Europeans,
everybody's ancient ancestors,
which is exactly what Grimm's fellow Germans are desperate for,
because it gives them a sense of identity.
The key thing for the Germans at the time
is, they need something to be proud of,
because Napoleon's army has recently totally clobbered them.
So when a German philosopher called Herder
jumps on the Indo-European bandwagon
and comes up with the idea
of an ancient Germanic Aryan culture older than the Greeks,
they go for it with all the abandon
of an alcoholic in a brewery.
In no time at all,
there are fake medieval paintings going up all over the place,
with all that Indo-European pizzazz
covering room after room of equally fake medieval castles,
with the latest electric light and Teutonic music to match.
But the search for ancient origins was also to kick off something
this particular fake castle might just remind you of.
But, Grandmother, what great, big eyes you have.
Walt Disney and all that.
But his modern stories are only a later, very cleaned-up version of what it was
that got this kind of entertainment started,
inspired by Herder and those Indo-European myths,
that generated one of the best-selling children's books of all time.
"The better to eat you with, my dear."
The better to eat you with, my dear.
Everyone, on the count of three,
I need everyone to scream.
One, two, three.
Before everything gets too gory,
I'd like to introduce someone very special to you
who can let you know where the story
of Little Red Riding Hood comes from,
Uncle James.
Let's have a big round of applause.
Uncle James, where did this fairy tale come from?
Why, the fairy tale is by the Brothers Grimm.
Oh, he's so smart.
You'll recall one of the two Brothers Grimm
was that guy who was into ancient Sanskrit,
which then got both of them into ancient folk stories.
And as for that remark about cleaned-up versions,
well, in the original yarns,
the ugly sisters get their eyes pecked out,
the witches get cooked alive,
the wolf eats both Little Red Riding Hood
and the grandmother,
Rapunzel gets pregnant,
and "Sleeping Beauty's" really about necrophilia.
I mean, what?
Even the Grimms themselves
turned it all down for the second edition.
She told her story, and her tears were dried,
and her father went after that wolf she had spied.
But the really strange thing was,
when the Grimms went looking for story material,
they found the same stories turning up
as far apart as Sweden and Iran.
I'II tell you why once this lot's finished.
And happily ends our tale of Little Red Riding--
Hood, Hood, Hood.
The end.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
In 1865, an English folklore freak called Tylor
traveled around the world trying to solve the mystery:
Why did pyramids turn up in so many different places,
for instance, in China or Egypt or here in Indonesia?
And all the carvings told the same kind of stories:
how the world began, how nature worked,
how to get to Heaven, the way to live a good life,
how to find the truth.
There had to be something
linking all these ancient folktales and myths.
Tylor argued that if Indo-European
had gone from one ancient language
to the babble of the modern world,
maybe way, way back,
we'd all started from one single ancient culture
and that you could still see that in modern people's customs,
like throwing salt over your shoulder,
which is a habit that probably goes all the way back
to the Stone Age.
So maybe places like this weren't as foreign,
say, to Westerners as they might appear.
When Tylor stopped traveling, he went back to England
and kind of invented cultural anthropology
and became the director
of the first real anthropology museum,
the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
It was places like this that finally got Westerners around to realizing
that maybe all those tribes and rituals and myths
that we dismissed as primitive weren't,
that their cultures were as valid in their own way
as ours were.
Well, that's it.
This program began with one word: "filioque,"
when the church tried to make everybody
back in the 11th century behave the same way, remember?
Ironic that it should have led us to cultural anthropology,
probably the best tool
in the pluralist world of the 21st century
to help us understand and value how different we all are.
So having started with one word, here's two: