Museum Secrets (2011–…): Season 3, Episode 22 - Inside the Musée national du Bardo - full transcript
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Tunis, a North African city
of tradition and transformation.
And at its heart, a museum
with secrets dark and strange.
How to cheat death in the Sahara,
how to kill a gladiator,
how the catapult toppled an empire,
and the surprising location
of a galaxy far, far away.
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Bardo National Museum.
(dramatic music)
If you travel down the boot of Italy,
and stand on the southern tip of Sicily,
you can see Africa.
Across the water is a
nation called Tunisia.
Just 300 kilometers wide,
Tunisia stretches south
from the Mediterranean
through fertile farmland
that becomes dry steppes
and finally, the desert
wastes of the Sahara.
Tunisia combines European, African,
and Middle Eastern influences.
A blend of cultures that is reflected
in the Bardo National Museum.
Inside is evidence that Tunisia
was colonized by the Arabs.
Before them, the Romans.
Before them, the Carthaginians.
And throughout Tunisia's history,
Berber tribes have made
its deserts their home.
(Jawa screeches)
A few decades ago, these deserts
were invaded by another tribe
led by a Hollywood director
named George Lucas.
Lucas chose Tunisia as the
shooting location for Star Wars.
The desert became the planet's Tatooine,
a name borrowed from a nearby town.
This is what's left of
the movie's spaceport.
- [Stormtrooper] We don't
need to see his identification.
- These aren't the
droids you're looking for.
- [Narrator] Not far away is the set
for Luke Skywalker's boyhood home,
the Lars Homestead.
- [Owen] Luke!
Luke!
- [Narrator] Every year, the sets attract
Star Wars fans from around the world.
- Everybody loves the movie, you know?
It's very famous, in Korea too.
- [Narrator] When this set fell into decay,
some super fans teamed up to repair it.
For them, it's a revered icon,
with Tunisia just a convenient backdrop.
But in reality, the connections
between Star Wars and Tunisia run deep.
- Aunt Beru, Uncle Owen?
- [Narrator] Where to find
them is a museum secret.
The investigation begins with
an arrival at the Tunis Airport.
Terry Cooper, a British
science fiction illustrator,
has made the Star Wars
pilgrimage several times.
- I saw Star Wars in
1977 as an eight year old,
and that's one of the,
obviously a big blockbuster
at the time and changed
the way films were made.
And it kind of changed my life,
because as an eight year old
watching a film like Star Wars
just tells you anything is possible.
- [Narrator] On this trip, Terry's guide
will be a young man from Tataouine.
The town, not the planet.
His name is Rad Adallah.
Rad is also a Star Wars fan,
but he sees it from a Tunisian perspective.
- So as you see, it looks
just like the Lars Homestead,
and that's originally from
the Muslim architecture.
There is one there, one there,
one up there.
- [Narrator] This architecture
appears in Star Wars,
with the addition of an extra sun.
- [Terry] I think it was a very wise move
for George Lucas's part.
There was this completely alien culture
and feel to these buildings
that no one had ever seen,
and it was very clever of
him to take that at the time.
- [Narrator] Down these stairs
is another Star Wars connection.
For centuries, Berber
tribes built dwellings
underground to beat the heat.
It looks like a Star Wars
set, but it's a real home.
The couple who live
here have turned one room
into a tiny museum.
- It has all the traditional Berber things,
like the traditional art and craft, carpet.
- [Narrator] The woman
of the house weaves cloth
in the traditional Berber way.
- And here we have the Berber cloaks.
- Okay.
- You just put it as a robe.
- And over your head, like this.
- Exactly. - Okay.
You can see where they
got the Jedi knights idea.
- [Rad] Yep.
- [Narrator] But while traditional Berbers
are nomadic traders, the
Jedi are warrior monks,
who strive to become
one with an unseen force.
- Through the force, things
you will see, other places.
The future, the past.
- [Narrator] The Jedi are mystics,
and it so happens that the Star Wars sets
are near the spiritual home
of Islamic mystics called Sufis.
Sufis are famous for a whirling dance
that looks a bit like a Jedi fighting move.
But the connection
here is not the spinning.
The Jedi religion may have
been inspired by Sufi beliefs.
- They even sometime have a vision
for the future.
They can see the future. - Okay.
- This is the myth.
- So it's like the miracles.
- Exactly.
- [Narrator] When night
falls, Terry and Rad
accept a rare invitation
to witness a Sufi ritual
that few outsiders have ever seen.
Some Muslims think that Sufis
are not true followers of Islam,
but Sufi master Munia
Masa strongly disagrees.
(speaks foreign language)
(singing in foreign language)
(speaks foreign language)
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Sufis believe that music
can help believers achieve
a higher state of being.
(speaks foreign language)
(chanting in foreign language)
- [Narrator] These men are all hoping
that the change will happen to them,
and for one believer, it does.
(chanting in foreign language)
He appears to have
fallen into a trance state.
The Sufis believe he's
been touched by the divine.
- [Terry] It creates a big
impression on people,
even on me, because it strengthens
and reinforces their beliefs,
and it underlines the seriousness
and the devotion to their faith.
- [Narrator] Before Terry
heads home to England,
he wants to pay a visit to the
Star Wars set one last time.
He not only likes it,
he was one of the super
fans who restored it.
- [Terry] Pretty good, actually.
The weather's beginning to take its toll,
but it's no longer as bright as it was.
- [Rad] Yeah.
- [Terry] The first time I ever went there,
I felt like I'd stepped through
the screen into the film,
because it's all around you.
The heat, the sand, the look of the place,
the exotic locations.
You feel like you're standing
right in the middle of Tatooine.
If Luke Skywalker went
to the country Tunisia,
the first thing he would say was
it looks just like my home.
- [Narrator] Up next, the secret of
conquering an impenetrable wall.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
one gallery displays artifacts found
just a few kilometers away,
in the ruins of the
ancient city of Carthage.
23 centuries ago, Carthage
controlled most of North Africa.
Its biggest rival was the
powerful Roman Empire,
and its best general was
a man named Hannibal.
(horn fanfare)
In 218 BC, Hannibal led an
army of men and elephants
around the Mediterranean to attack Rome.
(soldiers shouting)
He won many battles.
But finally lost the war.
After his death, Roman
legions sailed to North Africa,
bent on revenge.
But the city was protected
by a formidable wall.
- The Romans siege on
Carthage, and they tried to
breach the walls from different sides.
There was a triple wall,
doubled by triple trenches.
But walls which were nine meters thick.
- [Narrator] Over a three
year siege of the city,
Rome's heaviest weapons
failed to break through.
Its army suffered massive casualties,
but historians know the
Romans took Carthage somehow,
because today, within
the ruins of the city,
there is evidence that its
buildings were destroyed.
How the Romans conquered
Carthage is a museum secret.
The investigation begins at the museum,
with the arrival of British
historian Tracy Riehl.
Tracy believes she will discover the key
to Rome's conquest of Carthage
in an artifact recovered off a nearby coast
at the bottom of the sea.
- An ancient ship probably
got blown off course in a storm
and sank off Mahdia
on the coast of Tunisia.
- [Narrator] In a storeroom of the museum,
she finds salvaged items from
an ancient Roman shipwreck.
This case holds what
she was hoping to find,
a bronze cylinder from a Roman catapult.
- They're the key part of the machine
because if we find a washer,
we can reconstruct
the rest of the catapult,
just on the basis of that one part.
- [Narrator] You might expect it
to look something like this.
But the museum's
reconstruction isn't nearly so big,
and that's just what Tracy expected.
- Quite a large proportion
of the archeological evidence
is for small caliber weapons
that could be carried by one person.
- [Narrator] The catapult
is powered by rope,
bound tightly into a spring.
- And if I pull it back,
you'll get some idea.
Pull, you get some idea
of the discharge velocity.
- [Narrator] Tracy knows
that catapults like this one
were used during the siege of Carthage,
but their tactical value
can't be determined inside the museum.
So she heads to Coventry, England,
where Roman reenactors have built
rope-powered catapults of various sizes.
Today they will be put to the test,
with the help of historian Lenn Morgan.
- Maneuver this up.
- Hello, I'm Tracy.
- Tracy, nice to meet you.
- And you, and you.
I've heard a lot about your machine.
- Yeah the big one, we call it the beast.
It's two libra, or two pounder
stone thrower, ballista.
And the smaller machine
is the smallest catapult,
the arrow shooter.
And the further one is
a three span catapult.
Each of these machines are
the standard pieces of equipment
that would have been used in a Roman army.
- [Narrator] During a siege,
the beast would have lobbed
small balls into the city.
Creating havoc.
But not knocking down the walls.
- They also are very good, obviously,
dropping into a mass crowd of warriors
or whatever, you know, enemy.
Try that.
- Oh okay, can I go the other way around?
Because I...
- [Narrator] Tracy believes
the smallest catapult
might have been fired almost like a rifle.
Again, not useful for knocking down walls.
But what about the mid-size model?
The one most like the
catapult in the museum?
It's light, and easy to set up,
but it requires an expert
hand to prepare it for battle.
- To the bowstring, and then push the snake
into position to lock it.
Ratchets go back on.
Number two would start winding on.
And you place the bolt
in position on the slider,
and fit it back into the trigger.
- [Narrator] The first target
will be a double sheet of steel.
Tracy has never fired this catapult before.
- Right, okay.
- [Narrator] Even so,
she scores a direct hit.
- Well done.
- At his feet, at his
feet where we hit him.
- Got him in the foot. - Yeah.
- So that's the point of impact.
Got a hole on the first sheet,
and a hole through the second sheet.
So that's 1.2 millimeters,
and we've punched through.
- [Narrator] This suggests
the catapult's real purpose.
- So it's anti-personnel.
It's the small scale stuff.
They probably would've been
used for wall clearing duties.
- [Narrator] At the siege of Carthage,
the Romans finally stopped
trying to go through the walls,
and began to build a firing platform.
- The whole idea was that
you're higher than the city wall
so that your troops can
shoot down on the defenders,
and the Carthaginians first thought was
oh this is impossible.
They'll never achieve it.
But the Romans were
nothing if not persistent.
- [Narrator] When the
platform was complete,
Roman soldiers rushed to the top,
carrying catapults in pieces.
They assembled their
weapons, and began to fire.
Carthaginian arrows were no match
for the powerful and accurate catapults,
which took out the defenders one by one.
The Romans didn't need
to knock down the walls,
because they could now
scale them with impunity.
And when they did, the
story takes a darker turn.
Still evident back here,
in the ruins of Carthage.
- [Man] Bones, thousands of them.
- [Tracy] They're all over aren't they?
- Here are a good
example, could be a tibia.
You know, a leg.
So there you see a shoulder bone.
Here you have another one there.
Could be human.
- [Narrator] The Romans
believed there was only one way
to ensure that Carthage never
threatened their empire again.
Every building was razed,
every man, woman, and
child was slaughtered.
It was the first genocide
in recorded history,
and it may never have happened
without the catapult.
(dramatic music)
Up next, did the priests of
Carthage commit child sacrifice?
(dramatic music)
(ominous music)
Inside Tunisia's Bardo National Museum,
the gallery of Carthage
contains the likeness
of a pagan god named Baal Hammon.
Since the first century AD,
Baal has been associated
with a dark ritual.
Witnesses describe priests
holding babies above a fire,
as music drowns their mothers' screams,
the young ones are hurled into the flames.
These terrible events were recorded
by ancient Greek and Roman historians.
Then, in the early 20th Century,
in the ruins of Carthage,
archeologists discovered evidence.
Near the city's main cemetery,
they found a smaller one
they named the Tophet.
Tophet is Hebrew for roasting place.
Here, they pieced together stone markers,
including one that is
now in the Bardo Museum.
It shows a priest grasping a tiny child.
- This was for many scholars the evidence
that these Carthaginians
were sacrificing their babies.
- [Narrator] Then, in the 1970s,
PBS filmed American researchers
as they excavated the cemetery's graves.
The team was led by biblical
archeologist Lawrence Stager.
A young anthropologist
named Jeffrey Schwartz
was put in charge of collecting the bones.
- It seems fairly certain that
in fire individuals were placed in the urn.
This one is reasonably burned.
- [Narrator] There were 540 tiny skeletons,
revealing the scale of the
horrors reported in antiquity.
- Some of the classical sources suggest
that the infants were thrown in alive.
- [Narrator] Today, the people of Carthage
are remembered as baby killers.
But the real truth is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins with the arrival
of an older, grayer Jeffrey Schwartz,
who has come to revisit the
research he did as a young man.
- I started my career doing
more biblical archeology
than anything else.
And had been trained to analyze
human bones, and animal bones.
- [Narrator] After his
team's initial findings
were made public, he
began looking for bones
that might fit together.
- Got some ribs, I've got neck vertebrae.
You can piece together pieces of face.
It's just wild to bring
these things to life that way.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey discovered
that many urns in the Tophet
contained the bones of more than one child.
This does not match the ritual burial
described in some classical sources,
which he and others
were beginning to doubt.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey decided that
to uncover the whole
truth, he would need to look
beyond the Tophet cemetery to determine
where the rest of the
Carthaginians were buried.
In museum archives, he
found a surprising answer.
The main cemetery of
Carthage contained adults,
but no young children at all.
- The general population
in the main cemetery starts at about five,
and that's where my
sample more or less stops.
- [Narrator] And since
natural child mortality was high
in ancient times, Jeffrey
wondered if the stone marker
in the museum could have
a different interpretation.
- It's been interpreted as this is a priest
bringing a child to be sacrificed,
but there isn't just
one interpretation of it.
You look at this little thing,
it looks slumped over in this
priest's or this person's arm.
It has absolutely no facial
expression whatsoever.
So another way you can interpret it is
this was a dead child, or infant,
and it was being taken to
a special burial place.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey
theorized that the Tophet
was simply the graveyard
where all the young children
of Carthage were buried.
Not an evil sanctuary for baby sacrifice.
His colleagues reacted
with shocked disbelief.
- I was confronted by
people who are really wedded
to the sacrifice.
Everything here had to be sacrificed.
- [Narrator] To find proof
that babies died from natural causes,
he made detailed
measurements of every bone.
Many seemed extremely small.
He wondered if they might
be the bones of fetuses
that had died in the womb.
Jeffrey knew for every live birth,
the moment of birth is
recorded in the teeth.
- Before you're born, enamel is laid down
in a certain wavy pattern.
And the first insult you have in your life
is when you're born.
It's a big shock, and you actually see
a break in the wavy pattern
in the microstructure of the teeth.
And that's called the neonatal line.
- [Narrator] More than half the samples
from the Tophet cemetery
lack the neonatal line.
This is definitive proof that most babies
in the Tophet were stillborn.
So they weren't roasted alive in sacrifice.
They had already died, and
were brought here for cremation.
This suggests a culture that cared deeply
for children, even the unborn.
- It gives a more realistic picture
of the Carthaginians I think.
There was something
special about this place,
and it was a place to receive the young,
no matter how they died.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey has
rejected some of the assumptions
he held when he was younger,
and as he continues to delve into the past,
to investigate the archeological record,
he takes with him the
lessons he learned in Carthage.
- I think what I've relearned
is to use your own eyes.
Not to accept received wisdom,
and to just to do as good
of science as you can,
and let the cards fall where they may.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Up next, the
secrets of the gladiator games.
(crowd cheering)
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
there is evidence that
when Rome ruled Tunisia,
North Africans enjoyed
Roman style entertainment.
The men in this mosaic are gladiators.
They were involved,
along with exotic animals,
in a violent spectacle
called the gladiator games.
(crowd cheering)
In Hollywood depictions,
the games take place in Rome's Colosseum.
Before a bloodthirsty crowd,
lions devour Christians.
Unlucky slaves do battle.
And the emperor gives
the deciding thumbs up, or thumbs down.
It appears to be all about pain, and death.
But how the gladiators
really lived and died
is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins 200
kilometers south of the museum
in the town of El Djem.
While most movies show
only Rome's Colosseum,
in reality similar amphitheaters
were built in every Roman colony.
El Djem's Colosseum is
one of the biggest anywhere.
This local guide knows why.
They decide to build this
colosseum to say to Rome
that they have a lot of money,
and they can build a colosseum
like the Colosseum of Rome.
- [Narrator] The massive architecture
extends well below the ground.
And from this hall, they go up
the lions with hand lift to arena
to start the game.
- [Narrator] Not far from the animal cages,
gladiators prepared for battle.
And today, it's where several men
are preparing for gladiator school.
They aren't actors or stuntmen.
They're historians, who strive to recreate
the authentic fighting techniques.
In Roman times, gladiators were owned
by private games promoters,
who spent great sums
on weapons and training.
They hoped to make
a profit on ticket sales.
Movies that imply that the emperor
put on the games are wrong, and so is this.
The famous thumbs down gesture?
Never happened.
The sign for death was something else.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] The Hollywood version
comes from a French
painting of the 19th Century.
It was never seen in a real colosseum,
and the gesture for
mercy was different too.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] In the movies,
the fights are no holds barred,
but Roman mosaics reveal
the presence of referees.
(speaks foreign language)
(intense music)
- [Narrator] A referee's job
was to keep opponents
from killing each other.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] Games promoters
wanted their gladiators to stay alive,
especially those who impressed the crowds.
The best gladiators were revered,
like today's sports heroes and movie stars.
And they might even
see their names in stone.
The artist who made this mosaic
portrayed specific famous gladiators,
and even captured their post-game banter.
(speaks foreign language)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] And while in the movies,
only unknown Christians face wild animals,
in reality animal fighters
were often the most
famous gladiators of all.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] The animals
did not have an easy meal.
In fact, they were almost always killed.
(crowd cheering)
The festival of violence would climax
with a battle between two stars.
Their goal was not to
kill or maim each other,
but to put on an exciting show.
So serious wounds were
rare, but they did happen.
In the movies, this is the moment
when an emperor might
allow the loser to live
to recover from his wounds.
But in reality, serious
wounds couldn't be treated,
and everyone in the colosseum knew it.
The wounded man would
gesture for a decision,
and so to end the gladiator's suffering,
the games promoter would
make the sign for death.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] As the
gladiator committed suicide,
it's likely the crowd fell silent,
but not for long,
because in the Roman Empire, the appetite
for violent entertainment was insatiable.
And so the show must go on.
(crowd cheering)
Next on Museum Secrets, a
very desirable Roman bath.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
this gallery reveals how
the people of Carthage
and North Africa were
changed by the Roman conquest.
The mosaics are in a Roman style,
but were made by colonized North Africans.
They displayed Roman
mosaics in their homes,
and worshiped Roman gods.
But for those who aspired
to be Roman in every way,
there was a problem.
True Romans washed,
networked, and flirted at public baths.
This pleasurable tradition required
hundreds of liters of
water per person per day.
In Rome in Italy, there was plenty of water
to achieve the Roman lifestyle,
but North Africa is a dry
land for much of the year.
For the 500,000 people of Roman Carthage,
there was hardly enough water to drink,
let alone for public baths.
When Emperor Hadrian
learned of the shortage,
he demanded that Roman Carthage be supplied
with abundant water without delay.
How did his subjects tackle the problem?
That is our museum secret.
(horns honking)
The story begins in Tunis, a modern city
built on the ruins of Roman Carthage.
Its water supply is
pumped up from reservoirs,
and the nearby Miliane River watershed.
But in ancient times, these
were not viable water sources
because the Romans didn't have pumps.
The city required water
from a high elevation
so it could flow by gravity alone.
Such a source existed
at the sacred mountain
spring called Zaghouan.
Roman engineers were sent
to make this water flow to Carthage,
and today, British historian Olie Martin
has come here too, to
find out what they did.
- I mean it's amazing.
I often think of the person that was
given the job to start with, you know?
And you think where do
you start with all of this?
- [Narrator] Water can only be seen
at the bottom of a deep shaft.
But in ancient times,
water filled this pool
300 meters above Roman Carthage.
- Well assuming that for now
have found the best source,
here we now need to look across that plain
and the first thing we need to do really
is get an idea, roughly,
of which direction we need to build it.
- [Narrator] The direction is northeast,
the distance is 75 kilometers.
In Rome, engineers had constructed
long, gravity fed aqueducts.
Here, they would need
to adapt this technology
for North Africa's rough terrain.
- Of course it's highly
unlikely that your aqueduct
is gonna be able to run in a straight line.
The whole thing is gravity run,
so it must be a nice, sloping gradient
good enough to run the water,
but not too steep.
This is where you need
your expert surveyors
to walk this ground and see
where they could get this decent gradient.
Do you go around the hill?
Do you tunnel through the hill?
Do you go over the valley by bridging it?
So all of these are problems
that the Roman engineers
have got to think about.
- [Narrator] Once the
engineers made a general plan,
they needed precise curves and angles.
And so they employed a Roman innovation,
a surveyor's tool.
- So here we have a groma,
almost the symbol of a
Roman engineer really.
Now to get a straight line,
which is what this thing is used for,
you simply stand here
and you're gonna line
up those three strings.
We're gonna send an
assistant out with the pole,
however far we want him to,
move him left and right
until the pole is lined
up with the three strings,
and there we have a straight line.
Now the other thing you can use it for
is to measure 90 degrees, a right angle.
- [Narrator] This tool
allowed the engineers
to produce a blueprint of
the shortest possible route.
It snaked around mountains, over valleys,
and through hilltops for 128 kilometers.
For an aqueduct this long,
the gradient had to be just
two meters per kilometer.
To the unaided eye, the
slope appears horizontal,
and so another Roman invention was needed.
- Here we have a chorobates,
an instrument for measuring level.
It's basically a level plank.
We have four plumb lines hanging down,
and in the center we have a trough
which we are gonna fill with water.
As long as the water touches
the top of all four sides,
we know it must be level.
- [Narrator] Armed with
their level and blueprints,
the engineers announced
that building could begin.
(dramatic music)
Roman overseers enslaved
North Africans to do the job.
As a colonized people,
they had no right to refuse.
For 10 long years, they dug tunnels,
hauled stone, and erected arches
until they numbered in the thousands.
And then the engineers'
design was put to the crucial test.
From the sacred pool of Zaghouan,
water flowed briskly
down half-buried pipes,
and then more slowly
through channels, over valleys,
and through hillsides.
The precious water crept
along, kilometer after kilometer,
until it crossed above the Miliane River,
into the stone reservoirs
of Roman Carthage.
But how much water had been delivered?
Was there enough for a Roman bath?
Or only enough to drink?
The answer is hidden in plain
sight in the Bardo Museum.
In Roman mosaics, images
of fish and ocean waves
were used for the floors of Roman baths.
Their presence in Carthage
reveals that the aqueduct was a success.
- In many ways we think of the Romans
as all conquering people.
We all hear about the
Roman Army and stuff like that,
and perhaps sometimes we don't remember
that the Romans were also great engineers.
To have been able to achieve this
2,000 years ago is quite amazing.
- [Narrator] And their achievement
provided a colonized people
with even more than a pleasant bath.
It gave them the Roman lifestyle.
By the emperor's command,
those who lived as Romans
could be granted the
rights of Roman citizens,
who could not be enslaved.
In a dry land, water is valuable,
but human rights are priceless.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how to stay alive in the Sahara.
(dramatic music)
(doors creak)
The Bardo National
Museum displays treasures
of Tunisia's Islamic heritage.
There are several pages
of an ancient holy book
known as the Blue Qur'an.
They are among the most valuable
paper artifacts in the world.
And near the scripture,
there's an example of Islamic science.
This astrolabe is an Arab
take on a Greek invention.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] Astrolabes
were used by Arab seafarers
to navigate the ocean,
and by those who dared
to enter the Sahara Desert.
When sighted on the noonday sun,
an astrolabe reveals a traveler's distance
from the equator, and
from your destination.
It's an important tool for navigation,
but it won't help you survive.
The Sahara is one of the most
unforgiving environments on earth.
And historians believe it's getting worse.
- The story of the Sarah
since climate change occurred
about 5,000 years ago, is
that the level of groundwater
has gradually gone down.
The Sahara has been a high powered desert
for the last 5,000 years.
- [Narrator] How to stay alive
in the Sahara is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins
with a gathering of Berber tribesmen.
Caravan leader Fausi Buali and his crew
are preparing to enter the Sahara.
It may look like they belong here,
but they are as vulnerable
in the desert as anyone.
Luckily for them, their ancestors
domesticated the camel.
In the past, Berbers braved the desert
for trade and profit.
A camel caravan from one side to the other
was a four month journey.
- There must have been
caravans of hundreds of camels,
perhaps even thousands of camels
in the peak years,
and it says a lot I think
about the consumer
demand in the Central Sahara.
They wanted Roman tableware,
that nice, red, glossy pottery
and things like textiles,
salt, the dates from the oases.
And we know that gold from West Africa
is one of the key commodities.
- [Narrator] The camel is well-suited
to these long desert caravans
because of the large amount of water
it can store in its hump.
- [Narrator] But that's
only one of its adaptations.
- The camel has this
extraordinary splay-toed foot
which is very effective in traversing sand.
It also has well-adapted
eyes and ears and lips
and whiskers that sort of keep out the dust
when it's blowing around.
It also has the ability to
vary its body temperature
in a way that other
mammals simply don't have.
Its body temperature can go
from about 89 degrees Fahrenheit
up to about 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Well that would kill you or me.
- [Narrator] Requiring
only spiny grass for fuel,
the camel provides reliable
transport between water sources
that are sometimes
hundreds of kilometers apart.
In the Sahara, if a lone
traveler loses their camel,
they can easily die.
So if a camel wanders off,
it's critical to know how to find it.
- [Narrator] But while Berbers
depend on their camels for survival,
the camels depend on the Berbers too.
- Even your wonderful camels,
they cannot endure without
finding a water source.
You've got to know where
the water sources are.
That's the crucial thing.
(camels grunting)
- [Narrator] In the desert,
survival can depend
on convincing a camel to cooperate.
This camel is ready and willing.
(camel grunts)
This one, not so much.
(speaks foreign language)
- Camels are extraordinary animals,
but they also have very nasty tempers.
- [Narrator] Experienced Berbers
do not respond with anger or abuse,
because camels, like
elephants, never forget.
(speaks foreign language)
(men snoring)
(camel bellows)
- [Narrator] Unlike the
caravans of old, Fausi's convoy
is not involved in trade.
He and his men make their living
by taking tourists on expeditions
deep into the Sahara.
The purpose is not
to get to the other side.
The desert is the destination.
- [Narrator] As it has been
for thousands of years,
understanding the interdependence of humans
and the natural world
is the secret of survival in the Sahara.
In this place where ancient enemies meet,
for every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Secrets of the Holy Spirit,
and of the bravest hearts,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Bardo National Museum.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] Tunis, a North African city
of tradition and transformation.
And at its heart, a museum
with secrets dark and strange.
How to cheat death in the Sahara,
how to kill a gladiator,
how the catapult toppled an empire,
and the surprising location
of a galaxy far, far away.
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Bardo National Museum.
(dramatic music)
If you travel down the boot of Italy,
and stand on the southern tip of Sicily,
you can see Africa.
Across the water is a
nation called Tunisia.
Just 300 kilometers wide,
Tunisia stretches south
from the Mediterranean
through fertile farmland
that becomes dry steppes
and finally, the desert
wastes of the Sahara.
Tunisia combines European, African,
and Middle Eastern influences.
A blend of cultures that is reflected
in the Bardo National Museum.
Inside is evidence that Tunisia
was colonized by the Arabs.
Before them, the Romans.
Before them, the Carthaginians.
And throughout Tunisia's history,
Berber tribes have made
its deserts their home.
(Jawa screeches)
A few decades ago, these deserts
were invaded by another tribe
led by a Hollywood director
named George Lucas.
Lucas chose Tunisia as the
shooting location for Star Wars.
The desert became the planet's Tatooine,
a name borrowed from a nearby town.
This is what's left of
the movie's spaceport.
- [Stormtrooper] We don't
need to see his identification.
- These aren't the
droids you're looking for.
- [Narrator] Not far away is the set
for Luke Skywalker's boyhood home,
the Lars Homestead.
- [Owen] Luke!
Luke!
- [Narrator] Every year, the sets attract
Star Wars fans from around the world.
- Everybody loves the movie, you know?
It's very famous, in Korea too.
- [Narrator] When this set fell into decay,
some super fans teamed up to repair it.
For them, it's a revered icon,
with Tunisia just a convenient backdrop.
But in reality, the connections
between Star Wars and Tunisia run deep.
- Aunt Beru, Uncle Owen?
- [Narrator] Where to find
them is a museum secret.
The investigation begins with
an arrival at the Tunis Airport.
Terry Cooper, a British
science fiction illustrator,
has made the Star Wars
pilgrimage several times.
- I saw Star Wars in
1977 as an eight year old,
and that's one of the,
obviously a big blockbuster
at the time and changed
the way films were made.
And it kind of changed my life,
because as an eight year old
watching a film like Star Wars
just tells you anything is possible.
- [Narrator] On this trip, Terry's guide
will be a young man from Tataouine.
The town, not the planet.
His name is Rad Adallah.
Rad is also a Star Wars fan,
but he sees it from a Tunisian perspective.
- So as you see, it looks
just like the Lars Homestead,
and that's originally from
the Muslim architecture.
There is one there, one there,
one up there.
- [Narrator] This architecture
appears in Star Wars,
with the addition of an extra sun.
- [Terry] I think it was a very wise move
for George Lucas's part.
There was this completely alien culture
and feel to these buildings
that no one had ever seen,
and it was very clever of
him to take that at the time.
- [Narrator] Down these stairs
is another Star Wars connection.
For centuries, Berber
tribes built dwellings
underground to beat the heat.
It looks like a Star Wars
set, but it's a real home.
The couple who live
here have turned one room
into a tiny museum.
- It has all the traditional Berber things,
like the traditional art and craft, carpet.
- [Narrator] The woman
of the house weaves cloth
in the traditional Berber way.
- And here we have the Berber cloaks.
- Okay.
- You just put it as a robe.
- And over your head, like this.
- Exactly. - Okay.
You can see where they
got the Jedi knights idea.
- [Rad] Yep.
- [Narrator] But while traditional Berbers
are nomadic traders, the
Jedi are warrior monks,
who strive to become
one with an unseen force.
- Through the force, things
you will see, other places.
The future, the past.
- [Narrator] The Jedi are mystics,
and it so happens that the Star Wars sets
are near the spiritual home
of Islamic mystics called Sufis.
Sufis are famous for a whirling dance
that looks a bit like a Jedi fighting move.
But the connection
here is not the spinning.
The Jedi religion may have
been inspired by Sufi beliefs.
- They even sometime have a vision
for the future.
They can see the future. - Okay.
- This is the myth.
- So it's like the miracles.
- Exactly.
- [Narrator] When night
falls, Terry and Rad
accept a rare invitation
to witness a Sufi ritual
that few outsiders have ever seen.
Some Muslims think that Sufis
are not true followers of Islam,
but Sufi master Munia
Masa strongly disagrees.
(speaks foreign language)
(singing in foreign language)
(speaks foreign language)
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Sufis believe that music
can help believers achieve
a higher state of being.
(speaks foreign language)
(chanting in foreign language)
- [Narrator] These men are all hoping
that the change will happen to them,
and for one believer, it does.
(chanting in foreign language)
He appears to have
fallen into a trance state.
The Sufis believe he's
been touched by the divine.
- [Terry] It creates a big
impression on people,
even on me, because it strengthens
and reinforces their beliefs,
and it underlines the seriousness
and the devotion to their faith.
- [Narrator] Before Terry
heads home to England,
he wants to pay a visit to the
Star Wars set one last time.
He not only likes it,
he was one of the super
fans who restored it.
- [Terry] Pretty good, actually.
The weather's beginning to take its toll,
but it's no longer as bright as it was.
- [Rad] Yeah.
- [Terry] The first time I ever went there,
I felt like I'd stepped through
the screen into the film,
because it's all around you.
The heat, the sand, the look of the place,
the exotic locations.
You feel like you're standing
right in the middle of Tatooine.
If Luke Skywalker went
to the country Tunisia,
the first thing he would say was
it looks just like my home.
- [Narrator] Up next, the secret of
conquering an impenetrable wall.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
one gallery displays artifacts found
just a few kilometers away,
in the ruins of the
ancient city of Carthage.
23 centuries ago, Carthage
controlled most of North Africa.
Its biggest rival was the
powerful Roman Empire,
and its best general was
a man named Hannibal.
(horn fanfare)
In 218 BC, Hannibal led an
army of men and elephants
around the Mediterranean to attack Rome.
(soldiers shouting)
He won many battles.
But finally lost the war.
After his death, Roman
legions sailed to North Africa,
bent on revenge.
But the city was protected
by a formidable wall.
- The Romans siege on
Carthage, and they tried to
breach the walls from different sides.
There was a triple wall,
doubled by triple trenches.
But walls which were nine meters thick.
- [Narrator] Over a three
year siege of the city,
Rome's heaviest weapons
failed to break through.
Its army suffered massive casualties,
but historians know the
Romans took Carthage somehow,
because today, within
the ruins of the city,
there is evidence that its
buildings were destroyed.
How the Romans conquered
Carthage is a museum secret.
The investigation begins at the museum,
with the arrival of British
historian Tracy Riehl.
Tracy believes she will discover the key
to Rome's conquest of Carthage
in an artifact recovered off a nearby coast
at the bottom of the sea.
- An ancient ship probably
got blown off course in a storm
and sank off Mahdia
on the coast of Tunisia.
- [Narrator] In a storeroom of the museum,
she finds salvaged items from
an ancient Roman shipwreck.
This case holds what
she was hoping to find,
a bronze cylinder from a Roman catapult.
- They're the key part of the machine
because if we find a washer,
we can reconstruct
the rest of the catapult,
just on the basis of that one part.
- [Narrator] You might expect it
to look something like this.
But the museum's
reconstruction isn't nearly so big,
and that's just what Tracy expected.
- Quite a large proportion
of the archeological evidence
is for small caliber weapons
that could be carried by one person.
- [Narrator] The catapult
is powered by rope,
bound tightly into a spring.
- And if I pull it back,
you'll get some idea.
Pull, you get some idea
of the discharge velocity.
- [Narrator] Tracy knows
that catapults like this one
were used during the siege of Carthage,
but their tactical value
can't be determined inside the museum.
So she heads to Coventry, England,
where Roman reenactors have built
rope-powered catapults of various sizes.
Today they will be put to the test,
with the help of historian Lenn Morgan.
- Maneuver this up.
- Hello, I'm Tracy.
- Tracy, nice to meet you.
- And you, and you.
I've heard a lot about your machine.
- Yeah the big one, we call it the beast.
It's two libra, or two pounder
stone thrower, ballista.
And the smaller machine
is the smallest catapult,
the arrow shooter.
And the further one is
a three span catapult.
Each of these machines are
the standard pieces of equipment
that would have been used in a Roman army.
- [Narrator] During a siege,
the beast would have lobbed
small balls into the city.
Creating havoc.
But not knocking down the walls.
- They also are very good, obviously,
dropping into a mass crowd of warriors
or whatever, you know, enemy.
Try that.
- Oh okay, can I go the other way around?
Because I...
- [Narrator] Tracy believes
the smallest catapult
might have been fired almost like a rifle.
Again, not useful for knocking down walls.
But what about the mid-size model?
The one most like the
catapult in the museum?
It's light, and easy to set up,
but it requires an expert
hand to prepare it for battle.
- To the bowstring, and then push the snake
into position to lock it.
Ratchets go back on.
Number two would start winding on.
And you place the bolt
in position on the slider,
and fit it back into the trigger.
- [Narrator] The first target
will be a double sheet of steel.
Tracy has never fired this catapult before.
- Right, okay.
- [Narrator] Even so,
she scores a direct hit.
- Well done.
- At his feet, at his
feet where we hit him.
- Got him in the foot. - Yeah.
- So that's the point of impact.
Got a hole on the first sheet,
and a hole through the second sheet.
So that's 1.2 millimeters,
and we've punched through.
- [Narrator] This suggests
the catapult's real purpose.
- So it's anti-personnel.
It's the small scale stuff.
They probably would've been
used for wall clearing duties.
- [Narrator] At the siege of Carthage,
the Romans finally stopped
trying to go through the walls,
and began to build a firing platform.
- The whole idea was that
you're higher than the city wall
so that your troops can
shoot down on the defenders,
and the Carthaginians first thought was
oh this is impossible.
They'll never achieve it.
But the Romans were
nothing if not persistent.
- [Narrator] When the
platform was complete,
Roman soldiers rushed to the top,
carrying catapults in pieces.
They assembled their
weapons, and began to fire.
Carthaginian arrows were no match
for the powerful and accurate catapults,
which took out the defenders one by one.
The Romans didn't need
to knock down the walls,
because they could now
scale them with impunity.
And when they did, the
story takes a darker turn.
Still evident back here,
in the ruins of Carthage.
- [Man] Bones, thousands of them.
- [Tracy] They're all over aren't they?
- Here are a good
example, could be a tibia.
You know, a leg.
So there you see a shoulder bone.
Here you have another one there.
Could be human.
- [Narrator] The Romans
believed there was only one way
to ensure that Carthage never
threatened their empire again.
Every building was razed,
every man, woman, and
child was slaughtered.
It was the first genocide
in recorded history,
and it may never have happened
without the catapult.
(dramatic music)
Up next, did the priests of
Carthage commit child sacrifice?
(dramatic music)
(ominous music)
Inside Tunisia's Bardo National Museum,
the gallery of Carthage
contains the likeness
of a pagan god named Baal Hammon.
Since the first century AD,
Baal has been associated
with a dark ritual.
Witnesses describe priests
holding babies above a fire,
as music drowns their mothers' screams,
the young ones are hurled into the flames.
These terrible events were recorded
by ancient Greek and Roman historians.
Then, in the early 20th Century,
in the ruins of Carthage,
archeologists discovered evidence.
Near the city's main cemetery,
they found a smaller one
they named the Tophet.
Tophet is Hebrew for roasting place.
Here, they pieced together stone markers,
including one that is
now in the Bardo Museum.
It shows a priest grasping a tiny child.
- This was for many scholars the evidence
that these Carthaginians
were sacrificing their babies.
- [Narrator] Then, in the 1970s,
PBS filmed American researchers
as they excavated the cemetery's graves.
The team was led by biblical
archeologist Lawrence Stager.
A young anthropologist
named Jeffrey Schwartz
was put in charge of collecting the bones.
- It seems fairly certain that
in fire individuals were placed in the urn.
This one is reasonably burned.
- [Narrator] There were 540 tiny skeletons,
revealing the scale of the
horrors reported in antiquity.
- Some of the classical sources suggest
that the infants were thrown in alive.
- [Narrator] Today, the people of Carthage
are remembered as baby killers.
But the real truth is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins with the arrival
of an older, grayer Jeffrey Schwartz,
who has come to revisit the
research he did as a young man.
- I started my career doing
more biblical archeology
than anything else.
And had been trained to analyze
human bones, and animal bones.
- [Narrator] After his
team's initial findings
were made public, he
began looking for bones
that might fit together.
- Got some ribs, I've got neck vertebrae.
You can piece together pieces of face.
It's just wild to bring
these things to life that way.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey discovered
that many urns in the Tophet
contained the bones of more than one child.
This does not match the ritual burial
described in some classical sources,
which he and others
were beginning to doubt.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey decided that
to uncover the whole
truth, he would need to look
beyond the Tophet cemetery to determine
where the rest of the
Carthaginians were buried.
In museum archives, he
found a surprising answer.
The main cemetery of
Carthage contained adults,
but no young children at all.
- The general population
in the main cemetery starts at about five,
and that's where my
sample more or less stops.
- [Narrator] And since
natural child mortality was high
in ancient times, Jeffrey
wondered if the stone marker
in the museum could have
a different interpretation.
- It's been interpreted as this is a priest
bringing a child to be sacrificed,
but there isn't just
one interpretation of it.
You look at this little thing,
it looks slumped over in this
priest's or this person's arm.
It has absolutely no facial
expression whatsoever.
So another way you can interpret it is
this was a dead child, or infant,
and it was being taken to
a special burial place.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey
theorized that the Tophet
was simply the graveyard
where all the young children
of Carthage were buried.
Not an evil sanctuary for baby sacrifice.
His colleagues reacted
with shocked disbelief.
- I was confronted by
people who are really wedded
to the sacrifice.
Everything here had to be sacrificed.
- [Narrator] To find proof
that babies died from natural causes,
he made detailed
measurements of every bone.
Many seemed extremely small.
He wondered if they might
be the bones of fetuses
that had died in the womb.
Jeffrey knew for every live birth,
the moment of birth is
recorded in the teeth.
- Before you're born, enamel is laid down
in a certain wavy pattern.
And the first insult you have in your life
is when you're born.
It's a big shock, and you actually see
a break in the wavy pattern
in the microstructure of the teeth.
And that's called the neonatal line.
- [Narrator] More than half the samples
from the Tophet cemetery
lack the neonatal line.
This is definitive proof that most babies
in the Tophet were stillborn.
So they weren't roasted alive in sacrifice.
They had already died, and
were brought here for cremation.
This suggests a culture that cared deeply
for children, even the unborn.
- It gives a more realistic picture
of the Carthaginians I think.
There was something
special about this place,
and it was a place to receive the young,
no matter how they died.
- [Narrator] Jeffrey has
rejected some of the assumptions
he held when he was younger,
and as he continues to delve into the past,
to investigate the archeological record,
he takes with him the
lessons he learned in Carthage.
- I think what I've relearned
is to use your own eyes.
Not to accept received wisdom,
and to just to do as good
of science as you can,
and let the cards fall where they may.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Up next, the
secrets of the gladiator games.
(crowd cheering)
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
there is evidence that
when Rome ruled Tunisia,
North Africans enjoyed
Roman style entertainment.
The men in this mosaic are gladiators.
They were involved,
along with exotic animals,
in a violent spectacle
called the gladiator games.
(crowd cheering)
In Hollywood depictions,
the games take place in Rome's Colosseum.
Before a bloodthirsty crowd,
lions devour Christians.
Unlucky slaves do battle.
And the emperor gives
the deciding thumbs up, or thumbs down.
It appears to be all about pain, and death.
But how the gladiators
really lived and died
is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins 200
kilometers south of the museum
in the town of El Djem.
While most movies show
only Rome's Colosseum,
in reality similar amphitheaters
were built in every Roman colony.
El Djem's Colosseum is
one of the biggest anywhere.
This local guide knows why.
They decide to build this
colosseum to say to Rome
that they have a lot of money,
and they can build a colosseum
like the Colosseum of Rome.
- [Narrator] The massive architecture
extends well below the ground.
And from this hall, they go up
the lions with hand lift to arena
to start the game.
- [Narrator] Not far from the animal cages,
gladiators prepared for battle.
And today, it's where several men
are preparing for gladiator school.
They aren't actors or stuntmen.
They're historians, who strive to recreate
the authentic fighting techniques.
In Roman times, gladiators were owned
by private games promoters,
who spent great sums
on weapons and training.
They hoped to make
a profit on ticket sales.
Movies that imply that the emperor
put on the games are wrong, and so is this.
The famous thumbs down gesture?
Never happened.
The sign for death was something else.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] The Hollywood version
comes from a French
painting of the 19th Century.
It was never seen in a real colosseum,
and the gesture for
mercy was different too.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] In the movies,
the fights are no holds barred,
but Roman mosaics reveal
the presence of referees.
(speaks foreign language)
(intense music)
- [Narrator] A referee's job
was to keep opponents
from killing each other.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] Games promoters
wanted their gladiators to stay alive,
especially those who impressed the crowds.
The best gladiators were revered,
like today's sports heroes and movie stars.
And they might even
see their names in stone.
The artist who made this mosaic
portrayed specific famous gladiators,
and even captured their post-game banter.
(speaks foreign language)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] And while in the movies,
only unknown Christians face wild animals,
in reality animal fighters
were often the most
famous gladiators of all.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] The animals
did not have an easy meal.
In fact, they were almost always killed.
(crowd cheering)
The festival of violence would climax
with a battle between two stars.
Their goal was not to
kill or maim each other,
but to put on an exciting show.
So serious wounds were
rare, but they did happen.
In the movies, this is the moment
when an emperor might
allow the loser to live
to recover from his wounds.
But in reality, serious
wounds couldn't be treated,
and everyone in the colosseum knew it.
The wounded man would
gesture for a decision,
and so to end the gladiator's suffering,
the games promoter would
make the sign for death.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] As the
gladiator committed suicide,
it's likely the crowd fell silent,
but not for long,
because in the Roman Empire, the appetite
for violent entertainment was insatiable.
And so the show must go on.
(crowd cheering)
Next on Museum Secrets, a
very desirable Roman bath.
(dramatic music)
Inside the Bardo National Museum,
this gallery reveals how
the people of Carthage
and North Africa were
changed by the Roman conquest.
The mosaics are in a Roman style,
but were made by colonized North Africans.
They displayed Roman
mosaics in their homes,
and worshiped Roman gods.
But for those who aspired
to be Roman in every way,
there was a problem.
True Romans washed,
networked, and flirted at public baths.
This pleasurable tradition required
hundreds of liters of
water per person per day.
In Rome in Italy, there was plenty of water
to achieve the Roman lifestyle,
but North Africa is a dry
land for much of the year.
For the 500,000 people of Roman Carthage,
there was hardly enough water to drink,
let alone for public baths.
When Emperor Hadrian
learned of the shortage,
he demanded that Roman Carthage be supplied
with abundant water without delay.
How did his subjects tackle the problem?
That is our museum secret.
(horns honking)
The story begins in Tunis, a modern city
built on the ruins of Roman Carthage.
Its water supply is
pumped up from reservoirs,
and the nearby Miliane River watershed.
But in ancient times, these
were not viable water sources
because the Romans didn't have pumps.
The city required water
from a high elevation
so it could flow by gravity alone.
Such a source existed
at the sacred mountain
spring called Zaghouan.
Roman engineers were sent
to make this water flow to Carthage,
and today, British historian Olie Martin
has come here too, to
find out what they did.
- I mean it's amazing.
I often think of the person that was
given the job to start with, you know?
And you think where do
you start with all of this?
- [Narrator] Water can only be seen
at the bottom of a deep shaft.
But in ancient times,
water filled this pool
300 meters above Roman Carthage.
- Well assuming that for now
have found the best source,
here we now need to look across that plain
and the first thing we need to do really
is get an idea, roughly,
of which direction we need to build it.
- [Narrator] The direction is northeast,
the distance is 75 kilometers.
In Rome, engineers had constructed
long, gravity fed aqueducts.
Here, they would need
to adapt this technology
for North Africa's rough terrain.
- Of course it's highly
unlikely that your aqueduct
is gonna be able to run in a straight line.
The whole thing is gravity run,
so it must be a nice, sloping gradient
good enough to run the water,
but not too steep.
This is where you need
your expert surveyors
to walk this ground and see
where they could get this decent gradient.
Do you go around the hill?
Do you tunnel through the hill?
Do you go over the valley by bridging it?
So all of these are problems
that the Roman engineers
have got to think about.
- [Narrator] Once the
engineers made a general plan,
they needed precise curves and angles.
And so they employed a Roman innovation,
a surveyor's tool.
- So here we have a groma,
almost the symbol of a
Roman engineer really.
Now to get a straight line,
which is what this thing is used for,
you simply stand here
and you're gonna line
up those three strings.
We're gonna send an
assistant out with the pole,
however far we want him to,
move him left and right
until the pole is lined
up with the three strings,
and there we have a straight line.
Now the other thing you can use it for
is to measure 90 degrees, a right angle.
- [Narrator] This tool
allowed the engineers
to produce a blueprint of
the shortest possible route.
It snaked around mountains, over valleys,
and through hilltops for 128 kilometers.
For an aqueduct this long,
the gradient had to be just
two meters per kilometer.
To the unaided eye, the
slope appears horizontal,
and so another Roman invention was needed.
- Here we have a chorobates,
an instrument for measuring level.
It's basically a level plank.
We have four plumb lines hanging down,
and in the center we have a trough
which we are gonna fill with water.
As long as the water touches
the top of all four sides,
we know it must be level.
- [Narrator] Armed with
their level and blueprints,
the engineers announced
that building could begin.
(dramatic music)
Roman overseers enslaved
North Africans to do the job.
As a colonized people,
they had no right to refuse.
For 10 long years, they dug tunnels,
hauled stone, and erected arches
until they numbered in the thousands.
And then the engineers'
design was put to the crucial test.
From the sacred pool of Zaghouan,
water flowed briskly
down half-buried pipes,
and then more slowly
through channels, over valleys,
and through hillsides.
The precious water crept
along, kilometer after kilometer,
until it crossed above the Miliane River,
into the stone reservoirs
of Roman Carthage.
But how much water had been delivered?
Was there enough for a Roman bath?
Or only enough to drink?
The answer is hidden in plain
sight in the Bardo Museum.
In Roman mosaics, images
of fish and ocean waves
were used for the floors of Roman baths.
Their presence in Carthage
reveals that the aqueduct was a success.
- In many ways we think of the Romans
as all conquering people.
We all hear about the
Roman Army and stuff like that,
and perhaps sometimes we don't remember
that the Romans were also great engineers.
To have been able to achieve this
2,000 years ago is quite amazing.
- [Narrator] And their achievement
provided a colonized people
with even more than a pleasant bath.
It gave them the Roman lifestyle.
By the emperor's command,
those who lived as Romans
could be granted the
rights of Roman citizens,
who could not be enslaved.
In a dry land, water is valuable,
but human rights are priceless.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how to stay alive in the Sahara.
(dramatic music)
(doors creak)
The Bardo National
Museum displays treasures
of Tunisia's Islamic heritage.
There are several pages
of an ancient holy book
known as the Blue Qur'an.
They are among the most valuable
paper artifacts in the world.
And near the scripture,
there's an example of Islamic science.
This astrolabe is an Arab
take on a Greek invention.
(speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] Astrolabes
were used by Arab seafarers
to navigate the ocean,
and by those who dared
to enter the Sahara Desert.
When sighted on the noonday sun,
an astrolabe reveals a traveler's distance
from the equator, and
from your destination.
It's an important tool for navigation,
but it won't help you survive.
The Sahara is one of the most
unforgiving environments on earth.
And historians believe it's getting worse.
- The story of the Sarah
since climate change occurred
about 5,000 years ago, is
that the level of groundwater
has gradually gone down.
The Sahara has been a high powered desert
for the last 5,000 years.
- [Narrator] How to stay alive
in the Sahara is a museum secret.
Our investigation begins
with a gathering of Berber tribesmen.
Caravan leader Fausi Buali and his crew
are preparing to enter the Sahara.
It may look like they belong here,
but they are as vulnerable
in the desert as anyone.
Luckily for them, their ancestors
domesticated the camel.
In the past, Berbers braved the desert
for trade and profit.
A camel caravan from one side to the other
was a four month journey.
- There must have been
caravans of hundreds of camels,
perhaps even thousands of camels
in the peak years,
and it says a lot I think
about the consumer
demand in the Central Sahara.
They wanted Roman tableware,
that nice, red, glossy pottery
and things like textiles,
salt, the dates from the oases.
And we know that gold from West Africa
is one of the key commodities.
- [Narrator] The camel is well-suited
to these long desert caravans
because of the large amount of water
it can store in its hump.
- [Narrator] But that's
only one of its adaptations.
- The camel has this
extraordinary splay-toed foot
which is very effective in traversing sand.
It also has well-adapted
eyes and ears and lips
and whiskers that sort of keep out the dust
when it's blowing around.
It also has the ability to
vary its body temperature
in a way that other
mammals simply don't have.
Its body temperature can go
from about 89 degrees Fahrenheit
up to about 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Well that would kill you or me.
- [Narrator] Requiring
only spiny grass for fuel,
the camel provides reliable
transport between water sources
that are sometimes
hundreds of kilometers apart.
In the Sahara, if a lone
traveler loses their camel,
they can easily die.
So if a camel wanders off,
it's critical to know how to find it.
- [Narrator] But while Berbers
depend on their camels for survival,
the camels depend on the Berbers too.
- Even your wonderful camels,
they cannot endure without
finding a water source.
You've got to know where
the water sources are.
That's the crucial thing.
(camels grunting)
- [Narrator] In the desert,
survival can depend
on convincing a camel to cooperate.
This camel is ready and willing.
(camel grunts)
This one, not so much.
(speaks foreign language)
- Camels are extraordinary animals,
but they also have very nasty tempers.
- [Narrator] Experienced Berbers
do not respond with anger or abuse,
because camels, like
elephants, never forget.
(speaks foreign language)
(men snoring)
(camel bellows)
- [Narrator] Unlike the
caravans of old, Fausi's convoy
is not involved in trade.
He and his men make their living
by taking tourists on expeditions
deep into the Sahara.
The purpose is not
to get to the other side.
The desert is the destination.
- [Narrator] As it has been
for thousands of years,
understanding the interdependence of humans
and the natural world
is the secret of survival in the Sahara.
In this place where ancient enemies meet,
for every mystery we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Secrets of the Holy Spirit,
and of the bravest hearts,
hidden in plain sight inside
the Bardo National Museum.
(somber music)