Lost Cities of the Ancients (2006) s01e03 Episode Script

A mysterious new army has struck Babylon without warning.
Spreading terror throughout the city.
With ruthless efficiency, these dark warriors of Hattusha would go on to destroy anything in their way.
Their mission, to become the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
Yet once they had succeeded, this ruthless army, and the vast empire they created, simply disappeared.
As mysteriously as they had emerged.
For three thousand years, all trace of them was lost from all the history books and even from myth and legend.
Till one by one fragments from this lost world began to emerge.
These fragments opened up a world of mysteries and secret codes.
A fortress city, built to last for ever.
An unstoppable war machine.
And a mighty empire, even greater than that of Egypt.
This is the story of how a civilisation, built to last for ever, could simply vanish from history.
At the turn of the twentieth century, explorers were setting off on one of archaeologies great quests.
To test the truth of the ancient myths.
The earliest historians had told of a world before the Bible was written, ruled by just three mighty empires.
Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.
The explorers now confirmed those accounts.
These three great empires, all centred on the middle east, had left behind fabulous cities and monuments.
So the notion there could be a fourth great empire, of which there was no trace, seemed impossible.
Yet fragments of a mysterious language, seemingly spoken across large areas of the ancient world, were beginning to emerge.
And some even dared to believe this language, which no one could understand, could be evidence of a fourth vast empire.
One completely lost to history.
ln 1906, a German linguist, and his team went in search of the source of this lost language.
High up in the mountains of Anatolia in central Turkey, he came upon the ruins of a vast ancient city.
Everywhere were the signs of a major civilisation.
And as they examined the site further they found hundreds of clay tablets.
All covered in the strange language he was looking for.
But in order to unlock the secrets of this lost civilisation, Winckler had to find to find just one tablet written in a language he could actually understand.
For weeks his team searched, and finally he discovered a tablet in a language that did make sense.
lt was in Babylonian.
The diplomatic language of the ancient world.
lt was a peace treaty between the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses the second and a rival great king, Hattusili of the land of Hatti.
ln ancient times only the kings of the three great empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon were referred to as 'Great King'.
And yet here in this peace treaty the Egyptian pharaoh names Hattusili of the land of Hatti as the fourth 'great king'.
With this peace treaty Winckler had found proof there had indeed been a missing fourth empire.
And here - Yet Winckler was to die before he could solve the real mystery.
How did such a vast empire disappear so completely from history? lt was a question that would take nearly a hundred years to answer.
Archaeologists would need to examine the city carefully.
Analyse in detail everything recovered.
And then decipher two seemingly impenetrable codes.
One of them in hieroglyphs.
They called the city Hattusha.
ln the land of Hatti.
They called its people, the Hittites.
Even though they were completely different to the famous Hittitesof the Bible.
The Hittites of Hattusha had built their capital in the strangest of places.
A place where no capital of an empire should ever be.
For a great city, it is just so remote.
lt's -totally cut off.
You can't get in or out.
All major cities of the time were crossroads to the rest of the world.
Close to the trade routes or rivers or the sea.
But not Hattusha.
Hattusha was fifty miles from a major river.
Locked in behind towering mountain ranges, it was hundreds of miles from the sea and perched high up on the barren hills where the climate was harsh.
The whole region is landlocked.
lt's cut off from the Black Sea, it's some two - hundred and fifty miles from the eastern Mediterranean.
There's the other factor too, because of its height the region's snowed in for a number of months of the year.
So it's totally cut off.
lt seemed impossible to imagine how or why the Hittites built their capital city here.
But archaeologists were to discover it was precisely these difficulties that made it the perfect site for Hittite ambitions.
Every detail of their city was deliberately planned.
A permanent stronghold, able to withstand any attack.
The Hittites began by exploiting the natural defences of the mountains.
They built in the most extreme places.
Carved into sheer rock faces.
And built across steep ravines.
They hauled huge stones up hundreds of metres.
They drilled holes into solid granite and built thick walls along the edges of sheer cliffs.
Everywhere were feats of death defying engineering as they forged a city out of the granite mountains.
One massive outer wall enclosed the entire city.
lt was more than four miles long and crossed every obstacle.
An unbreakable ring to protect the Hittites from the outside world.
The Hittites then turned every part of Hattusha into an impregnable fortress.
They were clearly obsessed with their own security.
These walls were among the thickest in the ancient world with unique features to strengthen them even further.
We found these large walls around the whole city which at some places reach a width of more than eight metres.
The most surprising feature of the walls are these - puzzling compartments which make the walls unique in the ancient world.
These compartments gave the walls an incredible strength.
The Hittites filled them with a special watertight mix of earth and sand.
When it was pounded it set hard like concrete.
And on top of the super strong foundations, scientists calculated that Hittite builders added eight metre high mud brick walls.
And images on pottery show that at every twelve metres they built watchtowers, thirty metres high.
And turned gateways, normally the weak point of any defensive system, into deadly traps.
Any enemy which did break through would be caught, powerless against Hittite defenders on the massive defensive towers looming above them.
The unique features of the wall - meant that the Hittites were able to build a fortification system which was unbreakable for any weapon of its time.
But the city didn't stop there.
Cutting through the site was an inner wall even thicker than the first.
And here they'd added another defensive innovation.
Secret tunnels.
Eight of them.
Anyone who did break through the outer ring faced an even greater danger.
Ambush.
A surprise counter attack by the Hittite army hidden in the tunnel.
This was a city bristling with layer upon layer of defensive rings.
Hattusha was home to more than fifty thousand people.
The Hittites had deliberately chosen the remote mountainous location, well out of reach of their enemies.
And then transformed this impossible site into an impregnable fortress.
As archaeologists mapped out the city, it confirmed just how impressive this civilisation had once been.
As soon as the Hittites had made their city impregnable, they decided to show the world just how powerful they were.
They designed monuments to be the envy of the world and stand for ever as evidence of their power and strength.
One of the buildings had monumental doorways and two hundred rooms surrounding a vast central courtyard.
lnside were a number of ritualistic objects.
This was the great temple of Hattusha.
The most holy place in the entire empire.
At the highest point of the city there was even a massive pyramid.
Two hundred and fifty metres wide, with a hundred steps leading to the top.
lt was magnificent.
The outer city wall ran across the top of it.
ln the centre, a gateway adorned with sphinxes facing south, to Egypt.
The first sight of the city for most visitors.
A symbol of the power of the Hittite empire.
But it was on a hill, right in the centre of the city, that the Hittites built the most important building of all.
A castle for the king.
This was the beating heart of the city.
Around the castle, yet another massive fortified wall to keep the king safe.
From here, every corner of the city could be observed.
A central passageway ran up through the castle, denying access to all but the most important.
At the top, were the king's own private apartments.
At the heart of the city and its massive defences.
And laid out beneath, a Wonder of the Ancient World.
This truly was a city built on a monumental scale.
Every detail of its defences and survival had been ingeniously designed.
The Hittites, it seemed, had planned for Hattusha to be here forever.
But still there was nothing to explain how they'd emerged from their isolated city to build a great empire.
And how they'd disappeared so completely from history.
For this archaeologists would need to continue searching for clues.
They uncovered the sacred places of the kings.
They found images of the Hittites themselves.
And others that revealed their obsession with warfare.
And with death.
But strangely, throughout the city they discovered few precious objects.
None of the things normally found among the remains of an ancient capital.
lt was if Hattusha had been mysteriously stripped clean, leaving nothing behind to reveal the fate of the Hittite empire.
But ancient Hattusha did have one wonderful treasure just waiting to be discovered by archaeologists.
Not gold or jewels, but something far more precious.
Hidden away in a labyrinth of rooms, are five enormous libraries.
ln them, beautifully filed and catalogued, were thirty thousand tablets.
lt was one of the largest and oldest libraries ever discovered.
Recorded here, the thoughts and deeds of this mysterious people.
The inside story of a lost civilisation laid out in neat rows, just waiting to be read.
There was only one problem.
They were written in a language no one could understand.
Cracking this code was to absorb some of the greatest linguistic minds.
The Hittite language was written in a series of triangular shaped signs called cuneiform, one of the world's oldest writing systems.
Because it was used for writing several ancient middle eastern languages, the cuneiform signs themselves were known and could be easily read.
lt was the Hittite language that was impossible to understand.
lt's like being able to read the sounds of Latin, because it's written in our familiar alphabet, without being able to understand the meaning of any of the words.
The key to cracking an unknown language is to find a language that's similar.
lt's then possible using shared words and grammar to begin the decipherment.
But Hittite baffled everyone.
lt seemed to be a language all on its own.
There was no other middle eastern language like it.
But the code was finally cracked with the discovery of just one sentence among thousands.
A Czech scholar came across the sentence that starts right here and ends at the end of the column.
You can see it much better on a hand copy that we have right here.
lt's this sentence.
Nu NlNDA-an e-ez-za-at-te-ni wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni.
l have here the same sentence written out again, first in cuneiform, then in our own alphabet.
He could see the sign for bread.
Something common to many ancient languages.
NlNDA-an.
But then he saw something that stopped him dead.
Something no one could have expected.
A word in English.
So here one of the words -jumped out at him at first.
Er, wa-a-tar well that is of course very much like or own English water.
And in a similar way, ez-za reminded him very much of the old High German for to eat.
Etzum, which sounds very much the same.
And so in combination he seemed to have a sentence here, a complete sentence that he might now be able to translate, so he might have written out the words like l've done here and the nu reminded him of Latin nunc, for example, which means now.
The NlNDA- an he recognised as bread.
e-ez-za-at-te-ni we already saw was to eat.
Wa-a-tar could be the water word and the e-ku-ut-te-ni, at the very end, the e-ku part reminded him very much of Latin aqua.
Water.
So that might be to drink if it is a verb in common used in combination with water.
So, here he recognised a sentence that could be translated as, ' Now you now eat bread and you drink water.
' And with this he had the first full Hittite sentence translated in thirty thousand years.
The breakthrough surprised everyone.
lt meant Hittite was not a middle eastern language, as everyone expected, but an lndo-European language, just like English.
The Hittites were unlike all their rivals in the ancient world, because they were not from the middle east, but from some part of Europe.
The Hittites must have migrated to Turkey and then chosen the barren mountains of Anatolia to build their fortress city.
Now, finally, the world of the Hittites was laid bare for all to read.
Each word revealing more and more of this mysterious lost civilisation.
And so for the first time in three thousand years, the fabulous story of the fourth great empire of the ancient world could be told.
lt was a story of how the Hittites carefully planned and executed a strategy to become a great superpower.
And it all began with control.
Theirs was a world obsessed by order and riddled with fear.
From the tablets it was clear that every aspect of Hittite life was tightly regulated.
From working on state farms, to the payment of taxes.
And even to people's sex lives.
The texts revealed the population was tightly controlled by harsh penalties.
Execute the entire family of he who disobeys the King.
Cut off the nose and ears of the slave who starts a fire.
Kill the man who steals a bronze spear.
He shall be put to death.
Take away the land of the man who refuses to work.
The commandments of the Hittites, it appears, were duty, discipline and sacrifice.
And then, to ensure total obedience, oaths were sworn to the gods who could themselves inflict terrible punishment.
The anger of the gods will be inflicted on you when you broke an oath.
And these oaths would also be very often sort of enforced, strengthened by rituals.
But the most important oath was loyalty to the king.
According to the texts, a ruling elite, the lords of Hattusha, executed his will.
These close members of the king's own family were the real power in Hattusha.
Bound together by a sacred bond of unity in the service of the king.
The Storm God will destroy anyone who dishonours the king.
All must stand united with the king.
To break this bond of brotherhood was the most terrible act a Hittite could commit.
The gods will always come back at you if you kill a family member, and that was a real taboo in Hittite society.
The brothers burned effigies of their enemies.
Rituals like this strengthened the sacred bond of brotherhood that held Hattusha together in this hostile environment.
This bond was the rock on which Hittite success was built.
The texts revealed just how efficiently the Hittites imposed order to Hattusha.
The libraries held detailed accounts of the administration, recorded the treaties and alliances with other kings and compiled a detailed history of the Hittites themselves.
Everything seemed designed for a greater purpose.
A plan to impose Hittite power on the world.
And at the heart of their strategy was the plan to build an unstoppable war machine.
They began by developing a very effective military machine and l think that that's really the core of Hittite success, very highly disciplined.
Training manuals dictated how to turn raw recruits into ruthless warriors.
Specialist training sergeants imposed punishing schedules and absolute obedience.
And trained them in the deadly arts of war.
Officers who don't obey immediately will be blinded.
We expect soldiers to spy on their comrades.
Missing targets will be punished.
The king orders him killed.
The very best warriors specialised in chariot fighting, the most powerful weapon of the ancient world.
The horses were forced fed a special diet and pushed to the limits of their endurance.
The weakest killed.
lt seemed the Hittites had one ambition, to create a military force that could win at any cost.
They then unleashed their war machine on the world.
According to the texts, for hundreds of years the great cities and kingdoms of the ancient world surrendered, or were crushed by the Hittites.
From the Arzawa and Uliwanda in the west, to Niya, Arahtu and Qatna in the south.
The mighty kingdom of Aleppo and Mittani, and even the lands of the Kaska as far as Hatenzuwa.
The Hittites showed no mercy.
This text tells about the Hittite king who destroyed a city and at the end, after the city had been plundered and razed to the ground, sowed poisonous weeds, simply to make sure that it would never be resettled again.
So we can see this as a very early form of biological warfare.
ln just one line, the texts record how the Hittites marched nearly a thousand miles to the great city of Babylon.
Destroyed it and marched home.
Some kingdoms fought back and at times even won.
But nothing could stop the relentless Hittites.
Their mission was to build the world's greatest empire.
And now only one power stood in their way.
Egypt.
By 1279 B.
C.
, Ramesses the Great, one of the most powerful leaders in Egyptian history, was pharaoh.
And he knew the Hittites now threatened Egypt itself.
His own empire stretched from the Nile to where Syria is today.
All the ancient empires vied to control this strategically vital area.
And at the heart of the region was the town of Kadesh.
Whoever controlled Kadesh might well claim to be the most powerful king in the whole near eastern region.
So that was the bone of contention between Egypt and the Hittites.
War between the world's two great superpowers was inevitable.
lts outcome would decide the fate of the whole of the middle east.
The stakes could not be higher.
Ramesses commanded more resources and now added extra divisions, making his the largest army in Egyptian history.
Prince Hattusili was the Hittite General with the largest Hittite Army ever assembled.
More than forty-seven thousand men.
And crucially, the Hittites had ruthlessly prepared for the inevitable clash.
They now unveiled something that would give them that vital edge.
A new super weapon.
Some time before the Battle of Kadesh the Hittites introduced an innovation in chariot warfare.
What they did was to transfer the wheel from the back of the car to the centre.
And that was associated with a very significant change.
This Hittite innovation revolutionised ancient warfare.
Moving the wheels from the rear to the centre of the car, made the chariot stronger and so capable of carrying an extra man.
And that gave the chariot greater weight and firepower.
This changed the battle tactics in that these three-man vehicles er, could be used rather more like a, say a small modern tank er, for charging into the enemy right at the beginning of a battle, so presumably creating as much mayhem as possible, getting deeper into enemy ranks.
The Battle of Kadesh in 127 4, B.
C.
was the greatest battle the world had ever seen.
Thousands of Hittite chariots smashed into the Egyptian lines.
The Egyptians claimed victory.
But we now know from the texts found in Hattusha, that in fact the Hittites had won the war.
A peace treaty in the Hittite library shows that their Commander, Prince Hattusili, actually conquered all the territory around Kadesh and drove the Egyptians hundreds of miles south.
The new super weapon, together with superior tactics, had won the day.
Kadesh was a great victory for the Hittites.
Back in Hattusha, the king was finally one of the most powerful men in the world.
His uncle, Prince Hattusilis, had defeated the armies of the pharaoh and returned home a hero.
Remote Hattusha was now the capital city of a vast empire.
Soon after, Ramesses agreed an everlasting peace.
ln it, the Hittite ruler was called 'Great King.
' The title reserved for the head of a great superpower.
The Hittite's mission was complete.
A small band of brothers had appeared and within just a few hundred years had forged a mighty empire.
The future belonged to them.
And yet, within decades of the triumphant return from Kadesh of Prince Hattusili, this mighty empire vanished from history.
And still no one knew why.
Every word in the five great libraries of Hattusha was carefully re-examined for answers.
Somewhere here had to be the final dramatic chapter of the Hittites.
Surely, only the greatest of catastrophes could bring the fourth great empire of the ancient world crashing down.
But they found nothing.
Not one word.
The archives seem to run out erm, right before the end.
There's nothing that sheds any light on the very last days of the empire.
lt was now clear the archive would never reveal what disaster had overwhelmed the Hittites, three thousand years ago.
And erased all trace of them.
And that's how things remained until archaeologists uncovered something that had lain buried in the heart of Hattusha for more than three thousand years.
At first sight it looked like the tomb of a king.
But inside there was no body.
lnstead, the walls were covered in strange symbols.
Hieroglyphs.
A second impossible Hittite code.
These symbols would one day help unravel the fate of this empire.
A fate brought about not by mighty armies, but by an all too human tragedy of greed and revenge.
We didn't know what it was at first, but later when we saw the inscriptions and hieroglyphs on the walls we realised this must be an important place.
But no one there could read them.
And they would take years to fully decipher.
Amu-u- vah- pah-la-sa There are only a handful of people who can read Hittite hieroglyphs and two of them are married to each other.
Professor Dincol and his wife Belkis have devoted their lives to understanding these strange symbols.
They knew from hieroglyphs already discovered around the empire, that this code was increasingly important to the last Hittite kings.
And so now, together with colleagues around the world they got to work.
Hieroglyphs are notoriously difficult to decipher.
They start off simply enough.
lf you draw a figure pointing to himself this means, l am.
But things become more complicated with the expression of abstract thoughts.
Such a hieroglyph in English could be created like this.
For example an eye and a deer, this would mean l deer.
ldea.
The same sign can have more than one meaning.
But, to make matters worse, some Hittite hieroglyphs had evolved until the picture signs no longer looked like anything recognisable.
The experts needed something to help them unlock the code.
That came with a number of intriguing finds, including hundreds of tiny lumps of clay.
They were name seals, a kind of ancient business card with the name and rank of the owner inscribed into the clay.
Around the edge words were written in cuneiform which could be understood.
And in the centre, the same words, but in hieroglyphs.
So now the code breakers could begin to match the two.
One by one, the hieroglyphs were deciphered.
The first hieroglyph from the cave was also the most exciting.
lt was a symbol of the last known king of the Hittites.
Well here are the signs of great king and here hero.
The hieroglyphs told the story of his last great military campaign.
Surely, here also would be the name of the mighty foreign power that had finally brought about the downfall of the Hittites.
But as the names of his enemies were deciphered, everyone was stunned.
Because the enemy that was named was not foreign, but came from within the Hittite empire itself.
That could only mean civil war.
The hieroglyphs had revealed an unexpected story.
ln the last years of the Hittite empire, the great king was desperately suppressing a rebellion, deep inside Hittite territory.
Now piece by piece, everything began to fall into place.
Prince Hattusilis' return from the triumph at Kadesh, had in fact sparked a bitter family feud with the king, his nephew.
The king appears to become increasingly nervous about the great power which Hattusili wielded.
Suspected his intentions, started stripping him of his powers and once that happened Hattusili realised that his days was were numbered unless he retaliated.
Hattusili acted quickly.
He broke the most sacred oath of the Hittites.
The oath of brotherhood.
He arrested the king and sent him into exile.
The loyalty at the heart of Hittite unity was shattered.
Brother turned against brother and for the next three generations the civil war spiralled out of control.
Until Hattusha, at the heart of the empire, lay dying.
The civil war slowly drained the great city of Hattusha of life.
The city was designed to withstand attack from any foreign invader, but not from within the brotherhood itself.
The civil war brought about the collapse of the rigid order that had kept the kingdom together and the empire began to fragment.
Food no longer reached Hattusha and the great capital began to starve.
Now one of the texts, a very famous text, is a letter written by a Hittite king to vassal king in Ugarit er, urgently requesting that a large consignment of grain be sent to the Hittite homeland and the letter finishes by saying, 'it's a matter of life and death.
' Day by day the poison of betrayal that Hattusili had unleashed was weakening Hattusha and draining Hittite authority around the empire.
But what exactly happened in the last days of Hattusha to make the Hittites disappear so completely from history? None of the texts or hieroglyphs could help.
Then, archaeologists uncovered one last clue in Hattusha that would help solve the mystery.
As they dug deep into the foundations of the palace and other key buildings, they uncovered bricks that had been baked hard by fire.
But only parts of the city seemed affected.
We have fires here at the palace and Bogaskoy, but also in the temple area, temple one, here at House of slope.
ln the upper temple area, some of the temples burnt.
Here this temple, temple seven burnt.
Only the important buildings of state were burnt down.
But there was something even stranger about the destruction of these buildings.
lt seems as if those parts of the city which were destroyed by fire er, were beforehand were cleaned or were emptied.
The precious objects, which must have once been there, the gold, treasures and the most recent archives of the Hittites, had all disappeared.
And nowhere was there any sign of an invading army, whether foreign or Hittite.
There was one theory that could explain all the most recent archaeological evidence.
The Hittites knew their city and empire were finished and so they abandoned their city.
lt's even possible that as they left they set fire to their own great buildings leaving nothing of value to their enemies.
What does the great king of Hattusha do in the last moments of desperation? l believe that what he did was to organise a systematic evacuation of the, above all the acropolis and the royal buildings.
So that he would take his most valuable possessions with him including documents.
Together the Hittite brothers were invincible.
They had built a great city and created the fourth great empire of the ancient world.
They looked set to rule for ever.
But with their code of unity broken, everything disintegrated.
At the height of their power, fear and greed turned them against each other.
The Hittites deserted their city.
They left behind no monuments recording their incredible deeds and the great libraries containing their story were burned, burying all the clay tablets.
The Hittites then simply abandoned Hattusha.
And disappeared without trace.
lnteresting question l think is where did they go? lf they took their most valuable documents with them, this could mean that the last chapter of Hittite history lies hidden somewhere just waiting to be dug up.
The Hittites had deliberately built the city of Hattusha to last for ever.
But it was so remote that no other great civilisation ever settled up here again.
There was no one to pass on the myths and legends of the Hittites, and so their history died with the city.
Over time, the stones of Hattusha were buried and its name forgotten.
And so the amazing story of the Hittites disappeared for more than three thousand years.