[narrator] What is this misshapen 9,000-year-old clay head?
[Kevin MacDonald] The recreation of the features of the living
suggest this was part of an ancestral cult.
[narrator] Can this bizarre machine really harness intergalactic energy?
[Sascha Auerbach] It could repel an alien invasion
and improve your sex life.
[narrator] What do the drawings on this ancient tablet mean?
It's a map of the unknown.
[narrator] These are the most remarkable and mysterious objects on Earth,
hidden away in museums,
laboratories and storage rooms.
Now, new research and technology
can get under their skin
like never before.
We can rebuild them,
pull them apart
and zoom in to reveal the unbelievable,
the ancient
and the truly bizarre.
These are the world's strangest things.
In a corner of the British Museum
sits a strange misshapen head.
It was discovered nearly 70 years ago
in one of the world's earliest cities.
When it was found, it was quite unique.
No one really knew what it was for
and no one expected anything like this.
[narrator] Now this object can be examined
in minute detail.
This is the Jericho Head.
[Kevin] The first thing that draws you in are its bright shell eyes.
And then you notice its light brown plaster skin.
It's a haunting object.
[narrator] And there is a reason it looks so haunting.
Under the plaster,
there is an actual, real human skull.
[narrator] Why is a human head treated this way?
How is it made?
And who is the person beneath the plaster?
The ancient city of Jericho lies in the Jordan Valley
in modern-day Palestine.
Jericho is famous to us, for one, the bible of course,
the famous Walls of Jericho.
But, actually, it's a very ancient place.
[narrator] One of the world's earliest cities,
founded more than 11,000 years ago.
[Altaweel] Athens doesn't exist for another 4,000 years.
Or if we're talking about a place like London,
it doesn't exist for another 7,000 years.
[narrator] According to theOld Testament,
the Walls of Jericho collapse
when the Israelites blow their horns.
But in 1953,
pioneering archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon and her team
discover that the oldest walls of ancient Jericho
date back far beyond biblical times.
[Kevin] We're looking at an earlier walled settlement,
stretching back to around 10,000 years before present.
[narrator] In the ruins of this earliest settlement,
they make an extraordinary discovery.
[Kevin] This looked like large cobble or boulder.
But as it was excavated and emerged,
it became clear that what they had
was a reconstituted human head.
[narrator] A clay face has been sculpted onto the skull.
[Altaweel] They see a large hole where the nose is,
which presumably is where a plastered nose would have been.
There's dirt also coming out,
which the archaeologists assumed was actually infill
after the skull had been buried by surrounding dirt.
And there's also a large hole in the back of the skull.
[narrator] It's unlike anything the archaeologists have ever seen.
It's a skull which long ago was effectively brought back to life
by the introduction of shell and earth.
[narrator] This strange thing is crafted by someone who died
5,000 years before the pyramids were built.
Why do they rebuild a face on a human skull?
The skull is sent to the British Museum for analysis,
but 1950s technology has limitations.
Early attempts to X-ray it showed only a cloudy mass.
[narrator] One thing they can see clearly
is the large hole on the back of the skull.
It's assumed to be burial damage.
It's not.
More than 60 years later,
it's finally revealed how wrong that assumption is
when the British Museum teams up with Imperial College
to apply the latest CT scanning technology.
[Altaweel] We see cutting marks at the back of the head in this hole.
It's clear that somebody had actually
deliberately cut out this hole, uh,
away from the skull, that it was carefully cut,
uh, not to damage other areas of the skull.
[narrator] The interior of the skull is packed with earth.
It was assumed to have fallen in after burial.
But that turns out to be just as wrong.
[Kevin] The scan showed that the soil within the skull
had been carefully applied layer by layer
to support the fragile interior bone structures of the skull.
[narrator] We now understand how this strange thing is made.
Someone painstakingly cuts out a hole
and packs this skull with soil.
They even leave behind their finger marks,
still visible 10,000 years later.
Then, they create the face.
[Altaweel] Plastering the head would have taken perhaps
some multiple applications to get it quite right
and to mold the features,
particularly the nose that would have likely been there.
But also the eyes.
We know they used shells from the Mediterranean
that was about 60 miles away from Jericho.
So, clearly, they're importing materials.
So this is something that they really cared for.
It's not something they just made haphazardly.
They took some time in shaping this
and putting in precious objects into the skull.
[narrator] But who could be important enough
to deserve so much effort after death?
The skull beneath the clay face reveals
this was almost certainly a man
and even his age.
[Mark Benecke] The older you get,
the more your bone parts start to attach to each other.
So from that, you can deduce how old a person was.
And in this case,
the person was probably around 40 to 50 years when he died.
[narrator] And stripping back the dirt
shows that he suffers at least one injury during his life.
[Kevin] Examining their nose which is twisted to one side,
it was apparent that, at one point in their life,
they had suffered from a broken nose.
[narrator] This skull tells the story of a short hard life.
But it also reveals something very, very strange.
[Benecke] The head is unusually formed.
This form of the head is not natural.
[narrator] The shape of the skull is distorted.
And the thickness of the bone varies more than a normal skull.
Cranial distortion like this cannot happen after death.
Somebody intentionally changed the shape of the head of the person
by binding it and applying force to the head
so it's deformed.
[narrator] This can only be performed on an infant.
To get a desired deformation of the skull,
you have to do it very early, you have to start very early,
one month after birth until six months after birth, approximately.
[narrator] Tightly-wrapped bindings slowly squeeze his soft infant skull.
When the bones fuse at around two years,
his deformed head shape is fixed forever.
This unusual practice is known in a number of cultures.
[Kevin] Cranial deformation has been practiced in many different times
and places throughout the world.
[Altaweel] The head is often used as a way to make someone more prominent,
to perhaps make him stick out.
So it is a kind of cultural practice
to make an individual become sort of distinct.
[narrator] This can be a mark of tribal allegiance,
a sign of beauty
or elite social status.
Whatever it means to the people of ancient Jericho,
it tells us this man is special from birth.
Who is he?
[narrator] More than 9,000 years ago,
someone carefully and deliberately
created a clay face on the skull of a dead man.
Modern facial reconstruction techniques
finally allow us to stare into his living face.
[Altaweel] So they're doing effectively what the ancients were trying to do
with regards to the skull,
which is recreate what the face actually looked like,
but this time using laser scans
and 3D printing to create a face.
[narrator] Modeling the missing lower jaw
on other ancient Jericho skulls
muscle by muscle,
through layer upon layer of tissue and skin,
the face of a man appears.
The process that begins with clay and shells
nearly 10,000 years ago
is finally complete.
This is the face of someone very important
to the people of ancient Jericho.
And he is not alone.
More than 50 other decorated skulls have now been found
across the region,
including ten from Jericho alone.
This curation of plastered skulls
was undertaken much more widely
than was previously thought.
[narrator] And they all share something in common.
There is no body.
[Altaweel] Keeping the skull,
not necessarily the rest of the skeleton,
shows that the head had a great importance,
which was treated in a very venerated way
relative to the rest of the skeleton.
[narrator] Could this decorated skull be part of a religion?
Some kind of skull cult?
[Altaweel] Most of the skulls that have been found in Jericho
were in places that were prominent in display.
They're looking the same direction.
They often are near each other.
So they probably even put down a kind of a shelf
or some kind of pedestal to show them.
[narrator] It seems that in ancient Jericho,
these decorated skulls take pride of place,
keeping their shell eyes on the living.
[Kevin] Current interpretations suggest that these skulls
brought back to life through the addition of plaster
were part of a kind of ancestral cult.
[narrator] But why do the living of ancient Jericho
create a cult of their dead ancestors
in their own homes?
The explanation may lie in Jericho's most famous innovation.
It is one of the world's first cities.
[Altaweel] This is a period of great innovation for societies.
They began to use agriculture,
specifically domestication of different plants and animals.
Some had decided to settle into villages,
decided to live for long periods of time
or even the entire year in one specific site,
which was quite a novelty in this period.
[narrator] For the first time in history,
large numbers of people call the same place home.
But this means finding an entirely new way to live with each other,
crowded in together behind the city's 12-foot walls.
They need a way to avoid conflicts
developing between that other great invention of the city,
neighbors.
[Altaweel] When humans begin to settle,
they have to create a range of different cultural practices
that allow them to succeed in this kind of lifestyle
of where they stay in one place
for long periods of time.
[narrator] Archaeologists suspect that
the cult of ancestors this skull represents
acts as a kind of social glue,
connecting the citizens to their past, to their home
and, most importantly, to each other.
Innovating ancestors as a way of associating ownership
and tying yourself to the land
becomes a kind of cultural phenomenon
and reflects a kind of practical understanding
that you need to belong to the land
and you need to take care of the land.
[narrator] This dead man helps bind living people together
in a whole new way,
which makes this strange thing incredibly important.
This decorated skull may have been central
to the early success of one of mankind's greatest achievements,
the city.
Hidden among trees in a small forest near Rangeley, Maine,
stands a strange machine
designed to harness a powerful source of energy.
It looks big and long, but also futuristic.
[narrator] According to its inventor,
it can drill holes in the atmosphere
and trigger tornadoes.
This contraption effectively looks like a massive ray gun.
[narrator] Now, using the latest technology,
we can examine it in unprecedented detail.
This is the cloudbuster.
[Andrea Sella] It was supposed to control the weather.
It could make it rain.
It could stop the rain.
Just imagine being able to control droughts
or control a flood.
[narrator] But this isn't the only trick of this new form of energy.
[Sascha] And as an added bonus,
it could repel an alien invasion
and improve your sex life.
[narrator] This energy seems to have the potential
to change the world.
If you could control this,
you could make essentially anything you wanted happen.
[narrator] Who builds this game-changing weather gun?
What is the source of its power?
And could it actually work?
[narrator] The cloudbuster is created in 1952
by Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
Now, this is quite a contraption,
this multiple-tubed device
mounted on a klin then a swiveling mechanism
so it can be pointed in any direction.
It's got the metallic umbilical cables
that kind of thread down.
[narrator] These are designed to channel energy
that triggers a change in the atmosphere.
So Reich's idea is that by attaching this umbilicus
to a body of water
and pointing the muzzles of the device
at the correct direction in the atmosphere,
it could draw this energy out of the sky
and deposit it into the water.
The movement of this mysterious energy
out of the atmosphere
would cause clouds to form
and, subsequently, rain to fall.
[narrator] Who is the man who believes he can really control the weather
with his astonishing cloudbuster?
Wilhelm Reich is not the kind of person you'd expect
to dream up a world-changing weather machine.
His interests begin not in physics or engineering,
but in the mind.
Reich was born in Austria in 1897,
a time which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and he studied medicine at the University of Vienna.
[narrator] In the 1920s, Reich is a brilliant psychoanalyst
and protege of the discipline's founding father,
Sigmund Freud.
[Keon West] He took a lot of Freud's ideas about
people having these needs and these desires.
And there's always this tension between what we need
and whether that need is fulfilled.
[narrator] The more Reich digs into needs and desires,
the more he focuses on Freud's ideas
about the role of sexual desire in mental health.
[Sascha] He believes that repressing sexual outlets
can lead to neuroses.
So his argument is that
if you discharge these sexual urges,
it will have a psychoanalytic healing effect.
[narrator] But Reich is just getting started.
He gradually becomes convinced that sex is the sole cause
and sole cure for almost any illness,
mental or physical.
This increasingly extreme interpretation of Freud's work
doesn't go down well.
By 1939,
his ideas are considered so radical
and so contrary
to the general clinical practices of psychoanalysis
that he is kicked out of the movement.
[narrator] And Freud's followers aren't the only ones Reich falls out with.
He also falls out with the actual Reich...
[soldiers] Heil!
...the Third Reich.
The Nazis assert that he is part of a Jewish conspiracy
to undermine the health and well-being of Europe
and they ordered his books burned.
[narrator] Reich is forced to flee to the United States.
And it's there that he creates the cloudbuster.
But how does he make the leap from upsetting fascists
to upsetting the weather?
In the 1930s,
with the help of some very accommodating friends,
Reich sets out to find a scientific explanation
for the healing properties of sexual desire.
[Keon] So he took Freud's idea
and tried to measure something,
something bioelectrical or chemical or physical.
[narrator] As the friends get friendlier,
Reich records an increase in electrical activity.
He's certain it's evidence of some kind of
previously unidentified bioelectrical energy.
He names it orgone.
Through an elaborate series of experiments,
Reich convinces himself that he's rewritten the laws of the universe.
Reich argues that the entire planet is covered
with an envelope of this orgone energy.
[Andrea] It was responsible for stuff out in space,
like galaxies.
But at the same time,
it was also kind of channeled through people.
It produced the life force.
[narrator] In 1940,
Reich invents a device to harness the healing powers
of this miraculous energy.
He built what he calls an orgone accumulator.
[narrator] Reich claims that inside the wood and steel box,
orgone is absorbed through the patient's skin
to cure them of almost anything.
And he started to conduct experiments and treatments
using the accumulator box on patients
who had cancer and schizophrenia.
[narrator] But Reich goes further,
theorizing that orgone can literally change the world.
And in 1952, he sets out to prove it
by creating the cloudbuster.
[Sarah] Reich had made a lot of claims about
what the cloudbuster could do, but the key thing was
the fact that you could take it anywhere,
you could point it at the sky
and you could make it rain.
[narrator] Reich's momentous claims seemed crazy.
Could there be any real science to support his idea
of controlling the weather with the cloudbuster?
[narrator] In the 1950s, Wilhelm Reich's bizarre cloudbuster
promises to bring an end to droughts.
But will it work?
[Sarah] In 1953,
there had been a drought that had been going on for months
in Maine in the US.
And, in particular, the blueberry farmers
were worried about their crop.
[narrator] Blueberry plants take seven years to mature.
So a dead crop means years of financial hardship.
The farmers are desperate.
Enter Wilhelm Reich and his cloudbuster.
[Andrea] He wheels out his device.
He connects it up to a source of clear, pure water.
He points it at the sky.
And they begin to operate it.
And the next day...
it rains.
[narrator] Official records confirm a quarter of an inch of rain
falls the following day.
The blueberry farmers are very happy.
Reich gets paid.
For Reich, this is a triumph.
There is clearly cause and effect.
[narrator] Does this prove the cloudbuster works?
Or has Reich just caught a lucky break?
It sounds nuts,
but can you really control rainfall?
[Andrea] One of the key requirements
in order to be able to make an actual raindrop
is to have something,
what's called a condensation input,
a little sort of starting point
on which the drop can form.
And so if you put tiny solid particles into the air,
then they will be enough
to actually start the formation of droplets
which will then fall to Earth.
[narrator] Scientists have tried deliberately depositing silver iodide,
or dry ice, inside clouds to induce rain.
It's called cloud-seeding.
And the jury's still out on whether it works.
But that didn't stop the US government from weaponizing it.
In 1967, the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron
conducts what's called Operation Popeye.
The motto of which was "make mud, not war."
And their goal was to extend the monsoon season
over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, softening the roadbed
and causing transportation problems in the movement of supplies
from North Vietnam into the combat areas.
[narrator] It's impossible to know if it really works.
After all, it can rain a lot in the jungle
pretty much whatever you do.
But one thing we do know is this approach
can only work if you add particles to the clouds.
And that's a problem for the cloudbuster.
It doesn't blast particles into the atmosphere.
In fact, it doesn't actually seem to do anything.
[Sascha] The device has no buttons or trigger
or on switch of any sort.
You just point it at the clouds,
and that's that.
[narrator] So why does it rain on the blueberry crop?
Maybe it's nothing more than the luck of the draw.
[Andrea] Most of us can buy a lottery ticket.
You might win once.
What you need to do
is to do it over and over again
and really show that there are statistics there.
And what Reich does is he tries it once
and he sees what he wants.
But the reality is that it tells him nothing.
[narrator] Despite the grand claims,
there's no scientific evidence that the cloudbuster works.
But that doesn't stop Reich.
His cloudbuster is about to graduate
from saving blueberries
to saving the world.
Reich goes on to test his experiments
in the Arizona desert.
Whilst he's operating the cloudbuster,
he notices that there is an increase in cloud cover
and in humidity.
And he attributes this to the power of the cloudbuster
and the orgone energy.
[narrator] Then the cloud cover mysteriously breaks up.
But Reich has an explanation for this.
[narrator] And even by Reich's standards,
it's pretty out there.
[Sascha] Spotting a light over the Catalina Mountains,
Reich becomes convinced that the Earth is under attack
by aliens.
He claims that they are releasing a substance
called deadly orgone radiation.
He writes that we are at war with a power
previously unknown to man.
[narrator] Luckily, Reich has the perfect weapon to defeat the aliens.
[Sascha] Armed with two cloudbusters,
Reich fights what he claims to be
"a climactic interstellar battle"
with the aliens over the skies of Arizona.
Not the craziest idea ever floated in Arizona,
just for the record.
[narrator] But while Reich is busy fighting aliens,
he's missing a much more dangerous enemy.
[narrator] Armed with his cloudbuster,
psychoanalyst and inventor Wilhelm Reich
battles drought and blasts aliens.
But his work is attracting the attention
of an even more powerful adversary,
the US government.
Reich is a committed socialist
with a radical attitude to sexual freedom.
He rings all the alarm bells
for a government paranoid about
the threat of subversives.
He attracts quite a lot of negative media attention.
[narrator] The government turns Reich's work against him,
not the cloudbuster, but his earlier invention,
the orgone accumulator.
[Sarah] He was presenting the orgone accumulator box
as a legitimate medical device,
which they argued he didn't have the evidence to back up.
[narrator] The orgone accumulator is banned.
[Sarah] Unfortunately, for Reich,
one of his agents sells one of the boxes
without him even being involved,
and the FDA considered this to be
a breach of the injunction.
[narrator] Reich is sentenced to two years in prison.
And FDA agents destroy his accumulators and books.
[Sascha] Over 6 tons of Reich's writing are collected
and burned at a public incinerator.
Any material related to orgone is fair game.
And it all goes up in smoke.
[narrator] Reich's reputation is ruined.
Aged 60, the creator of the radical cloudbuster
dies of a heart attack while still in prison.
But his ideas don't die with him.
And it's easy to see why.
[Keon] It's really nice to believe that there's just
one energy that flows through the universe,
and that it's the source of everything
and the solution to everything.
When you have a really complicated, difficult world,
you can understand the appeal of an answer
that's both simple and enjoyable,
even if it's not the right answer.
[narrator] Despite no scientific proof that orgone exists,
Reich's fans are still turning out online plans
to build your very own cloudbuster today.
Just don't expect it to rain.
Locked away in the vaults of the British Museum
is a strange clay tablet.
It took years to be deciphered and its importance understood.
It's a map of the unknown.
[narrator] Now, using the latest technology,
we can begin to decode this ancient artifact.
This is the Babylonian Map of the World.
[Abigail Graham] While this is, technically speaking, a map,
it's so much more than that.
It is the oldest map of the world.
This map dates to more than 2,500 years ago.
[narrator] It stands 4.8 inches high
and 3.2 inches wide.
Curious diagrams and cryptic text cover its surface.
[Kevin] You've got living cities, you've got dead cities,
you've got mythological places,
you've got the notion of the end of the world.
[narrator] And at the heart of this map is a mystery.
What do the symbols and writing mean?
Why was it made?
Is this really a map of the world?
The map is discovered in 1881
in the lost city of Shapur,
17 miles southwest of modern-day Baghdad.
It is part of a 70,000-tablet bonanza.
And under this avalanche of finds,
its significance is missed.
[Kevin] This object was pretty much put to one side
for eight years until its importance was discovered
as one of the first maps of the world.
[narrator] The information on the tablet is in cuneiform form,
the oldest written language on Earth,
and it reveals a lost civilization.
In the center of the map is a hole,
a device often found on cuneiform tablets.
Above this lies a rectangle,
representing a mighty city labeled as Babylon.
[Abigail] We know it's the city of Babylon
because the other rectangle that runs through it
is the Euphrates River.
And Babylon was famous for being the city
that was on both sides of the Euphrates River.
[narrator] When the map is made around 2,600 years ago,
Babylon is home to 200,000 people.
It is the largest city on Earth
and the location of the greatest wonders of the ancient world,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
the Ishtar Gate
and theBible's Tower of Babel.
So it's no surprise that this map of the world
revolves around mighty Babylon.
[Abigail] They're setting out their concept of their kingdom and who they are
through the means of a map
in which they place themselves in the center.
And everything that isn't themselves
on the periphery.
[narrator] Beyond Babylon itself,
other features of this lost world appear.
[Abigail] There are also just plain circles
that fall in various places,
and these are ruins of ancient cities.
[narrator] There are mountains marked in the north
in roughly the same location as the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey.
A swamp in the south corresponds to the marshlands
of the Euphrates and Tigris floodplains.
But there is something strange about this tablet.
Unlike maps as we know them,
it has no scale, no measure of distance,
no roads, no paths.
The Babylonian map is not a map which will allow you
to find where you are in the world.
[narrator] This map clearly isn't for navigation.
So what is it for?
[narrator] Getting from A to B using the oldest map of the world
would be impossible.
Yet the Babylonians do seem to have the knowledge and the skill
that a mapmaker would need.
[Kevin] We know that the Babylonians had surveying skills.
So if you could make a more accurate map,
but you make something
which is rather less detailed and crude,
there must be another reason for it.
[narrator] The answer to that may begin
with the lines surrounding this lost Babylonian world.
There's a circle that goes around it
called the Bitter River.
By "bitter," we're talking about the kind of salt seas.
[narrator] The map does not end at the Bitter Sea,
it shows land beyond it,
but it looks very different.
The outer bodies of land are shaped like triangles,
reducing as they head towards the abyss
at the edge of the world.
Some people have even said the way that they're presented
as kind of triangles coming out
represents the way you'd have seen the land approaching by sea.
[narrator] These are distant places
outside the boundary of the Bitter Sea
and beyond the lands of Babylon.
Some of the labels say,
"Oh, the sun never shone here.
It was dark as night."
And there were places where birds wouldn't fly.
[narrator] These may well be partially-known places
based on travelers' tales or handed-down stories.
[Abigail] They have it on the map
and they've tried to map it out.
It's something that you know is there,
but you don't really have enough information
to describe it or even kind of put it properly.
[narrator] Later mapmakers called such unknown lands
"terra incognita."
[Abigail] In cartography, terra incognita
is the "land unknown."
We often get the phrase "hic sunt leones,"
"here be lions."
"Here be dragons."
[narrator] In the absence of facts or firsthand experience,
mapmakers use their imagination to fill in the gaps.
It's amazing, really, because it's not just describing a place,
but it's almost describing a philosophical concept
of something that you don't know
and, therefore, can't even imagine.
[narrator] The text on the tablet also includes references
to strange wildlife.
[Abigail] You have all different types of exotic animals,
almost otherworldly creatures,
like gazelles and a scorpion man.
And that kind of captures the idea
that they're seen as these otherworldly, mythic places.
[narrator] The heavily damaged text on the front
includes references to legendary figures
and the Babylonian creation myth.
This map and the writing on the tablet
are effectively a description of more than just the Babylonians physical world.
It's their cosmology.
This is a strange blending of worlds,
of the known world,
of a mythological world beyond.
[narrator] But one theory suggests that this map could be more
than just a description of a belief system.
Could it have a more Earthly purpose?
1,700 years before the map is made,
Babylon is part of the first great empire on Earth.
And at the center of everything is its ruler,
the legendary Sargon the Great.
[Kevin] The time of Sargon was the golden age.
This goes back many centuries to around 2,300 BC.
A multiethnic civilization stretched over a great breadth of land
with roots by land and sea.
This was potentially the world's first empire.
[narrator] But since then, Babylon has become
just a pale shadow of its former greatness.
[Kevin] It was no longer the golden age of Sargon.
This region was no longer a world leader.
Babylon had been conquered by Assyria
and was in a perpetual state of revolt.
It was ridden by conflict and civil war.
[narrator] Yet this map shows a Babylon-centric world view.
That could be because the empire strikes back.
They kick the Assyrians out of Babylon.
[Kevin] By the 7th and 6th centuries BC,
we do see a glimmer of change
with a short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire.
[narrator] In this period,
Babylonian culture and arts blossomed
and spectacular palaces and temples are built across the empire,
particularly in Babylon.
This era features the iconic King Nebuchadnezzar,
who, of course, we all know created the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
[narrator] In the text on the front,
the map talks of the Babylonian creator god,
Marduk.
And it suggests one of the distant triangular lands
may be home to both Utnapishtim,
their equivalent of Noah,
and Sargon himself.
It's like a golden hits of Babylonian mythology.
One means of interpretation might be to say
that this map served as a harkening back to that age.
[narrator] Could its purpose have been to revive ideas
of Babylon's lost golden past?
It's tempting to connect it with the resurgence of Babylon
in the 7th and 6th centuries
and this short secondary golden age
and see it as an attempt to appeal
to the glorious past of the area.
[narrator] That's consistent with what we know
of the Neo-Babylonian world.
[Kevin] Archaeologically speaking, there's other evidence
of the Neo-Babylonian state
using the past as a form of legitimation.
[narrator] We know they restore one of Sargon's great ancient cities,
Ur, including its towering ziggurat.
And they restore the Esagila,
the great temple to Marduk in the center of Babylon itself.
The Neo-Babylonians certainly wouldn't be alone
in using a glorious past to help shape the present.
[Kevin] If we look, for example, at Mussolini in the 1930s,
he used the Roman past and archaeology
as a means of discussing Italian greatness
and the Italian right to reconquer North Africa.
More recently in history,
we see Saddam Hussein doing the same thing in Iraq.
[narrator] Could the Babylonian map
also have been intended to draw a parallel
with past greatness?
Although it's a tempting theory and seems to fit,
modern scholars are skeptical.
The one thing we can say with some certainty
is this ancient clay tablet shows us the world
the mapmaker wants us to see.
[Kevin] Much like the map of the world today
and its projections,
the relative size of continents,
This is all guarded by the priorities of
the people who were drawing the maps.
[narrator] We just can't be certain what this mapmaker intended.
Is this strange thing made as a map?
As a cosmological guide?
Or as a piece of propaganda?
[Abigail] What's so intriguing about his object
is the fact that we probably won't ever know
exactly what it was meant to be used for.
[narrator] Unfortunately, the Neo-Babylonian Empire that likely created it
lasts less than a century.
But this remnant of that short-lived period remains,
the oldest-known map of the world in existence.