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These programs almost
always begin with a blank page

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and, in my case, a blank mind,

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trying to find some kind
of single trigger

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that will kick off the show, an idea.

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And then suddenly,
whatever it is springs to mind,

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and away you go.

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Sometimes, as in the case
of this program,

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all it takes to change everything
is this:

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History was changed by one word.

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The word meant "and the Son,"

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as in, "The Holy Spirit

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comes from the Father
and the Son together."

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The word was "filioque,"

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and the whole
of Catholic theology rested on it.

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So when the Greeks
dropped the word,

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the pope hit the roof.

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The papal fuss went on for 400 years,

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with Rome threatening
to chuck the Greeks out

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if they didn't put "filioque" back,

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and them saying, "Oh, yeah?"

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And finally, in 1053,
they got the boot,

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about which
they could have cared less,

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living as they did
in imperial Constantinople.

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No, there's nothing wrong
with the music.

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It's just that the great Greek city
on the Bosporus called Constantinople

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is today the great
Turkish city on the Bosporus

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called Istanbul--

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today Turkish Islamic;

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back then,
still Greek Christian.

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So you know what problem
I'm about to mention:

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the fact that the Greeks here

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had no idea
what was about to hit them.

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Well, in their position,
nor would you have.

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I mean, we're talking
about a superpower here.

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This place was a crossroads
of the world.

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So being threatened
by some tin-pot Roman pope

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was a little bit like Luxembourg
versus America.

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So who needed a bunch of illiterate
louts over in Europe anyway?

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Well, by mid-15th century,

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with the Turkish artillery
outside the walls, they did.

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So in very short order,

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there was an obsequious
diplomatic mission over in Italy

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asking the pope for help.

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"AII right," said the pope,

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"but add 'filioque'
to your services."

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What a memory.

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"AII right," the Greeks said,
"we will."

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Too late, as you can see.

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In 1 453, the Turkish army
took Constantinople,

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changed the name to Istanbul,

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and everything
went instantly Islamic.

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And all of a sudden,
those Greek diplomats off in Italy

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haggling with the pope
about a rescue mission

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and "filioque" and other matters
now kind of irrelevant

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had two problems:

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nowhere to come home to
and no job.

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Fortunately, however,
they could do one thing

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00:04:01,467 --> 00:04:03,298
their Italian hosts couldn't:

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00:04:08,274 --> 00:04:09,764
speak Greek.

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So they gave the Europeans
language lessons

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and kicked off what we call
the Renaissance,

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because when the Italians
got a sight of the books

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these guys had brought along
with them,

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they went nuts--

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all the ancient Greek philosophers,

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the scientists, the technology,
the literature,

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which the Greek exiles
now obligingly translated

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and one particular Italian
obligingly passed around

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in editions of 1,000 at a time,

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because he'd invented a way
to print scribble.

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The printer in question was
called Aldo, and he lived in Venice,

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which, as you were
no doubt expecting,

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takes us to sunny Italy--

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Now, Aldo invented a way
to print scribble

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because of the funny way
change always happens.

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The first version of a new invention
looks like the old thing it replaces.

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The first car looked like a carriage.

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The first movie looked like a play.

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So Aldo had to print stuff
that didn't look like printing,

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but manuscript.

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When life was all parchment
and scribble,

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people abbreviated a bit,

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like this.

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They would have thought the way
we write words out in full,

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00:05:51,711 --> 00:05:53,975
like that,
was pretty dumb.

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So the first printers
had to make their printing

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look like handwriting, like this.

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At the time, full joined-up
writing was, as you can see,

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a pretty laborious business
if you wrote it out in full--

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00:06:11,531 --> 00:06:13,123
no good to a hot-shot businessman

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who was going to lose his shirt
if the contract wasn't ready

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in triplicate in the next ten minutes.

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So they scribbled--

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anything to save a bit of time
and close the deal,

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which is what makes
manuscript reading today such a pain.

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So that printer
I said printed scribble

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did that because in 1501 in Venice,

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he came up with a print
equivalent of scribble.

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We call it "italic."

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Look how small it is.

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And that's a good thing
for another reason,

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because the most expensive thing
in the whole of printing--

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typeface, leather binding,
printing press, wages--

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is paper,

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which italic saved by being small.

106
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But the real reason
Aldo made a million

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was because everybody
traveled on horseback,

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and little books
fit in your saddlebag.

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Italic was so successful,
everybody wanted it,

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so in no time at all,
there was a new problem:

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book overload.

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The book overload problem
was solved

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by an Elizabethan spy
turned librarian called Bodley

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with this radical new idea:

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a catalog.

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And if you take
a quick squint at it,

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you'll see why so many people
feel uncomfortable in libraries.

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I mean, look at how easy
to get at this stuff is.

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I don't think,

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specially if you happened to be

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certain 17th-century
Massachusetts natives

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who were looking for an education,
which they were.

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Well, a couple of them were

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once the university at Harvard
had started,

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not long after Bodley,

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with a degree program
that included Native Americans.

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Things might have gone bad

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between them and the colonists
later on,

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but at the beginning,
the relationship was peaceful,

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and the Puritans were keen
to educate them

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and, of course,
convert them to Christianity.

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So they built a special annex
to the new college at Harvard,

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and two Native Americans got B.A.s.

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And then, in 1671,

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the son of the colony's governor
was over in England

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looking for somebody to run
the Harvard college,

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and who should he meet
but the 17th century's top educator

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and offered him the job.

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The guy was a Czech
called Komensky,

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who was all exercised
by the way technical knowledge

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was extremely difficult to get at,

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so he'd come up
with an amazing new kind of book

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called "The Visible World in Pictures"--

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the words describing animals
and plants and machines

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right next to drawings
of the things themselves.

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Ho-hum to you, but back then,

147
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a revolutionary
industrial approach to knowledge

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that got him the Harvard offer,
which he turned down,

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and that might have been the end
of training for industry

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but for the Cavaliers
versus Roundheads business.

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The English Civil War was brief,
so I'II be.

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Free-church Puritans
behead king, go republican,

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make life hell
for Church of England royalists.

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Then they win,

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and the free-church Puritans
get their comeuppance.

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Banned from public office
and universities,

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most of them then find it difficult
to get any kind of job.

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Well, there were only two places
for them to go:

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trade and industry.

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And fortunately for us,
that's where most of them went.

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AII the great scientists
and technologists and innovators

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00:10:05,831 --> 00:10:07,856
and financiers of the time,

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people like James Watt,
for instance,

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were all Church of England rejects,

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which is why religious intolerance
kicked off the industrial revolution

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and brought the chemistry it needed

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and the gobbledygook
that generated

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thanks to an overweight Swede
called Berzelius.

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Berzelius spent most of his life
in health spas

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00:10:37,430 --> 00:10:42,231
taking care of his hypochondria
and blowing his blowpipe,

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which he took everywhere with him.

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00:10:46,038 --> 00:10:50,099
See, back then, people
used to keep rock collections--

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stones, I mean--

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and big B. would heat them up
with his blowpipe

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and analyze them.

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This trick went over
very big at parties,

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00:11:04,090 --> 00:11:06,923
and Berzelius loved parties.

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00:11:08,561 --> 00:11:11,894
And then, in 1812,
he ruined my life,

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because it's Berzelius
you have to thank

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for all that stuff you used
to hate in chemistry class.

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Remember the poem:

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00:11:18,104 --> 00:11:19,571
Here is the grave of Willie Smith.

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Alas, he is no more,

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for what he thought was H2O

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00:11:24,176 --> 00:11:26,508
was H2SO4.

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00:11:26,645 --> 00:11:28,408
Ho, ho.

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00:11:30,015 --> 00:11:31,607
This is all Berzelius.

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00:11:31,751 --> 00:11:34,914
The letters are for
the latin names of the stuff,

189
00:11:35,054 --> 00:11:38,455
and the little numbers
are for the proportions it's in.

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00:11:40,793 --> 00:11:44,092
Berzelius did one other thing
to make his mark on history.

191
00:11:44,230 --> 00:11:45,595
Earlier in his life,

192
00:11:45,731 --> 00:11:49,064
he blowpiped a strange rock
found in a Swedish iron mine--

193
00:11:49,201 --> 00:11:50,930
turned out to be a new element.

194
00:11:51,070 --> 00:11:52,537
And funnily enough,

195
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he didn't name it Berzelium
or Swedonium, as you'd expect.

196
00:11:57,243 --> 00:12:00,235
He called it cerium

197
00:12:00,379 --> 00:12:03,371
after the newly found
asteroid Ceres--

198
00:12:03,516 --> 00:12:06,246
well, found and then lost.

199
00:12:06,685 --> 00:12:07,811
The strange thing is,

200
00:12:08,020 --> 00:12:12,719
the astronomer who'd found Ceres
knew where to look until he lost it,

201
00:12:12,858 --> 00:12:15,952
because back in 1772,
somebody had discovered

202
00:12:16,095 --> 00:12:20,054
how numbers were involved
in planetary distances.

203
00:12:20,199 --> 00:12:22,963
If, say, the sun to Mercury was 1 unit,

204
00:12:23,102 --> 00:12:24,899
the sun to Venus would be 2;

205
00:12:25,037 --> 00:12:27,801
to Earth, 4; sun to Mars, 8;

206
00:12:27,940 --> 00:12:30,033
sun to something, 16;

207
00:12:30,176 --> 00:12:32,644
and sun to Jupiter, 32.

208
00:12:32,778 --> 00:12:35,178
I said "something" here

209
00:12:35,314 --> 00:12:37,839
because they hadn't discovered
the asteroids

210
00:12:37,983 --> 00:12:40,076
until, in 1801,

211
00:12:40,219 --> 00:12:43,211
an Italian called Piazzi
finds the first one,

212
00:12:43,355 --> 00:12:44,845
calls it Ceres,

213
00:12:44,990 --> 00:12:48,551
tracks it for about
three degrees across the sky,

214
00:12:48,694 --> 00:12:49,718
gets sick.

215
00:12:49,862 --> 00:12:52,023
When he's better,
it's too cloudy.

216
00:12:53,232 --> 00:12:56,292
Next time he's able to look,
Ceres is gone.

217
00:12:56,435 --> 00:12:57,993
Panic!

218
00:12:58,137 --> 00:13:00,435
So a German math genius
called Gauss

219
00:13:00,573 --> 00:13:03,872
works out a way to calculate
orbits from very little data--

220
00:13:04,009 --> 00:13:06,341
which is what Piazzi has,
to put it mildly,

221
00:13:06,478 --> 00:13:07,740
like three sightings--

222
00:13:07,880 --> 00:13:09,347
and tells him where to look.

223
00:13:10,583 --> 00:13:12,983
One year later to the day,

224
00:13:13,118 --> 00:13:16,246
there's Ceres exactly
where Gauss said it would be--

225
00:13:16,388 --> 00:13:19,846
right in the middle of what we call
the asteroid belt.

226
00:13:24,230 --> 00:13:27,324
This amazing discovery
made his name--

227
00:13:27,466 --> 00:13:28,831
Gauss, I mean.

228
00:13:28,968 --> 00:13:32,563
Got him the astronomer's job
at the University of Gottingen,

229
00:13:32,705 --> 00:13:36,641
where they thought so highly of him,
they preserved his brain.

230
00:13:38,143 --> 00:13:39,542
Still there.

231
00:13:39,678 --> 00:13:42,374
Mind you,
Gauss is a very clever fellow.

232
00:13:42,514 --> 00:13:45,847
He helps to invent the telegraph
before Sam Morse does,

233
00:13:45,985 --> 00:13:47,247
and he gets all worked up

234
00:13:47,386 --> 00:13:53,154
about a strange ancient language
called Sanskrit.

235
00:14:15,648 --> 00:14:18,412
The first the West gets to hear
about Sanskrit

236
00:14:18,550 --> 00:14:21,713
is when a Welshman called Jones
is made a judge in Calcutta.

237
00:14:21,854 --> 00:14:25,415
Now, he's interested in Sanskrit
because Indian law is written in it,

238
00:14:25,557 --> 00:14:29,755
and he is, after all, traveling around
dispensing Indian justice.

239
00:14:29,895 --> 00:14:33,524
So the first kind of Sanskrit
he sees is this stuff:

240
00:14:33,666 --> 00:14:35,657
Sanskrit legalese.

241
00:14:35,801 --> 00:14:37,291
Doesn't take him long to recognize

242
00:14:37,436 --> 00:14:40,928
that this is much older
than Latin or Greek.

243
00:14:42,107 --> 00:14:45,201
So he writes a grammar,
totally turns on the guy

244
00:14:45,344 --> 00:14:47,403
who got Gauss into Sanskrit--
remember?

245
00:14:47,546 --> 00:14:49,070
Fellow called Grimm,

246
00:14:49,214 --> 00:14:51,205
who promptly traces Sanskrit
all the way back

247
00:14:51,350 --> 00:14:54,513
to what he calls the Indo-Europeans,

248
00:14:54,653 --> 00:14:56,587
everybody's ancient ancestors,

249
00:14:56,722 --> 00:15:00,214
which is exactly what Grimm's
fellow Germans are desperate for,

250
00:15:00,359 --> 00:15:02,486
because it gives them
a sense of identity.

251
00:15:05,898 --> 00:15:08,128
The key thing for the Germans
at the time

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00:15:08,267 --> 00:15:10,497
is, they need something
to be proud of,

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because Napoleon's army
has recently totally clobbered them.

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So when a German philosopher
called Herder

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00:15:24,950 --> 00:15:27,009
jumps on the Indo-European bandwagon

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and comes up with the idea

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00:15:28,454 --> 00:15:32,322
of an ancient Germanic Aryan culture
older than the Greeks,

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they go for it
with all the abandon

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00:15:34,426 --> 00:15:36,451
of an alcoholic in a brewery.

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In no time at all,

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there are fake medieval paintings
going up all over the place,

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with all that Indo-European pizzazz

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00:15:43,702 --> 00:15:48,071
covering room after room
of equally fake medieval castles,

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with the latest electric light
and Teutonic music to match.

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But the search for ancient origins
was also to kick off something

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this particular fake castle
might just remind you of.

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But, Grandmother,
what great, big eyes you have.

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Walt Disney and all that.

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But his modern stories are only a later,
very cleaned-up version of what it was

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00:16:19,738 --> 00:16:22,707
that got this kind
of entertainment started,

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inspired by Herder
and those Indo-European myths,

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that generated one of the best-selling
children's books of all time.

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"The better to eat you with,
my dear."

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The better to eat you with,
my dear.

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00:16:38,090 --> 00:16:39,648
Everyone,
on the count of three,

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00:16:39,792 --> 00:16:41,225
I need everyone to scream.

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00:16:41,360 --> 00:16:43,191
One, two, three.

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Before everything gets too gory,

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I'd like to introduce someone
very special to you

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who can let you know
where the story

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00:16:55,274 --> 00:16:57,299
of Little Red Riding Hood
comes from,

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Uncle James.

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00:16:58,977 --> 00:17:00,774
Let's have a big round of applause.

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00:17:03,082 --> 00:17:05,778
Uncle James, where did
this fairy tale come from?

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00:17:05,918 --> 00:17:08,614
Why, the fairy tale
is by the Brothers Grimm.

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00:17:08,754 --> 00:17:10,722
Oh, he's so smart.

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00:17:12,024 --> 00:17:13,821
You'll recall
one of the two Brothers Grimm

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00:17:13,959 --> 00:17:16,553
was that guy
who was into ancient Sanskrit,

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00:17:16,695 --> 00:17:20,392
which then got both of them
into ancient folk stories.

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00:17:22,167 --> 00:17:24,829
And as for that remark
about cleaned-up versions,

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well, in the original yarns,

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the ugly sisters
get their eyes pecked out,

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00:17:29,108 --> 00:17:30,905
the witches get cooked alive,

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00:17:31,043 --> 00:17:32,772
the wolf eats
both Little Red Riding Hood

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and the grandmother,

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00:17:34,079 --> 00:17:35,273
Rapunzel gets pregnant,

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00:17:35,414 --> 00:17:37,314
and "Sleeping Beauty's"
really about necrophilia.

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I mean, what?

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00:17:38,550 --> 00:17:39,608
Even the Grimms themselves

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00:17:39,751 --> 00:17:42,379
turned it all down
for the second edition.

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00:17:42,521 --> 00:17:45,581
She told her story,
and her tears were dried,

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00:17:45,724 --> 00:17:48,454
and her father went after
that wolf she had spied.

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But the really strange thing was,

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when the Grimms went looking
for story material,

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00:17:53,932 --> 00:17:55,866
they found the same stories
turning up

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as far apart
as Sweden and Iran.

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I'II tell you why
once this lot's finished.

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00:18:03,275 --> 00:18:06,574
And happily ends our tale
of Little Red Riding--

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00:18:06,712 --> 00:18:13,743
Hood, Hood, Hood.

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00:18:13,886 --> 00:18:16,047
The end.

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00:18:16,188 --> 00:18:17,155
Thank you.

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00:18:17,289 --> 00:18:18,415
Thank you very much.

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00:18:33,172 --> 00:18:37,336
In 1865, an English folklore
freak called Tylor

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00:18:37,476 --> 00:18:40,343
traveled around the world
trying to solve the mystery:

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00:18:40,479 --> 00:18:43,141
Why did pyramids turn up
in so many different places,

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00:18:43,282 --> 00:18:47,548
for instance, in China or Egypt
or here in Indonesia?

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00:18:47,686 --> 00:18:50,519
And all the carvings told
the same kind of stories:

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00:18:50,656 --> 00:18:52,988
how the world began,
how nature worked,

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00:18:53,125 --> 00:18:55,753
how to get to Heaven,
the way to live a good life,

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00:18:55,894 --> 00:18:57,919
how to find the truth.

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00:18:58,063 --> 00:18:59,325
There had to be something

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linking all these ancient
folktales and myths.

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00:19:16,048 --> 00:19:18,676
Tylor argued that if Indo-European

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00:19:18,817 --> 00:19:20,876
had gone
from one ancient language

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00:19:21,019 --> 00:19:23,214
to the babble of the modern world,

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00:19:24,890 --> 00:19:27,358
maybe way, way back,

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we'd all started
from one single ancient culture

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00:19:30,963 --> 00:19:34,296
and that you could still see that
in modern people's customs,

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00:19:34,433 --> 00:19:36,867
like throwing salt over your shoulder,

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00:19:37,002 --> 00:19:38,765
which is a habit that probably
goes all the way back

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00:19:38,904 --> 00:19:40,394
to the Stone Age.

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00:19:40,539 --> 00:19:43,474
So maybe places like this
weren't as foreign,

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00:19:43,609 --> 00:19:46,169
say, to Westerners
as they might appear.

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00:19:55,020 --> 00:19:58,012
When Tylor stopped traveling,
he went back to England

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00:19:58,156 --> 00:20:00,954
and kind of invented
cultural anthropology

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00:20:01,093 --> 00:20:02,060
and became the director

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00:20:02,194 --> 00:20:04,958
of the first real anthropology museum,

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00:20:05,097 --> 00:20:07,725
the Pitt Rivers Museum
in Oxford.

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00:20:14,006 --> 00:20:17,806
It was places like this that finally
got Westerners around to realizing

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00:20:17,943 --> 00:20:20,741
that maybe all those tribes
and rituals and myths

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00:20:20,879 --> 00:20:23,973
that we dismissed as primitive
weren't,

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00:20:25,017 --> 00:20:28,350
that their cultures
were as valid in their own way

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00:20:28,487 --> 00:20:29,818
as ours were.

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00:20:30,856 --> 00:20:33,051
Well, that's it.

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00:20:33,191 --> 00:20:36,558
This program began
with one word: "filioque,"

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00:20:36,695 --> 00:20:38,322
when the church
tried to make everybody

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00:20:38,463 --> 00:20:41,523
back in the 11th century
behave the same way, remember?

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00:20:52,811 --> 00:20:56,679
Ironic that it should have
led us to cultural anthropology,

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00:20:56,815 --> 00:20:58,146
probably the best tool

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00:20:58,283 --> 00:21:00,717
in the pluralist world
of the 21st century

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00:21:00,852 --> 00:21:04,049
to help us understand and value
how different we all are.

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00:21:05,724 --> 00:21:09,524
So having started with one word,
here's two: