Thursday, January 29, 2009

PBS Nova: Parthenon

Secrets Of The Parthenon


NARRATOR: It is the Golden Age of Greece, a unique window of time that gives birth to Western ideals of beauty, science, art and a radical new form of government: democracy.

To immortalize those ideals, the Greeks build what will become the very symbol of Western Civilization, the Parthenon.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT (University of Oregon): It was the physical embodiment of their values, their beliefs, of their ideology. It remains for us a powerful statement of what human beings are capable of.

NARRATOR: But today, solving the secrets of how the ancients designed and engineered the Parthenon has taken on a new urgency. For, after 2,500 years of being ravaged by man and nature, the building is in danger of collapse.

Hidden behind its columns, a rescue mission is under way. The team must take apart, repair and reassemble tens of thousands of its pieces. And although the Parthenon appears to be geometrically straight and made from interchangeable parts, subtle curves make each piece unique, varying by fractions of a millimeter.

CATHY PARASCHI (Acropolis Restoration Project): The quality of the engineering work and the precision is unmatched, even from us today.

NARRATOR: The restoration team has taken over 30 years and spent well over $100 million restoring what the ancient Athenians built in just eight or nine years.

It is clear today's technology can only take the team so far. To rescue the Parthenon, these modern architects, stonemasons and archaeologists must unlock the engineering secrets of the ancient Greeks.

Up next on NOVA, Secrets of the Parthenon.

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NARRATOR: Peering over the rooftops of modern Athens, from its throne atop the ancient Acropolis, the sacred city in the sky, the Parthenon rules in shimmering splendor.

Even in its present form, a stark marble ruin, the Parthenon is revered as an icon of Western civilization. Its shapely muscular columns, crowned with majestic capitals, are the very symbol of the classical world. Its height and width define perfect proportions. Its original sculptures have been looted and lusted after for their beauty.

And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Parthenon reigns as the most copied building in the world, from the French Parliament, to the U.S. Supreme Court, to banks, museums and countless buildings that aspire to convey wealth, culture and power.

BARBARA BARLETTA (University of Florida): The Parthenon remains an enduring symbol. It was built to glorify Athens, but it's taken on a much greater meaning. Despite the destructions of time and man, it still represents the highest level of human creativity.

NARRATOR: But as magnificent as the Parthenon is today, it is a shadow of its former self. Twenty-five-hundred years ago, the Parthenon was built as the crowning achievement of classical Greece. It towered on the Acropolis, at the center of a complex of temples and altars, vividly painted and adorned with statues of mortal and immortal greats.

The most prominent sculpture stood inside, a 40-foot-high gold and ivory statue of Athena Parthenos, the patron goddess of Athens.

But that was then. Where Athena once stood, today stands a crane. Not a trace of her statue remains. Now her holy precinct is a construction site, for much of her temple lies in tens of thousands of pieces, some scattered around the Acropolis, some around the world and some lost forever.

What does remain standing is in danger of collapse. Now, a rescue mission, the Acropolis Restoration Project, is trying to save it. The team, guided by the meticulous investigations of Manolis Korres, has set the bar high, salvaging whatever ancient marble blocks remain, in order to create the most faithful restoration. The cost to date is easily over $100 million.

CHARALAMBOS BOURAS (President, Acropolis Restoration Project): We keep as much as possible of the original material, and we do not damage the ancient material. The theory is that we preserve all the original pieces and we add only a few marble in order to fit them to the general construction.

NARRATOR: This capital, once atop a column, typifies the struggle they face. It is in six pieces, with many fragments still missing.

First, master marble masons need to puzzle together what pieces they can find, then meticulously recreate what is missing. The block itself weighs 10 tons. It will need to be hoisted to the top of a column consisting of 11 drums, of which many are also fragmented. Together, the drums and capital may have to support up to 100 tons of surviving marble beams and sculpture.

But before they can hoist the capital into place, the team must solve a more perplexing problem. On which of the Parthenon's 46 columns does the capital belong? For, although the Parthenon may appear to be one giant building kit with interchangeable parts, it's not. The building celebrated as a symbol of beauty and perfect proportions hides an ancient secret.

Cathy Paraschi and Lena Lambrinou, architects on the restoration team, investigate.

LENA LAMBRINOU (Acropolis Restoration Project): You think that all the blocks are square in this building, but in fact, if you check it with a set square, you can see that we don't have a right angle here.

NARRATOR: And when Paraschi places her book on one end of the stylobate, the Parthenon's foundation, it can't be seen from the other end.

CATHY PARASCHI: This is because there is a curve in the middle of the lines of the stylobate, about six and three-fourths centimeters high.

NARRATOR: Korres and his team have investigated every angle on the Parthenon. And although the building looks straight, they've discovered there's barely a straight line on it.

These curves are no accident. They start with the foundation, or stylobate. Each of the 46 columns has a gently curving profile and leans inward. Even the architraves, marble beams that span the columns, as well as the architectural elements above them, are curved.

This means that each of the over 70,000 pieces of the Parthenon is unique and fits in only one place. And the difficulty of fitting the pieces back together is compounded by the Parthenon's history.

Since it was built, in the fifth century B.C.E., it has been shot at, exploded, set on fire, rocked by earthquakes, converted to a church then a mosque, and in the 19th century, looted for its magnificent sculptures.

To make matters worse, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Parthenon was subjected to catastrophic restorations.

CATHY PARASCHI: More recent damage was done in the 1900s by the restoration team putting in these iron clamps. They rusted and expanded, cracking and destroying the marble.

NARRATOR: In addition, the early restorers put column drums and whole blocks back in the wrong place. Before the restoration team could even start, they had to correct these mistakes by taking apart, block by block, much of the Parthenon.

Paraschi took on the Herculean task of working out the original positions of 700 scattered blocks from the long inner walls of the temple.

CATHY PARASCHI: Although the blocks seem to be the same, each block is different. Each one has individual and perceivable information, the cuttings, the height. We're talking about differences of a tenth of a millimeter here.

NARRATOR: That's about the thickness of a hair.

The team turned to modern technology to assist them. Each stone, like everywhere on the Acropolis, was I.D.'d and entered into the computer system.

EVI PETROPOULOU (Acropolis Restoration Project): As soon as a fragment of marble is found, it takes a number and it is entered in the database. So far we have 5,500 architectural members of the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: All with detailed descriptions of height, width, slope, corrosion, cracking, stain marks, even graffiti. By mapping these variables, Paraschi and the team hoped to reconstruct the two inner walls.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS (Acropolis Restoration Project): We found about 52 criteria we could give, maximum, to one block of the wall. If you measure all the constructive elements, you have about 52 criteria. So we thought, let's try to put it on a computer program, to press the button, to see if we have a result.

NARRATOR: But the puzzle proved too complex.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS: Mathematically it was working, but we didn't have any result.

NARRATOR: In the end, to put her wall back together, Paraschi had to draw each stone onto a card, and with the help of detailed measurements, shuffle them around.

CATHY PARASCHI: So the final decision was made by eye.

NARRATOR: It took five years to identify the position of around 500 of the pieces. It's been over 30 years since the restoration began.

The Parthenon is a 20,000 ton, 70,000 piece, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. And worse, it's a puzzle that doesn't include instructions. No one has found anything resembling architectural plans.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS: Where are they written, these things? Where are they writing? We have so many papers, we have computers; we have everything. How they are doing it? How they communicate and were going so quickly, in eight years? I cannot understand. I cannot imagine.

NARRATOR: How did the ancient Athenians build the Parthenon with such precision in less than nine years? And why with these subtle curves and few right angles? How can the modern restorers faithfully repair and reassemble these pieces before air pollution and even earthquakes inflict further damage?

To save this masterpiece of Western civilization for the future, Korres and his team of architects, engineers and marble masons will have to unlock the secrets of the past.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: The Parthenon was the greatest monument in the greatest sanctuary in the greatest city of classical Greece. It was the central repository of the Athenians' lofty conception of themselves and the physical—marble—embodiment of their values, their beliefs, their myths, their ideologies. It was as much a temple to Athens and the Athenians as it is to their patron goddess, Athena Parthenos.

NARRATOR: But just 30 years before it was built, Athens lay in ruins, a victim of Emperor Xerxes, leader of Greece's traditional enemy, Persia. The Athenians rally the rest of the Greek city-states and, with a series of heroic military victories, drive out the Persian invaders.

With the foreign threat neutralized and nearly 200 cities across the Aegean paying into a mutual defense fund, Athens grows wealthy. It's now 450 B.C.E., and a former general emerges as leader, Pericles.

He spearheads an ambitious campaign to rebuild Athens and ushers in the Golden Age of Greece, a unique window of time that establishes Western ideals of beauty, science, art and a radical new form of government: "demos" meaning "people," and "cratos," "power"— people power, or democracy.

BARBARA BARLETTA: This is the area of Athens, just beyond the Acropolis, where male citizens came to vote. We think that during the fifth century, the assembly would have comprised about 30,000, perhaps up to 40,000 male citizens.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: Mid-fifth-century Athens was a golden age because of the constellation of powerful intellects who gathered there.

NARRATOR: Socrates studies philosophy here. Hippocrates, considered the founder of modern medicine according to later traditions, visited Athens. Herodotus, father of history, and Thucydides write detailed accounts of this time.

BARBARA BARLETTA: Theater, especially, flourished. This is the time of Sophocles and Euripides performing their wonderful plays to the public in these theaters, including this particular one, the theater of Dionysus, on the south slope of the Acropolis.

NARRATOR: But while all of Athens flourishes, the Acropolis still lay in ruins from the Persian invasion. Then, in 449 B.C.E., Pericles proposes to rebuild the temples destroyed by the Persians. He opens the question to debate.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: Every monument, every element of the Periclean building program had to be voted upon so that these monuments would, in fact, be monuments of the democracy and not of one man, such as Pericles himself.

NARRATOR: In a powerful statement of their self-confidence, the people of Athens vote to rebuild the Acropolis, and at its center, a building to embody their ideals, the Parthenon. The Parthenon would be the largest building in the world constructed entirely of marble; and in tracing the path of that marble, lies the first clue as to how it was built.

Before the Parthenon, marble had been imported from quarries on islands in the Aegean Sea. On one of those islands, Naxos, archaeologists discover a small temple.

CATHY PARASCHI: On the beautiful island of Naxos, we see this temple which is one of the early archaic Greek temples, made of stone.

NARRATOR: The temple of Demeter was constructed about 100 years before the Parthenon. It, too, was built with few right angles or straight lines.

CATHY PARASCHI: We can indicate already the curvature of the base of the temple, also the widening of the lower part of the columns.

NARRATOR: Why are these builders deliberately constructing their temples with curves and few right angles? Professor Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard neurobiologist, believes the ancient Greeks might have been aware of optical illusions.

MARGARET LIVINGSTONE (Harvard Medical School): The function of the visual system is not to transmit an image to the brain; there's nobody up there to look at an image. It's to transmit information about the world up to the brain.

NARRATOR: Our brain translates visual information, like converging lines to help us assess distance and relative size. But sometimes, something's lost in translation. Here the converging lines are telling us that the line on the right is taller than the line on the left. The result? An optical illusion.

MARGARET LIVINGSTONE: This is another classical illusion. If you have two straight lines, if you add converging lines, these two lines seem to bow in the middle. So if the floor of the Parthenon has converging cues as to depth and perspective, you could have an illusory sag in the floor of the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: Perhaps to compensate for the illusory sag, the builders left extra marble in the middle. The ancient Greeks realized that to construct a building that appears perfect, they would have to come up with a design that tricks the eye. What they invent is a system of optical refinements.

CATHY PARASCHI: Their concern was the visual perfection of the building.

NARRATOR: This small stone temple, on Naxos, provides evidence of the Greeks' keen observation over hundreds of years.

CATHY PARASCHI: Here we can see the first optical refinements already experimented by the people building the temple. Here lies, literally, the D.N.A. of the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: But even with the wealth of Periclean Athens, it was too expensive to bring so much marble from the islands to the mainland. Fortunately, the Athenians discover a rich source of marble, 11 miles from the Acropolis.

The Pentelicon quarry became one of the largest and deepest marble quarries in the world and is the source for the restoration today. In minutes, diamond-tipped saws cut through the same stone used by the ancients.

Nikos Toganidis, the architect in charge of day-to-day operations on the Parthenon restoration, is searching for a flawless 12-ton block.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS: Today we are going to check a marble that George found here in the quarry. It's going to be an architrave. It's the last large marble that we need for the restoration of the north side.

NARRATOR: The restoration team has waited months for just the right block to make the new architrave, the marble support beam above the columns. It costs over a million dollars and will have to support up to 20 tons.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS: Let's measure it. Let's see if we have the length of the marble that we need.

NARRATOR: It seems perfect except for a hidden vein, which could compromise its structural integrity.

NIKOS TOGANIDIS: If there is the problem, then the sound is quite different. It sounds as a bell. So we are going to buy.

Jurgo, bravo.

NARRATOR: At the time of Pericles, teams of quarrymen extracted an estimated 100,000 tons of marble from Pentelicon. The cost of extracting and transporting it, inscribed in part on this stone placard from 434 B.C.E., was over 400 silver talents, the equivalent of more than 400 of their fully-equipped warships.

BARBARA BARLETTA: Expenses for the construction of the Parthenon were recorded on stone annually. The stone was actually set up on the Acropolis. This is because Athens had a democratic system of government so that they required that the expenditure of public monies be made public.

NARRATOR: The rest of the construction budget was spent on carving that marble. In that sense, the workplace today, as in ancient times, is less a construction site and more a sculptor's studio.

MARIA IOANNIDOU (Acropolis Restoration Project): We have, in some cases, to form a new drum from one hundred different pieces. That is a very, very difficult work.

NARRATOR: Here the restorers recovered a part of an original capital, but were missing the pieces to fit around it. They had to carve them by hand from the newly quarried Pentelic marble.

They start by making a plaster cast of a missing piece. Then they use this ancient mason's device, called a pantograph, to record the three-dimensional shape of the cast, and transfer it, point by point, to the new marble.

LENA LAMBRINOU: It's a very traditional technique. Even the Romans were using the same device to copy their sculptures in antiquity.

NARRATOR: Once a new piece is completed, they can join it with an old. But will their new piece fit?

It doesn't. It's just millimeters off.

The moderns will borrow a technique used by the ancients for fitting together two new blocks. They coat the inside surface with red clay.

LENA LAMBRINOU: In the points that it doesn't fit, it leaves white marks where the clay goes to white. They have to carve it a little bit more and test it again until they have no new marks when they are closing the two pieces.

NARRATOR: The operation is repeated dozens of times until the new marble exactly matches the ancient broken surface. But even when they succeed, there's still the challenge of fitting the restored pieces precisely back into place. After months of painstaking work, drum number 14192 doesn't quite make it.

LENA LAMBRINOU: As you see here, we have a small ancient fragment. We built around it with the new addition. Now we're going to move it and take it down to the workshop.

NARRATOR: Just a few millimeters of excess new white marble has to be cut from the base, at ever so slight an angle, to match the precision of the original blocks.

LENA LAMBRINOU: These differences of one or two millimeters is just a miracle. You can't believe that you have so small differences.

NARRATOR: And here lies the Parthenon's central mystery: how did the ancients sculpt it with such precision and speed?

MANOLIS KORRES (Acropolis Restoration Project): We were examining a drum over there on which there were some lines.

NARRATOR: Etched into the marble itself, Manolis Korres finds a clue.

MANOLIS KORRES: Have you ever seen this?

WORKER: No. This is the first time.

NARRATOR: Korres made an extensive study of the relationship between toolmarks and the kind of tool and force necessary to produce them. From these marks, he reconstructed a type of chisel lost since antiquity.

MANOLIS KORRES: You see how it goes?

NARRATOR: The marks led Korres to identify a range of tools that reflect centuries of expertise in metallurgy, enabling the Greeks to produce sharper and more durable tools than we have today.

MANOLIS KORRES: The different artisans is obvious.

NARRATOR: And from minute differences in the chisel marks, Korres can even identify the distinctive workmanship of about 200 different stonemasons.

They were recruited from throughout the Greek islands and would have had many different systems of measurement. Without a common standard, coordinating this workforce would have been a logistical nightmare.

How did they do it? One answer lies on the island of Salamis, not far from Athens. Here, discovered on a church wall, was a stone carving. Today, it is in the Piraeus Museum.

Architect Mark Wilson Jones believes the enigmatic Salamis Stone, depicting an arm, hands and feet, may be a conversion table for the different measuring systems, Doric, Ionic and Common.

MARK WILSON JONES (University of Bath): This is a tracing I've done that shows the stone, and you can immediately see how the main measures work. We have this foot rule here. That's 327 millimeters, more or less, the Doric foot. And here you have a foot imprint that's roughly a 307-millimeter-long foot, which we tend to call the Common foot. And there are, in fact other feet. For example, this dimension here is one Ionic foot. So there is a, kind of, whole network of different interrelated measurements here.

NARRATOR: The Salamis Stone represents all the competing ancient Greek measurements: the Doric foot, the Ionic foot, and, for the first time, the Common foot—virtually the same measurement we use today.

Wilson Jones finds evidence of all three measuring systems in the height of the Parthenon.

MARK WILSON JONES: That distance is, at one and the same time, 45 Doric feet, that's the ruler on the relief; it's also 48 Common feet, which is the foot imprint; and it's 50 Ionic feet, all at the same time. And these are quite exact correspondences.

NARRATOR: So the Salamis Stone may have provided a simple way for ancient workers from different places to calibrate their rulers and cross-reference different units of measurement.

But the Salamis Stone may also be a clue to how the ancient Greeks were using the human body to create what we now regard as ideal proportions.

MARK WILSON JONES: What's extraordinary about this, is that at the same time as being a practical device, it's also a kind of model of theory, architectural theory, that a perfect, ideal human body, designed by nature, is a kind of paradigm for how architects should design temples.

NARRATOR: Among the first to record that Greek temples were based on the ideal human body was the Roman architect, Marcus Vitruvius. He studied the proportions of temples like the Parthenon, in the first century B.C.E., 400 years after it was built.

MANOLIS KORRES: Vitruvius's work gives us the overall frame which is necessary to understand the system of proportions of the Parthenon.

NARRATOR: According to Vitruvius, Greek architects believed in an objective basis of beauty that mirrors the proportions of an ideal human body. They observed, among many examples, that the span from finger tip to finger tip is a fixed ratio to total height, and height is a fixed ratio to the distance between the navel and the foot.

Two thousand years after the Parthenon, another artist was also searching for an objective basis of beauty.

MARK WILSON JONES: This is a very famous image. It's drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, in the Renaissance, and it's based on Vitruvius's description of the ideal the human body. And he encapsulates this idea of its theoretical importance. And what's really interesting for us is that when we superimpose the Salamis relief on this drawing, we see that there's a remarkable correspondence. There are differences, but it's the same principle. You have the same interest in the anthropomorphic principle of getting a kind of sacred fundamental justification for these measures.

NARRATOR: Da Vinci's ideal Renaissance man famously stands in a circle surrounded by a square. Da Vinci named this image "Vitruvian Man" after the Roman architect.

The ratio of the radius of the circle to a side of the square is 1 to 1.6. That ratio is sometimes attributed to the Greek mathematician, Pythagoras, who lived 100 years before the building of the Parthenon. In the Victorian age, it became known as the "golden ratio." It was a mathematical formula for beauty. For centuries many scholars believed the golden ratio gave the Parthenon its tremendous power and perfect proportions. Most notably, the ratio of height to width on its facades is a golden ratio.

Today the golden ratio's use in the Parthenon has been largely discredited, but Manolis Korres and most scholars believe another ratio does in fact appear in much of the building.

MANOLIS KORRES: The width, for instance is 30 meters and 80 centimeters; the length is 69 meters and 51 centimeters, the ratio being 4:9.

NARRATOR: The 4:9 ratio is also found between the width of the columns and the distance between their centers, and the height of the facade to its width.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: The Parthenon, like a statue, exemplifies a certain symmetria, a certain harmony of part to part and of part to the whole. There's no question that the harmony of the building, which is clearly one of its most visible characteristics is dependent upon a certain mathematical system of proportions.

MARK WILSON JONES: For the Greeks, there was nothing better than a design based on the coming together of measures, of proportions and harmonies and shapes. It's rather like an orchestrated piece of music in which the harmonies of the various instruments are, sort of, fused together in a wonderful, glorious, orchestrated symphony.

NARRATOR: With something like the Salamis Stone's use of the human body as units of measure, and the idealized human form to define perfect proportions, the Parthenon literally embodies the words of the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who lived in Athens during the construction of the Parthenon, "Man is the measure of all things."

But proportions and principles do not a perfect Parthenon make. Cathy Paraschi has been commuting to work on the Acropolis for 10 years. In all her time on the Parthenon restoration team, she's still amazed at one particular achievement of the ancients, their precision.

CATHY PARASCHI: We have a joint on the step of the Parthenon which has been so thin, it's, like, 1/20th of a millimeter, thinner than a hair. Further up, you cannot detect the joint at all. And finally, probably due to an earthquake, a crack starts from one block and continues to the other. And the two behave as one.

NARRATOR: This is the level of precision that the restorers need to match today.

Their reconstructed column drum, number 14192, was taken down because its base didn't fit. To achieve the required precision, they use metal smoothing plates, a technique based on ancient stone plates found on the Acropolis.

LENA LAMBRINOU: It's a very traditional way to level a marble surface. We are putting sand in these holes, and they just move it on the top of the stone. They can make very small differences between the surfaces.

NARRATOR: Manolis Korres believes the ancient stone sanding plates could grind to 1/20th of a millimeter. But to stack and precisely align the drums presents an additional challenge.

Again, the modern restorers uncover an ancient technique, when they separate these two column drums for the first time in 2,500 years.

CATHY PARASCHI: The ancients aligned the drums very simply but again ingeniously. They had this block of wood that they cut in half. The lower part was inserted at the center of the lower drum, flush and perfectly fitted. And the upper part is centered in the upper drum coming down. So when the upper drum is placed, it centers onto this pin. The surface was perfectly connected, and it was so airtight that when we opened the drum we found this—and it's 2,500 years old—intact.

NARRATOR: The cedar is so well preserved that restorers could still smell the wood put there by Pericles' stonemasons. Today, the modern restorers use the same method but with titanium.

But even though the restoration team has solved many details of the ancients' engineering secrets, they are still at a loss to answer the larger question. How did the Athenians build the Parthenon, with all its subtle curves, without an architectural plan?

MARK WILSON JONES: There's a simple problem. To get a plan of this size on a reasonably small dimension that you can grapple with—something like this, which would be around 1 to 50 or so—that would be nowhere near precise enough to deal with all the subtle curvature and the minute adjustments that are also essential for this kind of project.

NARRATOR: One of the subtlest of these curves can be found on the Parthenon's columns.

LENA LAMBRINOU: If we pull a string, we can see that from the middle of the column and up, we can see a curve, a very slight curve.

NARRATOR: The curve is gentle, starting a little less than halfway up and tapering again near the top. It's an optical refinement called "entasis."

CATHY PARASCHI: Entasis means tension. It gives life to the column visually. It resembles an athlete trying to lift the weight, even the deep breadth of the swelling of its chest. It is no longer dead stone. It has life in it. It has pulse.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: These deviations from the straight, from the perfectly vertical, from the perfectly horizontal are analogous to the curvatures and the swellings and the irregularities of the human body. And in that sense the Parthenon strikes me as being a sculptural as well as an architectural achievement.

NARRATOR: The entasis curve on the side of the column is so subtle and so slight, restorers can only draw it by computer. For the ancients to have drawn it at full scale, they would have had to set their compass at an impossible radius of nearly a mile. How they constructed the curved columns was one of the last great riddles left by the ancient Greek temple builders.

The answer literally "came to light" at Didyma, 200 miles from Athens, in what is, today, Turkey. Here, a team of German archaeologists was exploring the ruin of the Temple of Apollo.

Built at the time of Alexander the Great, 150 years after the Parthenon, it was the biggest Greek temple ever conceived: 120 columns, each one more than twice the height of the Parthenon's.

The German team noted an optical refinement, a curvature, on the base of the temple, similar to that of the Parthenon. They suspected there might be more.

Traversing the tunnel to the temple's sacred inner sanctum, open to the air, Lothar Haselberger waited for his eyes to adjust.

LOTHAR HASELBERGER (University of Pennsylvania): Coming out of the darkness of the tunnel, into that white marble hall, is a blinding experience. What then, to my surprise, came up, were regularly incised horizontal lines. And I found them interesting enough to at least keep them in mind in order to return at a time when everything was under better light conditions. So I was left wondering.

NARRATOR: At the mercy of the sun, Haselberger would have to wait for just the right time of day for the light to reveal more of the mysterious lines.

LOTHAR HASELBERGER: There's a golden time each day when the sunlight comes just about parallel to the surface.

NARRATOR: It was worth the wait.

LOTHAR HASELBERGER: Coming back again, under better light conditions, it was a kind of revelation, because I realized this is a full-sized vertical section of a column, the very one at the front of the temple.

NARRATOR: At just the right place in the temple of the sun god Apollo, at just the right time of day, he discovered what might be the answer to the riddle: an almost invisible, scaled-down version of the subtle entasis curve of the columns.

This template represents a squashed column. Because it is impossible to draw the curve of the column in full size, the Greeks scaled down the height of the column by a factor of 16.

Now they had a curve that could be drawn with a large compass-like instrument. But the genius behind the template is that the width was not scaled down, so each horizontal line is still the radius of a full-scale column. Now all a stonemason need do, is set his compass to any line of the template to get the diameter of any corresponding point on the column.

This simple scale drawing was a key reference for the stonemasons at Didyma, as they carved one column drum after another.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: Greek stonemasons were so experienced in creating optical refinements like entasis, that they may have been given relatively little guidance.

NARRATOR: The inscribed template survived at Didyma because the temple was destroyed by an earthquake and remained unfinished. But at the Parthenon, such lines probably disappeared when the walls were polished at the time of completion.

LOTHAR HASELBERGER: The Parthenon was finished, the marble surfaces smoothed and polished, and with it went what we assumed were the construction lines of the temple.

NARRATOR: The modern restorers believe the ancient builders must have had similar kind of template to produce the subtle curvature on, not only the columns, but most of the Parthenon's marble blocks.

MARK WILSON JONES: The key problems are these amazing refinements, the curvatures, the inclination and so on. But once you've got them established, once you know, with these blueprints, exactly where you're going, then you proceed down the length of the building and across the front by repetition. So once they get going, they can get going at considerable speed.

NARRATOR: With the discovery of the Didyma plans, the restorers have new insight into the last great secret of how the ancients built the Parthenon.

But now they face the ultimate test, as they place the drum they've so painstakingly reconstructed back on its column. With all its curves and angles, will this new column drum fit?

It does.

LENA LAMBRINOU: We're very happy.

NARRATOR: The restorers now need only apply a finish sanding to the most distinctive feature of the columns, the fluting. The crowning achievement will come with the placement of this 12-ton capital on top of the column shaft.

For Korres and the modern restorers, this finished marble is more than just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle. They feel they have successfully entered the minds of the ancient builders and discovered how Pericles and his architects were able to design and engineer the ideals of beauty and perfection into this monumental building.

Using the same marble and similar techniques and tools, the Acropolis Restoration team has reconstructed a part of the Parthenon, perhaps as perfectly as the original builders.

CATHY PARASCHI: In the next 10 years, the worksite will be empty and we will be able to admire the perfect proportions of the Parthenon again.

NARRATOR: The Parthenon was completed in 432 B.C.E. As the ultimate expression of Athenian ideals, the temple is adorned with mythological battles of victory: justice over injustice, civilization defeating barbarity, order prevailing over chaos. And, perhaps for the first time on a Greek temple, the Athenians, mere mortals, depict themselves alongside the gods.

JEFFREY M. HURWIT: And so, if the human beings, the Athenians on the Parthenon frieze, are elevated near the rank of gods, the gods are represented in a way that makes them human. And the difference between gods and mortals, between Athenians and the Olympians is not one so much of kind, as of degree. This is an extremely humanistic way of representing themselves.

NARRATOR: But the temple and society that built it would not last. Just one year later, Pericles goes to the citizens of Athens for funds to equip an army against the threat of Sparta. To pay for it, he suggests they could, if necessary, strip the gold from the great statue of Athena. Soon after, Pericles and a third of the city die from the plague. Athens is crushed by the Spartans, who turn the Parthenon into an army barracks.

For the next two millennia, the Parthenon would be abused by Romans, Barbarians, Christians, Muslims, Turks, with the final insult coming in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Europeans rediscover Classical Greece, and, out of reverence, plunder much of its remaining sculptures, the most famous of which, the Elgin Marbles, are in the British Museum to this day.

When the Acropolis Restoration Project began, over 30 years ago, Manolis Korres and his colleagues could have chosen to restore the Parthenon to its original state, adorned with sculpture and friezes painted in vivid colors. Instead, they chose to preserve what has survived these 2,500 years, a majestic ruin, a witness to what we needlessly destroyed and the beauty and perfection that we can create.

On NOVA's Secrets of the Parthenon Web site, see how the temple was used over time, and examine the question of whether an ancient ruin should be restored at all. Find it at PBS.org.

PBS Nova: The Towers Fell

Why The Towers Fell


NARRATOR: By now you've seen the images and heard the stories.

BILL FORNEY (World Trade Center Survivor): ...because I remember a coworker saying, "Don't. Don't. Don't open the door. Don't go out there. It's fire out there. You're going to, you're going to burn up."

NARRATOR: But what really caused the Twin Towers to collapse? Was their failure inevitable? Or could they have stood longer, giving occupants and emergency crews a better chance for escape?

FIREFIGHTERS: When we hit the fifth floor, that's when everything happened.

It was rattling. It was rolling. It was roaring. The floor was shaking.

I remember getting knocked down the stairwell, landing like a rag doll.

That's when the building started coming down.

NARRATOR: When a blue ribbon team of forensic engineers was asked by the government to determine exactly what triggered the Towers' collapse, NOVA was there from the beginning, following their quest for answers.

W. GENE CORLEY (Structural Engineer): What we're looking for is pieces that were in the areas where fires occurred. You can get a better idea of what the strength was before the collapse occurred.

NARRATOR: From their detailed examination of the Towers' innovative design to the search for forensic evidence in the molecules of collapsed steel, the investigation team has studied every possible scenario. Could one tower have collapsed for different reasons than the other? Was there something about the Towers—built to maximize rental space—that traded safety for economy?

CHARLES THORNTON (Structural Engineer): A lot of people are saying that the structural engineering of the World Trade Center was miraculously wonderful, that the buildings stood up in the case of two 767s flying into it. I would tend to think they were not as successful as they could have been.

NARRATOR: Was the damage from the explosions and massive fires too great for any building to sustain?

MATTHYS LEVY (Author, Why Buildings Fall Down): As the steel began to soften and melt, the interior core columns began to give. Then you had this sequential failure that took place where it all pancaked—one after the other.

NARRATOR: Why did only four people above the impact zone get out alive? Was there a problem with the emergency stairs? The escape route? And perhaps most importantly, what does this disaster tell us about the safety of all tall buildings?

JAKE PAULS (Building Safety Analyst): Public perception about evacuation of large buildings is that if they decide to evacuate that they will get out quickly. The reality is really something quite different.

NARRATOR: This unthinkable tragedy has come to define our times. The question now is, "Can we learn from it?"

LESLIE ROBERTSON (Engineer, World Trade Center): I cannot escape the people who died there. It's still, to me, up there in the air, burning. And I cannot make that go away.

Why the Towers Fell, up next on NOVA.

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And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
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NARRATOR: Even today Ground Zero has the capacity to shock, because what happened here on September 11th still seems beyond comprehension.

BRIAN CLARK (World Trade Center Survivor): He said, "You know, I think those buildings could go over." And I said, "There's no way." I said, "Those are steel structures." And I didn't finish the sentence.

NARRATOR: People come as pilgrims to the site, to honor those who were lost and to try and understand how two of the world's tallest skyscrapers could have been destroyed so quickly. A disaster on this scale raises two crucial questions: Was the collapse of the buildings inevitable? And need so many people have died?

MIKE MELDRUM (Ladder 6 Fire Crew): I still find it hard to believe that these buildings are missing. I can't explain what happened. I can't explain how we walked out of that building.

NARRATOR: One place to begin the search for answers is among piles of charred and twisted steel now lying in a scrap yard in New Jersey.

Gene Corley is leading a team from the American Society of Civil Engineers investigating the precise causes of the collapse. Corley led the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing disaster, but the magnitude and relevance of this investigation is daunting.

GENE CORLEY: I have looked at now two major terrorist attacks, and I never want to look at another one in the future. I want the findings that we have obtained from these studies to be used to develop buildings that will provide more safety for those who are in those buildings.

NARRATOR: In the months since the collapse, the team has analyzed countless fragments of steel and pored over hundreds of hours of video tape trying to determine the timetable of the collapse and exactly which parts of the buildings failed. But to really understand how these structures performed, the team had to look back at decisions made 35 years ago, when the Twin Towers were designed and built.

It all began in 1966, with a radical dream. The World Trade Center Towers were designed to be more modern, more economical and taller than any other skyscraper in the world. The lead structural engineer on the project was Leslie Robertson, then just 34 years old.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: It was really a young person's project. It took a huge amount of energy. Did a lot of things that I don't think an older engineer would have bothered to do, because he would have had confidence in the work that he'd done in the past. And I was charging down a different highway.

NARRATOR: Earlier skyscrapers, like the Empire State Building, used a dense grid of steel girders to support the height and mass of the structure, but they all had the same drawback.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: The buildings of the past had columns spaced roughly 30 feet on center in all directions. And the issue with that is it worked well but it has columns in space that you would like to rent.

NARRATOR: To increase the rentable floor space, Robertson repositioned most of the inner columns to the exterior wall. This dense steel palisade would support half the downward weight of the building. But its main task was to resist the biggest load on any skyscraper, the force of the wind.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: That whole issue of wind engineering is the most important part of the structural design of any very tall building. Just the brute strength of it is the driving force behind all structures of tall buildings.

NARRATOR: The World Trade Center's exterior skeleton was exceedingly strong, capable of resisting the lateral force of the wind and the unexpected force it would receive three decades later.

BILL FORNEY: It lurched forward, back and forth. After maybe six to 10 movements back and forth of that building it was over—and it was still standing.

NARRATOR: In Robertson's design, the downward weight of the building was also supported by large steel columns around the building's inner core, which is where he placed elevator shafts, emergency stairs and other building services. But the tall vertical columns of the inner core and outer walls were like freestanding stilts until Robertson tied them together with floor trusses.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: The World Trade Center is a very large project. In essence, it still boils down to a series of small pieces, and this is an example of a top part assembly of a typical floor truss.

NARRATOR: Long and thin, these horizontal steel assemblies were connected by bolts to the columns at each end and then welded to the exterior columns for extra support. The trusses were critical for holding the buildings together, and their performance is now at the heart of the investigation into what happened.

Robertson tried to save weight and costs wherever he could. He fireproofed all steel members, including the trusses, with the latest lightweight heat-resistant foam. And he kept the core area light by walling it off with drywall or Sheetrock(TM) rather than concrete.

JONATHAN BARNETT (Professor, Fire Protection Engineering): This is very typical. We often build buildings this way, two layers of Sheetrock on either side of a steel framework. It's just like you might build a wall, except we use special Sheetrock that's particularly fire-resistant.

NARRATOR: Although drywall is indeed effective at keeping fire at bay, it has one serious drawback that would reveal itself on September 11th. It's not very strong, especially when it's been heated.

The designers of the Trade Center tried to anticipate every possible disaster. The Towers were the first skyscrapers ever explicitly built to survive the impact of a plane.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: We had designed the project for the impact of the largest airplane of its time, the Boeing 707, that is, to take this jet airplane, run it into the building, destroy a lot of structure and still have it stand up.

NARRATOR: When the World Trade Center was opened, there was little doubt these buildings were as safe as any skyscrapers in the world. Although they were initially criticized for their sterile, industrial look, over time they worked their way into the hearts of New Yorkers and became one of the busiest spots in the city.

But their very success made them a target. In 1993, Islamic extremists attacked the buildings for the first time. The terrorists exploded a huge bomb in a parking garage beneath the Trade Center complex. The blast blew a 90-foot hole through five floors of the underground structure, killing six people and sending soot and smoke racing through the building. But the Towers stood firm.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: The bombing, I think, created a lot of confidence in everyone's mind that the Trade Center was pretty sturdy.

NARRATOR: The bombing did reveal at least one serious problem.

JAKE PAULS: Remarkably, there was no study performed of the people evacuating in 1993. The evacuation time was something in the range of one to seven hours depending on how high you were in the building and what your disabilities were.

NARRATOR: After the attack, exit stairs were much improved, but no one really knew if people could evacuate the towers in less time if they had to.

The test would come on September 11, 2001. On that day British transport consultant Paul Neal was sitting at his desk on the 63rd floor of the North Tower.

PAUL NEAL (North Tower Survivor): The day was a beautiful, clear day which I'm quite sure was significant because it meant that the hijackers of the aircraft would have perfect visual conditions, so they'd've been able to see those twin towers probably 60, 70 miles away.

NARRATOR: Down below, in the World Trade Center's underground station, the morning rush hour was underway. It's now estimated that there were just 14,000 people in the two towers at that time in the morning, far fewer than the 40,000 who would normally fill them later in the day.

DISPATCHER: Ladder 6, Ladder 6 only, Box 215, 120 Mulberry Street.

NARRATOR: A few blocks away, the Ladder 6 fire crew was going about its normal duties when one of them heard the roar of aircraft engines.

MATT KOMOROWSKI (Ladder 6 Fire Crew): We started pulling out of quarters and I distinctly remember hearing from the dispatcher, "All Lower Manhattan Units respond to the World Trade Center."

SYNC: Go. Go to the Trade Center.

NARRATOR: Inside the stricken North Tower, just ten floors beneath where the plane had hit, was commodities trader Bill Forney.

BILL FORNEY: There was a high-pitched scream. There was a tremendous change in the air pressure. The building lurched forward, back and forth. It was a scary situation. It was actually the first time that I had truly ever thought that I might die.

NARRATOR: The 767 that flew into the North Tower was larger than a 707 and moving fast. It struck the building between the 93rd and 98th floors, instantly killing scores of people in the plane and tower.

It also created a huge void across six floors on the impact wall. You can see the outline of the wing tip on the upper right. Two-thirds of the supporting columns were completely severed, but the building stood firm.

GENE CORLEY: What happened was that the loads that were being carried by those columns arched across the opening so that the columns adjacent to the hole now started picking up the loads that had been carried by those where the airplane went in.

NARRATOR: Leslie Robertson's radical design seemed to have worked, but there was more devastating damage hidden inside. Although the aluminum aircraft shattered on contact with the exterior wall, the speed and force of the fragments and the intact steel engines severely damaged the columns and stairwells in the core, and jet fuel began saturating the building.

PAUL NEAL: Almost immediately after the impact, somewhat bizarrely, I smelled an overwhelming stench of aviation fuel, Jet A1 gas, which I recognized because I'm a private pilot and I'm used to airfield environments. I recall smelling it and almost instantly dismissed it as being illogical and didn't have any place in the World Trade Center.

NARRATOR: In an instant, the fuel ignited a massive fire that quickly engulfed the damaged area, and this was something even Robertson had not considered.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: With the 707, to the best of my knowledge, the fuel load was not considered in the design. Indeed, I don't know how it could have been considered.

CHARLES THORNTON: They didn't have the mathematical models in the computers to model a fire as a result of the fuel in a 707. I was asked in 1986 what would happen if a plane flew into the Trade Center. And I said it would not knock the building down from the pure physics of the mass hitting the building. But we...none of us really focused on that kind of a fuel fire.

NARRATOR: Initial reports described the fire as "super hot" due to the thousands of gallons of jet fuel carried by the plane. But the fire experts on the study team found those reports to be wrong.

JONATHAN BARNETT: The role of the jet fuel...although it was hot, it only lasted a short period of time. It's very similar to using lighter fluid on a charcoal fire. It ignites the charcoal and then burns out. Its main role was to ignite other combustibles and really start the whole space burning at once.

NARRATOR: The fuel served to flash start the fire on several floors instantaneously. And since sprinkler piping in the core was completely destroyed, there was no water to slow down the blaze. Even worse, when the core was struck, the building's three emergency exits were also destroyed. So 950 people above the impact became trapped with no way out of the growing inferno.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: The people above...obviously they were suffering terribly, the people who elected to take their own destiny in their hands by jumping...I mean, it must have been an incredibly awful place above the impact.

NARRATOR: It now appears that people could not get past the crash area because the drywall used to protect the stairs had been blown off leaving the staircases destroyed or in flames.

One remarkable story illustrates just how weak the drywall was. The crash caused an elevator to jam between floors trapping six people in the middle of the building.

AL SMITH (Mail Services): "If we don't get out of here, are we going to suffocate in here? Will the elevator move again?" I think a lot of thoughts just raced through our mind at that particular moment.

NARRATOR: They pried the doors open and found themselves facing drywall which Jan Demczur attacked with nothing more than his window cleaning squeegee.

JAN DEMCZUR (Window Crew): Whatever you have, you have to try. And this particular time there was not brick or concrete or something, there was drywall.

AL SMITH: He takes the handle of the squeegee, takes the rubber out to make a device to work with. I focused on this guy digging into the wall like there was no tomorrow.

JAN DEMCZUR: I was chopping...I don't know...my hand was tight or something and I was...and the squeegee went straight through the hole. And I lost my squeegee.

NARRATOR: Others in the elevator took over and by kicking the drywall enlarged the hole. Al Smith, the slimmest, went through first.

AL SMITH: I went head first, then my shoulders, which was a tight squeeze. Then I hollered back into the elevator for them to push my feet.

NARRATOR: All six people got out alive by breaking through the weak drywall. For those higher up that weakness proved fatal. Some safety experts believe that stronger walls might have allowed many more people to get down the stairways.

JAKE PAULS: If the stairs had been more hardened the walls would have been less able to be breached by the collision of the aircraft. Perhaps one or two of the stairs would have survived the impact. And that would have meant people from above maybe could have passed through the impact area.

NARRATOR: For 6000 people below the impact the stairways were clear and they quickly began leaving the building. In the early stages all eyes were on the fire and the victims stuck high in the Tower.

CROWD SYNC: I saw it. I saw it.

NARRATOR: No one was thinking that there might be even worse to come, but the seeds of destruction that would eventually bring the tower down had already been sown.

These images reveal that spray-on fireproofing was completely blown off critical load-bearing steel, and several of the floor trusses were destroyed. Inside, additional trusses would have been weakened or dislodged, and fireproofing everywhere would have been obliterated.

CHARLES THORNTON: Once the plane hit and the fragments of the plane came through the building, we know it knocked out floors. We also know that it knocked spray-on fireproofing off a lot of the components. Once you lose the spray-on fireproofing you have bare steel. Once you have bare steel you don't have a fire rating anymore.

NARRATOR: Without fireproofing the steel in the core was now exposed to intense heat.

MATTHYS LEVY: So that fire caused the steel to soften up. The columns in the interior of the core began to soften, buckle, fail. And I saw that the building had really a good chance of collapsing at that point.

NARRATOR: Unaware of the danger that lay ahead, firemen began assembling to enter the crippled North Tower. Among them was the crew from Ladder 6 who faced a brutal climb of 93 floors.

MATT KOMOROWSKI: It was very slow. We took our time going up because we have heavy gear...very crowded. The civilians were coming down on our left in a single file.

JAKE PAULS: The stairs were narrow. They were crowded and they have firemen coming up. Now, every time a firefighter comes up heavily loaded with gear, the people coming down the stairs have to stop or twist to the side, so the firefighters, if anything, tended to slow down the evacuation. In perfect hindsight, firefighters should have focused on facilitating people getting out of the building at the bottom as opposed to trying to help them at the top of the building. Those people were already lost.

NARRATOR: Controlling the fire was also hopeless. It was too high up and spread over too big an area. Had firemen even reached the blaze, the equipment they carried would have made very little difference.

By now, more than 2000 people had managed to escape the burning North Tower. And many occupants had also decided to leave the undamaged South Tower, a decision that probably saved countless lives. But not everyone left the South Tower. Brian Clark, a volunteer fire marshal, stayed on the 84th floor.

BRIAN CLARK: I am strictly guessing but I would think we were perhaps down to about 25 people left on our floor. There was an announcement came over the system and said, "If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may return to your office by using the re-entry doors on the re-entry floors and the elevators to return to your office."

NARRATOR: It is not known how many, but some people turned around and went back up. Just five minutes later the terrorists struck again. A second hijacked 767 crashed into the South Tower, hitting it between floors 78 and 84. Brian Clark's office was on the 84th floor where the upper wing of the aircraft struck.

BRIAN CLARK: Our room fell apart at that moment—complete destruction. For seven to 10 seconds, there was this enormous sway in the building, and it was all one way, and I just felt in my heart that, "Oh my gosh, we're going over."

NARRATOR: The plane sliced into the South Tower at an angle to the right. Unlike in the North Tower, the core was not hit dead on. But in one crucial respect the South Tower was hit in a far more damaging way than the North. It had been struck far lower down which meant the wounded section was having to bear a far heavier load.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: And I kept saying to myself, "What's going on inside? How bad is it inside?" And there's no way to measure it.

NARRATOR: Although the path of the impact did not compromise the core as severely as in the North Tower, here the plane acted like a snowplow, pushing office contents and debris into the northeast corner and starting a raging fire at that spot.

When the plane struck, there were about 2000 people left in the South Tower, 500 above the impact line and some 1500 below.

For those above the crash site, two of the three staircases were completely destroyed. But a lucky few somehow found the one that was passable.

BRIAN CLARK: So we started down that stairway and we only went three floors, and...there was a group of seven of us, myself and six others. We met two people that had come up from the 80th floor—a heavy-set woman and, by comparison, a rather frail male. She said, "Stop, stop. You've got to go up." And she labored up to join us, moving very slowly. She was such a big woman. She said, "You've got to go, you've got to go up, you can't go down. There's too much smoke and flame below."

NARRATOR: Clark then heard cries for help coming from a damaged office nearby. It was banker Stanley Praimnath. Clarke pulled him free, and together they decided to chance the smoky stairs. But their progress was hampered by one of the things that was meant to protect them, the fire-resistant dry wall.

BRIAN CLARK: Drywall had been blown off the wall and was lying propped up against the railings here, and we had to move it, shovel it aside. You could see through the wall and the cracks and see flames just licking up, not a roaring inferno, just quiet flames licking up and smoke sort of eking through the wall.

NARRATOR: Clark and Praimnath were two of only eighteen people to escape the towers from the impact zones or above.

Less than a quarter of an hour after it had been hit, all the conditions for the collapse of the South Tower were in place. The huge weight of the top third of the building was bearing down on the weakening structure. Analysis of the steel from this part of the building reveals that the fire here reached 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that would definitely have caused the steel to buckle.

Inside, the fire was weakening the floor trusses. Some were starting to soften and sag, pulling on their bolted connections to the columns.

CHARLES THORNTON: They had two 5/8-inch bolts at one end of the truss and two 3/4-inch bolts at the other end, which is perfectly fine to take vertical load and perfectly fine to take shear loads, but once the floor elements start to sag during a fire...okay...they start exerting tension forces because it becomes a catenary, like a clothesline, and those two little bolts just couldn't handle it.

NARRATOR: The trusses were essential for holding the building together. If too many failed the building would collapse.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: I think the structures were stalwart, but they were not that stalwart. There was no fire suppression system that could even begin to deal with that event. Nothing. Nothing. So I didn't know whether they would fall or not fall.

NARRATOR: The South Tower had now been burning for 50 minutes. The North Tower for over an hour. Office workers from both buildings were reaching ground level in a steady stream.

PAUL NEAL: There was burning debris. Over this whole plaza level were, well, bodies and body parts, and I'm assuming these were the people who had been jumping.

NARRATOR: Paul Neal made it out to the street. Others were led below ground.

BILL FORNEY: They were ushering us forward, "Let's go. Let's keep moving." We walked down these escalators down to the tunnel system, the concourse underneath the World Trade Centers.

NARRATOR: Seven minutes later, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath made it out of the South Tower and were four blocks away when they both looked back.

BRIAN CLARK: And Stanley said to me, "You know, I think those buildings could go over." And I said, "There is no way." I said, "Those are steel structures. That's furniture and paper and carpeting and draperies and things like that that are burning."

NEWSCASTER: We're standing next to the World Trade Towers. The police and firemen...

BILL FORNEY: A tidal wave of destruction just flowed. I remember tightening my eyes as tight as can be and grimacing and hoping that I wasn't going to die.

GENE CORLEY: The South Tower over here and the damage to the side...

NARRATOR: As they searched the visual record for the precise moment and trigger for the South Tower collapse, engineers Gene Corley and Bill Baker found crucial evidence in video shot by a nearby firm of architects. It reveals that much of the central core remained momentarily intact when the outer walls fell.

If the core remained standing, something else must have triggered the collapse.

CORLEY AND BAKER:...starts to collapse. It spreads over to here and the top of the building now is on its way down.

NARRATOR: These pictures show that the South Tower fell away from the impact wall and toward the side where the fire had concentrated. To the team, this suggested a particular mechanism for the collapse, which the video helped confirm.

The plane slammed along the eastern wall, starting a fierce fire in the northeast corner and severely damaging many of the steel columns in this area. The heat of the fire would have softened both the floor trusses and the outer columns they were attached to. When the steel became weak, the trusses would have collapsed. And without the trusses to keep them rigidly in place, the columns would have bent outward and then failed.

CHARLES THORNTON: As you start to lose the lateral support due to the floors, the exterior just crumples like a piece of paper. Or if you took a sheet of cardboard and you put some weight on it and you take out the lateral supports it will just bow right out.

NARRATOR: This footage shows the process in action. A line of columns in the outer skeleton snaps. The top of the building then lurches outwards and falls. As it does so, it dislodges many more floor trusses. Once the trusses fail, the floors they were holding cascade down with a force too great to be withstood. The result is what's called a "progressive collapse," as each floor pancakes down onto the one below.

In all, 600 people died in the South Tower, and those numbers could have been much worse.

JAKE PAULS: Had the evacuation occurred an hour or so later when the buildings were more occupied, then the story would have been very, very different. Because then the evacuation time for those extra people would have exceeded the time during which the towers were actually standing after the impact, and so there would have been many people who would be trapped in the stairways or even on the floors at the time of the collapse.

NARRATOR: It's almost impossible to overstate the shock of that first collapse.

PAUL NEAL: So I came back out onto the surface and came out into what would be my idea of what a nuclear winter would have been like.

BRIAN CLARK: The building I had worked in for 27 years was gone. And it was just a staggering thought. I mean there was then silence. People just couldn't believe it.

NARRATOR: There was now one terrible implication. If the South Tower had fallen, the North was likely to follow. An urgent message was radioed to all firemen in the building. The Ladder 6 team had reached the 27th floor when they got the word to evacuate immediately.

MIKE MELDRUM: We heard someone yelling on the radio, "It's time to start back down now."

MATT KOMOROWSKI: We are trained to go and save people and go into dangerous situations. And then when we're told to abandon our assignment it's a very odd thing

NARRATOR: By now, most of the people who could have gotten out of the burning tower had gotten out. The men of Ladder 6 had only made it down to the fourth floor when, at 10:28, the tower came down.

MATT KOMOROWSKI: I felt an incredible rush of air at my back.

SAL D'AGOSTINO (Ladder 6 Fire Crew): I remember hearing the boom, the boom. As the floors are pancaking, I'm hearing that.

MIKE MELDRUM: It was like standing in between two heavy freight trains in a tunnel going by you.

NARRATOR: Over 1400 people died in the North Tower but somehow the Ladder 6 team survived.

MIKE MELDRUM: I said, "Captain," I said, "there is a light above us." I thought it was somebody with a flash light. And I said, "What is it?" And he said, "Mick, there is a beautiful blue sky above us." And I said, "Captain, there is a 105-story building above us." He says, "No." He says, "I think we are the top of the World Trade Center right now."

SAL D'AGOSTINO: Yeah.

NARRATOR: Nearly 3000 people perished in the attack. Four hundred seventy nine were from the emergency services. One hundred fifty seven were on board the two jets. The majority of the casualties were office workers who had been trapped in the crumbling towers.

BILL BAKER: The fire may be related to the initial impact.

NARRATOR: The team now believes the North Tower collapsed in a different manner than the South. The main clue lies in what happened to the TV antenna, which rested directly on top of the core.

GENE CORLEY: Looking at the films of the North Tower, it appears that the antenna starts down just a little bit before the exterior of the building. That suggests the core went first.

MATTHYS LEVY: It was very much like a controlled demolition when you look at it, because the building essentially fell almost vertically down, as if someone had deliberately set a blast to take place to cause the building to fall vertically downward.

NARRATOR: The reason the core failed first in the North Tower can be explained by the way it was hit. The 767 had smashed through the outer wall and impacted the inner core directly, damaging or destroying essential load-bearing columns and their fire protection.

In this scenario, the fire would have softened the already weakened core columns to the point where they could no longer carry weight from above. When these columns finally failed they immediately precipitated another progressive collapse.

Knowing how the towers collapsed does not fully explain what specific components failed. For that, the investigators needed to examine the remains of the buildings.

ENGINEER: The first numbers identify which building it's in.

NARRATOR: Most steel components had locator numbers stamped on the surface.

GENE CORLEY: This part of the column extended from Floor 39 to 41.

NARRATOR: If those numbers survive, investigators can actually pinpoint where each piece of steel came from, even in this surreal and mangled pile.

Central to the investigation is finding the floor trusses and their connections.

ENGINEER: This is the bottom piece of the truss connection.

NARRATOR: These lightweight but critical supports have been prime suspects in the collapse, and many observers have been outspoken on this issue from the beginning.

CHARLES THORNTON: Had the floor system been a more robust floor system with much stronger connections between the exterior and the inside, I think the buildings probably would have lasted longer. Would they ultimately have collapsed? Maybe not.

NARRATOR: From the evidence found at the steel yards, and from computer modeling of applied forces, the team now believes the truss connections probably did fail from the force of the impact, the heat of the fire, or both. But the study concludes that there was a more fundamental reason for the overall collapse.

GENE CORLEY: We found that the types of fireproofing that were used were damaged by the aircraft hitting them. If the fire resistance of the building was increased so that the material in there could burn out before a collapse occurred, then you could come back in quickly afterwards, stabilize the building and save it from collapse.

NARRATOR: The team concluded that the fire resistant foam was blown off with ease. If it had remained intact the steel would have kept its resistance to the damaging effects of the heat. And since the contents would have eventually burned out on their own, had the steel been better protected, the twin towers might not have fallen.

JONATHAN BARNETT: We have a long history of successful steel construction in this country and, in fact, the world. And one of the great successes is that under normal fire conditions we don't have building collapse. In fact, until 9/11, I was unaware of any protected steel structure that had collapsed anywhere in the world from just a fire.

GENE CORLEY: It was the combination of the impact load doing great damage to the building, followed by the fire, that caused collapse. We need to look for types of fireproofing that can take the impact and can stand up to the impact and stick to the steel after the impact.

NARRATOR: The report also points to failure of the drywall construction to protect the emergency exits in the core.

MATTHYS LEVY: The core in concrete might have actually stood for a much longer period of time, allowing many, many more occupants to leave the building. It would certainly have allowed the occupants on the upper floors to have a safe passage through at least one of the vertical stairwells. The core in concrete might have actually stood through the fire and survived.

NARRATOR: The official report suggests that, in the future, architects and engineers should consider hardening stairwells; toughening fire protection on all steel members, especially their points of connection; and creating back up supports in case key load-bearing systems fail.

Given the recommendations of the study team, it is hard to imagine that these are the ruins of buildings so stalwart and strong that they actually saved people's lives. Yet this is the central conclusion of the report and its most controversial finding.

CHARLES THORNTON: A lot of people are saying that the structural engineering in the World Trade Center was miraculously wonderful, that the building stood up that long in the case of two 767s flying into it. I would tend to think that they were not as successful as they could have been. I think the buildings, had they been a different floor design, probably would have lasted longer.

NARRATOR: Although the World Trade Center collapse will be studied for years to come, Gene Corley stands by his team's assessment.

GENE CORLEY: The buildings, we found, performed well. They demonstrated that they could take the hit of a large aircraft and not immediately collapse, and there was no trade off of safety for economy in construction.

NARRATOR: In the meantime, what is left is a fierce human tragedy and thousands of people trying to come to terms with it.

BRIAN CLARK: We lost 61 dear friends that we worked with and laughed with for years. I'm deeply saddened that they aren't here.

BILL FORNEY: You know, it scares me to think about going into a tall building. One of the big visions that I have is that the building is going to fall. And in the past I probably would have written that vision off, thinking that could never happen. But now I know that it can happen.

MIKE MELDRUM: I ride the ferry home at night and I still find it hard to believe that these buildings are missing. I can't explain what happened. I can't explain why anybody would go to that extent. I can't explain how we walked out of that building.

NARRATOR: But for Leslie Robertson, the man who built the World Trade Center, there is a special kind of torture: his office overlooks what was once his greatest achievement.

LESLIE ROBERTSON: Ground Zero is a very disturbing place for me. I mean I probably have more emotional attachment to it than maybe any other person now alive. And I cannot escape the people who died there. Even if I'm looking down into a pile of rubble, it's still, to me, somehow up there in the air, burning. And I cannot make that go away.

In this program, you met Brian Clark, one of only a few survivors who got out from above the impact zones. On NOVA's Website, hear the complete story of his escape, at PBS.org or America Online, Keyword PBS.

PBS Nova: Buried Secrets

The Bible's Buried Secrets



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NARRATOR: God is dead, or so it must have seemed to the ancestors of the Jews in 586 B.C. Jerusalem and the temple to their god are in flames; the nation of Israel, founded by King David, is wiped out.

WILLIAM G. DEVER (University of Arizona): It would have seemed to have been the end, but it was, rather, the beginning.

NARRATOR: For out of the crucible of destruction emerges a sacred book, the Bible, and an idea that will change the world, the belief in one God.

THOMAS CAHILL (Author, The Gifts of the Jews): This is a new idea. It was an idea that no one had ever had before.

LEE I. LEVINE (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Monotheism is well-ensconced, so something major happened which is very hard to trace.

NARRATOR: Now, a provocative new story from discoveries deep within the Earth and the Bible.

EILAT MAZAR (Shalem Center): We wanted to examine the possibility that the remains of King David's palace are here.

WILLIAM DEVER: We can actually see vivid evidence here of a destruction.

AMNON BEN-TOR (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Question number one: "Who did it?"

NARRATOR: An archaeological detective story puzzles together clues to the mystery of who wrote the Bible, when and why.

GABRIEL BARKAY (Bar-Ilan University): And it was clear that it was some kind of a tiny scroll.

RON E. TAPPY (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary): I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters.

P. KYLE MCCARTER (Johns Hopkins University): This is the ancestor of the Hebrew script.

NARRATOR: And, from out of the Earth, emerge thousands of idols that suggest God had a wife.

AMIHAI MAZAR (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): We just found this exceptional clay figurine showing a fertility goddess.

NARRATOR: Powerful evidence sheds new light on how one people, alone among ancient cultures, finally turn their back on idol worship to find their one god.

CAROL MEYERS (Duke University): This makes the god of ancient Israel the universal God of the world that resonates with people—at least in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition—to this very day.

NARRATOR: Now, science and scripture converge to create a powerful new story of an ancient people, God and the Bible.

... Up next on NOVA, The Bible's Buried Secrets.

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NARRATOR: Near the banks of the Nile, in southern Egypt, in 1896, British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, leads an excavation in Thebes, the ancient city of the dead. Here, he unearths one of the most important discoveries in biblical archaeology. From beneath the sand, appears the corner of a royal monument, carved in stone.

Dedicated in honor of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses the Great, it became known as the Merneptah Stele. Today it is in the Cairo Museum.

DONALD REDFORD (Pennsylvania State University): This stele is what the ancient Egyptians would have called a triumph stele, a victory stele, commemorating victory over foreign peoples.

NARRATOR: Most of the hieroglyphic inscription celebrates Merneptah's triumph over Libya, his enemy to the West, but almost as an afterthought, he mentions his conquest of people to the East, in just two lines.

DONALD REDFORD: The text reads, "Ashkelon has been brought captive. Gezer has been taken captive. Yanoam in the north Jordan Valley has been seized, Israel has been shorn. Its seed no longer exists."

NARRATOR: History proves the pharaoh's confident boast to be wrong. Rather than marking their annihilation, Merneptah's Stele announces the entrance onto the world stage of a people named Israel.

DONALD REDFORD: This is priceless evidence for the presence of an ethnical group called Israel in the central highlands of southern Canaan.

NARRATOR: The well-established Egyptian chronology gives the date as 1208 B.C. Merneptah's Stele is powerful evidence that a people called the Israelites are living in Canaan, in what today includes Israel and Palestine, over 3,000 years ago.

The ancient Israelites are best known through familiar stories that chronicle their history: Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Ten Commandments, David and Goliath.

It is the ancient Israelites who write the Bible. Through writing the Hebrew Bible, the beliefs of the ancient Israelites survive to become Judaism, one of the world's oldest continuously-practiced religions. And it is the Jews who give the world an astounding legacy, the belief in one God.

This belief will become the foundation of two other great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam.

Often called the Old Testament, to distinguish it from the New Testament, which describes the events of early Christianity, today the Hebrew Bible and a belief in one God are woven into the very fabric of world culture. But in ancient times, all people, from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Babylonians, worshipped many gods, usually in the form of idols. How did the Israelites, alone among ancient peoples, discover the concept of one god? How did they come up with an idea that so profoundly changed the world?

Now, archaeologists and biblical scholars are arriving at a new synthesis that promises to reveal not only fresh historical insights but a deeper meaning of what the authors of the Bible wanted to convey.

They start by digging into the Earth and the Bible.

WILLIAM DEVER: You cannot afford to ignore the biblical text, especially if you can isolate a kind of kernel of truth behind these stories and then you have the archaeological data. Now what happens when text and artifact seem to point in the same direction? Then, I think, we are on a very sound ground, historically.

NARRATOR: Scholars search for intersections between science and scripture. The earliest is the victory stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, from 1208 B.C. Both the stele and the Bible place a people called the Israelites in the hill country of Canaan, which includes modern-day Israel and Palestine. It is here, between two of history's greatest empires, that Israel's story will unfold.

PETER MACHINIST (Harvard University): The way to understand Israel's relationship to the super powers—Egypt and Mesopotamia on either side—is to understand its own sense of its fragility as a people. The primary way in which the Bible looks at the origins of Israel is as a people coming to settle in the land of Israel. It's not indigenous; it's not a native state.

NARRATOR: The Hebrew Bible is full of stories of Israel's origins. The first is Abraham, who leaves Mesopotamia with his family and journeys to the "Promised Land," Canaan.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Genesis 12:1 and 2): The Lord said to Abraham, "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation. And I will bless you. I will make your name great."

NARRATOR: According to the Bible, this promise establishes the covenant, a sacred contract between God and Abraham. To mark the covenant, Abraham and all males are circumcised; his descendents will be God's chosen people. They will be fruitful, multiply and inhabit all the land between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In return, Abraham and his people, who will become the Israelites, must worship a single god.

THOMAS CAHILL: This is a new idea. It was an idea that no one had ever had before. God, in our sense, doesn't exist before Abraham.

NARRATOR: It is hard to appreciate today how radical an idea this must have been in a world dominated by polytheism, the worship of many gods and idols.

The Abraham narrative is part of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, along with Noah and the flood, and Adam and Eve. Though they convey a powerful message, to date, there is no archaeology or text outside of the Bible to corroborate them.

DAVID ILAN (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion): The farther back you go in the biblical text, the more difficult it is to find historical material in it. The patriarchs go back to Genesis. Genesis is, for the most part, a compilation of myths, creation stories, things like that, and to find a historical core there is very difficult.

NARRATOR: This absence of historical evidence leads scholars to take a different approach to reading the biblical narrative. They look beyond our modern notion of fact or fiction, to ask why the Bible was written in the first place.

WILLIAM DEVER: There is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. The biblical writers were telling stories. They were good historians and they could tell it the way it was when they wanted to, but their objective was always something far beyond that.

NARRATOR: So what was their objective? To find out, scholars must uncover who wrote the Bible and when.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Exodus 34:27) And the Lord said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I make a covenant with you and with Israel."

NARRATOR: The traditional belief is that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, the story of creation; Exodus, deliverance from slavery to the Promised Land; Leviticus; Numbers; and Deuteronomy, laws of morality and observance.

Still read, to this day, together they form the Torah, often called the "Five Books of Moses."

MICHAEL COOGAN (Stonehill College): The view that Moses had personally written down the first five books of the Bible was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century. There were a few questions raised about this, for example, the very end of the last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, describes the death and burial of Moses. And so, some rabbis said, "Well, Moses couldn't have written those words himself, because he was dead and was being buried."

NARRATOR: And digging deeper into the text, there are even more discrepancies.

MICHAEL COOGAN: For example, how many of each species of animals is Noah supposed to bring into the ark? One text says two, a pair of every kind of animal; another text says seven pair of the clean animals and only two of the unclean animals.

NARRATOR: In one chapter, the Bible says the flood lasts for 40 days and 40 nights, but in the next it says 150 days. To see if the floodwaters have subsided, Noah sends out a dove. But in the previous sentence, he sends a raven. There are two complete versions of the flood story interwoven on the same page.

Many similar discrepancies, throughout its pages, suggest that the Bible has more than one writer. In fact, within the first five books of the Bible, scholars have identified the hand of at least four different groups of scribes, writing over several hundred years. This theory is called the Documentary Hypothesis.

MICHAEL COOGAN: One way of thinking about it is as a kind of anthology that was made, over the course of many centuries, by different people adding to it, subtracting from it and so forth.

NARRATOR: But when did the process of writing the Bible begin?

NARRATOR: Tel Zayit is a small site on the southwestern border of ancient Israel that dates back to biblical times. Since 1999, Ron Tappy has been excavating here.

It was the last day of what had been a typical dig season.

RON TAPPY: As I was taking aerial photographs from the cherry picker, a volunteer notified his square supervisor that he thought he had seen some interesting marks, scratches, possibly letters incised in a stone.

NARRATOR: Letters would be a rare find, so when he kneeled to look at the marks, Tappy got the surprise of a lifetime.

RON TAPPY: As I bent down over the stone, I immediately saw very clear, very distinct letters.

NARRATOR: Tappy excavated the rock and brought it back to his lab at the nearby kibbutz. It was only then that he realized he had more than a simple inscription.

RON TAPPY: Aleph, bet, gimmel, dalet...I realized that this inscription represented an abecedary, that is to say, not a text narrative but the letters of the Semitic alphabet written out in their correct order. Nun, pe and ayin are difficult to read but they're out here.

NARRATOR: This ancient script is an early form of the Hebrew alphabet.

KYLE MCCARTER: What was found was not a random scratching of two or three letters, it was the full alphabet. Everything about it says that this is the ancestor of the Hebrew script.

NARRATOR: The Tel Zayit abecedary is the earliest Hebrew alphabet ever discovered. It dates to about 1000 B.C., making it possible that writing the Hebrew Bible could have already started by this time. To discover the most ancient text in the Bible, scholars examine the Hebrew spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

KYLE MCCARTER: The Hebrew Bible is a collection of literature written over about a thousand years, and, as with any other language, Hebrew, naturally, changed quite a bit over those thousand years. The same would be true of English. I'm speaking English of the 21st century, and if I were living in Elizabethan times, the words I choose, the syntax I use would be quite different.

NARRATOR: Scholars examine the Bible in its original Hebrew in search of the most archaic language, and therefore the oldest passages. They find it in Exodus, the second book of the Bible.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible, "Revised Standard Version," Exodus 15:4) Pharaoh's chariots and his army He cast into the sea. His picked officers are drowned in the Red Sea.

NARRATOR: This passage, known as the "Song of the Sea," is the climactic scene of Exodus, the story of the Israelites enslavement in Egypt and how Moses leads them to freedom. In all of the Bible, no single event is mentioned more times than the Exodus.

With the development of ancient Hebrew script, the "Song of the Sea" could have been written by 1000 B.C., the time of Tappy's alphabet. But it was probably recited as a poem long before the beginning of Hebrew writing.

LAWRENCE STAGER (Harvard University): It's very likely that it was a kind of story, told in poetic form, that you might tell around the campfire. Just as our poems are easier to remember, generally, than prose accounts, so we generally think that the poetry is orally passed on from one to another, long before they commit things to writing.

NARRATOR: Because the poetry in Exodus is so ancient, is it possible the story has some historical core?

Here, in the eastern Nile Delta of Egypt, in a surreal landscape of fallen monuments and tumbled masonry, archaeologists have uncovered a lost city. Inscribed on monuments throughout the site is the name of Ramesses II, one of the most powerful Egyptian rulers. It is Ramesses who is traditionally known as the pharaoh of the Exodus.

Ancient Egyptian texts call the city Pi-Ramesse, or House of Ramesses, a name that resonates with the biblical story of Exodus.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The only specific item mentioned in the Exodus story that we can probably connect with non-biblical material is the cities that the Hebrews were ordered to build, and they are named Pithom and Ramesses.

NARRATOR: Scholars agree that the biblical city Ramesses is the ancient Egyptian city Pi-Ramesse. Its ruins are here in present-day Tanis.

MANFRED BIETAK (Austrian Academy of Sciences): Most of the Egyptologists identified Pi-Ramesse, the Ramesses town, with Tanis, because here you have an abundance of Ramesside monuments.

NARRATOR: This convergence between archaeology and the Bible provides a timeframe for the Exodus. It could not have happened before Ramesses became king, around 1275 B.C., and it could not have happened after 1208 B.C., when the stele of pharaoh Merneptah, Ramesses the Second's son, specifically locates the Israelites in Canaan.

The Bible says the Israelites leave Egypt in a mass migration, 600,000 men and their families, and then wander in the desert for 40 years. But even assuming the Bible is exaggerating, in a hundred years of searching, archaeologists have not yet found evidence of migration that can be linked to the Exodus.

WILLIAM DEVER: No excavated site gives us any information about the route of the wandering through the wilderness. And Exodus is simply not attested anywhere.

NARRATOR: Any historical or archaeological confirmation of the Exodus remains elusive. Yet scholars have discovered that all four groups of biblical writers contributed to some part of the Exodus story.

Perhaps it is for the same reason its message remains powerful to this day: its inspiring theme of freedom.

CAROL MEYERS: Freedom is a compelling notion, and that is one of the ways that we can understand the story of the Exodus: from being controlled by others to controlling oneself, the idea of a change from domination to autonomy. These are very powerful ideas that resonate in the human spirit, and the exodus gives narrative reality to those ideas.

NARRATOR: Following the Exodus, the Bible says God finally delivers the Israelites to the Promised Land, Canaan. Archaeology and sources outside the Bible reveal that Canaan consisted of well-fortified city-states, each with its own king, who in turn served Egypt and its pharaoh.

The Canaanites, a thriving Near Eastern culture for thousands of years, worshipped many gods in the form of idols.

The Bible describes how a new leader, Joshua, takes the Israelites into Canaan in a blitzkrieg military campaign.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Joshua 6:20): So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat.

NARRATOR: But what does archaeology say? In the 1930s, British archaeologist John Garstang excavated at Jericho, the first Canaanite city in Joshua's campaign. Garstang uncovered dramatic evidence of destruction and declared he had found the very walls that Joshua had brought tumbling down.

And at what the Bible describes as the greatest of all Canaanite cities, Hazor, there is more evidence of destruction.

Today, Hazor is being excavated by one of the leading Israeli archaeologists, Amnon Ben-Tor, and his protégé and co-director, Sharon Zuckerman.

AMNON BEN-TOR: I'm walking through a passage between two of the rooms of the Canaanite palace of the kings of Hazor. Signs of the destruction you can still see almost everywhere. You can see the dark stones here and, most important, you can see how they cracked into a million pieces. It takes tremendous heat to cause such damage. The fire here was, how should I say, the mother of all fires.

NARRATOR: Among the ashes, Ben-Tor discovered a desecrated statue, most likely the king or patron god of Hazor. Its head and hands are cut off, apparently by the city's conquerors.

This marked the end of Canaanite Hazor.

AMNON BEN-TOR: Question number one: Who did it? Who was around, who is a possible candidate?

So, number one: the Egyptians. They don't mention having done anything at Hazor. In any of the inscriptions at the time, we don't see Hazor.

Another Canaanite city-state could have done it, maybe. But who was strong enough to do it?

Who are we left with? The Israelites. The only ones about whom there is a tradition that they did it. So, let's say they should be considered guilty of destruction of Hazor until proven innocent.

NARRATOR: And there's another Canaanite city-state that Joshua and his army of Israelites are credited with laying waste. It's called Ai, and has been discovered in what is now the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

Here, archaeologist Hani Nur el-Din and his team are finding evidence of a rich Canaanite culture.

HANI NUR EL-DIN (Al-Quds University): The village first appears and developed into a city, and then there was a kind of fortification surrounding this settlement.

NARRATOR: These heaps of stones were once a magnificent palace and temples, which were eventually destroyed. But when archaeologists date the destruction, they discover it occurred about 2200 B.C. They date the destruction of Jericho to 1500 B.C., and Hazor's to about 1250 B.C. Clearly, these city-states were not destroyed at the same time; they range over nearly a thousand years. In fact, of the 31 sites the Bible says that Joshua conquered, few showed any signs of war.

WILLIAM DEVER: There was no evidence of armed conflict in most of these sites. At the same time, it was discovered that most of the large Canaanite towns that were supposed to have been destroyed by these Israelites were either not destroyed at all or destroyed by others.

NARRATOR: A single sweeping military invasion led by Joshua cannot account for how the Israelites arrived in Canaan. But the destruction of Hazor does coincide with the time that the Merneptah Stele locates the Israelites in Canaan.

So who destroyed Hazor?

Amnon Ben-Tor still believes it was the Israelites who destroyed the city. But his co-director, Sharon Zuckerman, has a different idea.

SHARON ZUCKERMAN (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): The final destruction itself consisted of the mutilation of statues of kings and gods. It did not consist of signs of war or of any kind of fighting. We don't see weapons in the street like we see in other sites that were destroyed by foreigners.

NARRATOR: So if there was no invasion, what happened? Excavations reveal that Hazor had a lower city of commoners, serfs and slaves, and an upper city with a king and wealthy elites.

Zuckerman finds, within the grand palaces of elite Hazor, areas of disrepair and abandonment, to archaeologists, signs of a culture in decline and rebellion from within.

SHARON ZUCKERMAN: I would not rule out the possibility of an internal revolt of Canaanites living at Hazor and revolting against the elites that ruled the city.

NARRATOR: In fact, the entire Canaanite city-state system, including Hazor and Jericho, breaks down. Archaeology and ancient texts clearly show that it is the result of a long period of decline and upheaval that sweeps through Mesopotamia, the Aegean region and the Egyptian empire around 1200 B.C.

PETER MACHINIST: And when the dust, as it were, settles, when we can begin to see what takes the place of these...of this great states system, we find a number of new peoples suddenly coming into focus in a kind of void that is created with the dissolution of the great state system.

NARRATOR: Can archaeologists find the Israelites among these new people?

NARRATOR: In the 1970s, archaeologists started wide-ranging surveys throughout the central hill country of Canaan, today, primarily, the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN (Tel Aviv University): I was teaching at that time. We used to take students and go twice a week to the highlands, and every day we used to cover between two and three square kilometers. And this accumulates, very slowly, into the coverage of the entire area.

NARRATOR: Israel Finkelstein and teams of archaeologists walked out grids over large areas, collecting every fragment of ancient pottery lying on the surface. Over seven years he covered nearly 400 square miles, sorting pottery and marking the locations of where it was found, on a map.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: In the beginning, the spots were there on the map and they meant nothing to me. But later, slowly, slowly, I started seeing sort of a phenomena and processes.

NARRATOR: By dating the pottery, Finkelstein discovered that before 1200 B.C., there were approximately 25 settlements. He estimated the total population of those settlements to be 3,- to 5,000 inhabitants. But just 200 years later, there's a very sharp increase in settlements and people.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: Then you get this boom of population growing and growing. Then we are speaking about 250 sites. And the population grows, also, 10 times, from a few thousand to 45,000 or so. Now this is very dramatic and cannot be explained as natural growth. This rate is impossible in ancient times.

NARRATOR: If not natural growth, perhaps these are the waves of dispersed people settling down following the collapse of the great state systems.

Then, more evidence of a new culture is discovered, a new type of simple dwelling, never seen before. And it's in the exact location where both the Merneptah Stele and the Bible place the Israelites.

AMNON BEN-TOR: The sites in which this type of house appears, throughout the country, this is where Israelites lived. And they are sometimes even called the Israelite house or Israelite-type house.

The people who lived in those villages seemed to be arranged, more or less, in a kind of egalitarian society because there are no major architectural installations. If you look at the finds, the finds are relatively poor. Pottery is more or less mundane—I don't want to offend the early settlers or the early Israelites—very little art.

NARRATOR: Curiously, the mundane pottery found at these new Israelite villages is very similar to the everyday pottery found at the older Canaanite cities like Hazor. In fact, the Israelite house is practically the only thing that is different. This broad similarity is leading archaeologists to a startling new conclusion about the origins of the ancient Israelites.

WILLIAM DEVER: The notion is that most of the early Israelites were originally Canaanites, displaced Canaanites.

PETER MACHINIST: The Israelites were always in the land of Israel. They were natives, but they were different kinds of groups. They were basically the have-nots.

WILLIAM DEVER: So what we're dealing with is a movement of peoples, but not an invasion of armed hordes from outside, but rather a social and economic revolution.

NARRATOR: Ancient texts describe how the Egyptian rulers and their Canaanite vassal kings burden the lower classes of Canaan with taxes and even slavery.

A radical new theory based on archaeology suggests what happens next. As that oppressive social system declines, families and tribes of serfs, slaves and common Canaanites seize the opportunity. In search of a better way of life, they abandon the old city-states, and head for the hills. Free from the oppression of their past, they eventually emerge in a new place as a new people, the Israelites.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: In the text, you have the story of the Israelites coming from outside, and then besieging the Canaanite cities, destroying them and then becoming a nation in the land of Canaan, whereas archaeology tells us something which is the opposite. According to archaeology, the rise of early Israel is an outcome of the collapse of Canaanite society, not the reason for that collapse.

NARRATOR: Archaeology reveals that the Israelites were themselves originally Canaanites. So why does the Bible consistently cast the Israelites as outsiders in Canaan: Abraham's wanderings from Mesopotamia; Moses leading slaves out of Egypt and into the Promised Land; and Joshua conquering Canaan from outside?

The answer may lie in their desire to forge a distinctly new identity.

PETER MACHINIST: Identity is created, as psychologists tell us, by talking about what you are not, by talking about another. In order to figure out who I am, I have to figure out who I am not.

NARRATOR: Conspicuously absent from Israelite villages are the grand palaces and the extravagant pottery associated with the kings and rich elites of Canaan.

AVRAHAM FAUST (Archaeologist, Bar-Ilan University): The Israelites did not like the Canaanite

system, and they defined themselves in contrast to that system. By not using decorated pottery, by not using imported pottery, they developed an ideology of simplicity which marked the difference between them and the Egyptian Canaanite system.

NARRATOR: If the Israelites wanted to distinguish themselves from their Canaanite past, what better way than to create a story about destroying them?

But the stories of Abraham, Exodus and the Conquest serve another purpose. They celebrate the power of what the Bible says is the foremost distinction between the Israelites and all other people, their God.

In later Judaism, the name of God is considered so sacred it is never to be spoken.

MICHAEL COOGAN: We don't know exactly what it means and we don't know how it was pronounced, but it seems to have been the personal name of the God of Israel, so his title, in a sense, was "God," and his name was these four letters, which in English is "YHWH," which we think were probably pronounced something like Yahweh.

NARRATOR: But Yahweh only appears in the Hebrew Bible. His name is nowhere to be found in Canaanite texts or stories. So where do the Israelites find their God?

NARRATOR: The search for the origins of Yahweh leads scholars back to ancient Egypt. Here in the royal city of Karnak, for over a thousand years, Pharaohs celebrated their power with statues, obelisks and carved murals on temple walls.

DONALD REDFORD: Here on the north wall of Karnak, we have scenes depicting the victories and battles of Seti the First, the father of Ramesses the Great.

Seti, here, commemorates one of his greatest victories over the Shasu.

NARRATOR: The Shasu were a people who lived in the deserts of southern Canaan, now Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, around the same time as the Israelites emerged.

Egyptian texts say one of the places where the Shasu lived is called "Y.H.W.," probably pronounced Yahu, likely the name of their patron god. That name Yahu is strangely similar to Yahweh, the name of the Israelite god.

In the Bible, the place where the Shasu lived is referred to as Midian. It is here, before the Exodus, the Bible tells us, Moses first encounters Yahweh, in the form of a burning bush.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Exodus 3:5 and 15): Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. God also said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, YHWH the God of your ancestors... has sent me to you: This is My name forever, and this My title for all generations."

MICHAEL COOGAN: So we have, in Egyptian sources, something that appears to be a name like Yahweh in the vicinity of Midian. Here is Moses in Midian, and there a deity appears to him and reveals his name to Moses as Yahweh.

NARRATOR: These tantalizing connections are leading biblical scholars to re-examine the Exodus story. While there is no evidence to support a mass migration, some now believe that a small group did escape from Egypt; however, they were not Israelites but, rather, Canaanite slaves. On their journey back to Canaan they pass through Midian, where they are inspired by stories of the Shasu's god, Yahu.

AVRAHAM FAUST: There was probably a group of people who fled from Egypt and had some divine experience. It was probably small, a small group demographically, but it was important at least in ideology.

NARRATOR: They find their way to the central hill country, where they encounter the tribes who had fled the Canaanite city-states. Their story of deliverance resonates in this emerging egalitarian society. The liberated slaves attribute their freedom to the god they met in Midian, who they now call Yahweh.

CAROL MEYERS: They spread the word to the highlanders, who themselves, perhaps, had escaped from the tyranny of the Canaanite city-states. They spread the idea of a god who represented freedom, freedom for people to keep the fruits of their own labor. This was a message that was so powerful that it brought people together and gave them a new kind of identity.

NARRATOR: The identity of "Israelites." They are a combination of disenfranchised Canaanites, runaway slaves from Egypt and even nomads, settling down. The Bible calls them a "mixed multitude."

WILLIAM DEVER: According to the Hebrew Bible, early Israel is a motley crew. And we know that's the case, now. But these people are bound together by a new vision, and I think the revolutionary spirit is probably there from the beginning.

NARRATOR: The chosen people may actually be people who chose to be free. Their story of escape, first told by word of mouth and poetry, helps forge a collective identity among the tribes. Later, when written down, it will become a central theme of the Bible: Exodus and divine deliverance, deliverance by a God who comes from Midian—exactly where the Bible says—adopted by the Israelites to represent their exodus from slavery to freedom.

So is this the birth of monotheism?

MICHAEL COOGAN: The common understanding of what differentiated the ancient Israelites from their neighbors was that their neighbors worshipped many different gods and goddesses, and the Israelites worshipped only the one true god. But that is not the case.

NARRATOR: This bull figurine, likely representing El, the chief god of the Canaanite deities, is one of thousands of idols discovered in Israelite sites.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The Israelites frequently worshipped other gods. Now, maybe they weren't supposed to, but they did. So at least on a practical level, many, if not most, Israelites were not monotheists.

NARRATOR: The Bible's ideal of the Israelite worship of one god will have to wait.

NARRATOR: About two centuries pass after the Merneptah Stele places the Israelites in Canaan. Families grow into tribes; their population increases. Then about 1000 B.C., one of the Bible's larger than life figures emerges to unite the 12 tribes of Israel against a powerful new enemy.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Samuel 17:49): David put his hand into the bag; he took out a stone and slung it. It struck the Philistine in the forehead; the stone sank into his forehead and he fell down on the ground.

NARRATOR: The Bible celebrates David as a shepherd boy who vanquishes the giant Goliath; a lover who lusts after forbidden fruits; and a poet who composes lyric psalms still recited today. Of all the names in the Hebrew Bible, none appears more than David.

Scriptures say David creates a kingdom that stretches from Egypt to Mesopotamia. He makes Jerusalem his royal capital. And in a new covenant, Yahweh promises that he and his descendents will rule forever. David's son Solomon builds the Temple where Yahweh, now the national God of Israel, will dwell for eternity.

The Kingdom of David and Solomon: one nation, united under one god, according to the Bible.

WILLIAM DEVER: Now, some skeptics, today, have argued that there was no such thing as a united monarchy. It's a later biblical construct and, particularly, a construct of modern scholarship. In short, there was no David. As one of the biblical revisionists have said, "David is no more historical than King Arthur."

NARRATOR: But then, in 1993, an amazing discovery literally shed new light on what the Bible calls ancient Israel's greatest king.

Gila Cook was finishing up some survey work with an assistant at Tel Dan, a biblical site in the far north of Israel, today. The excavation was headed by the eminent Israeli archaeologist, Avraham Biran. It was near the end of the day, and Cook was getting her last measurements, when she hears a yell from below.

GILA COOK (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem): And it was Biran, in his booming voice, yelling "Gila, let's go." And so I waved to him, "Hold it," and continued working.

NARRATOR: After being summoned by Biran a second time, Cook had her assistant load her up, and she started down the hill.

GILA COOK: So I get there, and I just drop my bag and drop the board, and I set my stuff down.

NARRATOR: But something catches her eye: a stone with what appeared to be random scratches, but was actually an ancient inscription. This time she yelled for Biran.

GILA COOK: And he looks at it, and he looks at me, and he says, "Oh my god!"

NARRATOR: Cook had found a fragment of a victory stele, written in Aramaic, an ancient language very similar to Hebrew. Dedicated by the king of Damascus or one of his generals, it celebrates the conquest of Israel, boasting, "I slew mighty kings who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. I killed the king of the House of David."

Those words, "the House of David," make this a critical discovery. They are strong evidence that David really lived.

Unlike Genesis, the stories of Israel's kings move the biblical narrative out of the realm of legend and into the light of history.

WILLIAM DEVER: The later we come in time, the firmer ground we stand on. We have better sources, we have more written sources, we have more contemporary eyewitness sources.

NARRATOR: When the biblical chronology of Israel's kings can be cross-referenced with historical inscriptions, like the Tel Dan Stele, they can provide scholars with fairly reliable dates. King David is the earliest biblical figure confirmed by archaeology to be historical. And most scholars agree he lived around 1000 B.C., the 10th century.

Could any of the Bible have been written during David's reign? The earliest Hebrew alphabet discovered by Ron Tappy carved on a stone at Tel Zayit provides an enticing clue.

RON TAPPY: The stone was incised with this alphabet, the stone was then used to build the wall, and the structure itself suffered massive destruction by fire sometime near the end of the 10th century B.C.E.

NARRATOR: The find is even more significant because Tel Zayit was a biblical backwater, on the fringes of David's kingdom.

KYLE MCCARTER: Surely, if there was a scribe that could write this alphabet that far away, way out in the boondocks, at the extreme western boundary of the kingdom, surely if there is a scribe that could do that out there, there were scribes, much more sophisticated scribes, back in the capital.

NARRATOR: Could these scribes have been in the court of King David and his son Solomon? Could they have been the earliest biblical writers?

In the 18th century, German scholars uncovered a clue to who wrote the Bible, hidden in two different names for God.

MICHAEL COOGAN: According to one account, Abraham knew God by his intimate, personal name, conventionally pronounced Yahweh.

NARRATOR: Passages with the name Yahweh, which in German is spelled with a J, scholars refer to as J

MICHAEL COOGAN: But according to other accounts, Abraham knew God simply by the most common Hebrew word for God, which is Elohim.

NARRATOR: So the two different writers became known as E, for Elohim, and J, for Yahweh. Most likely based on poetry and songs passed down for generations, they both write a version of Israel's distant past, the stories of Abraham in the Promised Land, Moses and the Exodus.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The earliest of these sources is the one that is known as J, which many scholars dated to the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon.

NARRATOR: And because the backdrop for J's version of events is the area around Jerusalem, it's likely he lived there, perhaps in the royal courts of David and Solomon.

NARRATOR: For over a hundred years, archaeologists have searched Jerusalem for evidence of the Kingdom of David, but excavating here is contentious because Jerusalem is sacred to today's three monotheistic religions.

JOAN R. BRANHAM (Providence College): For Christians, Jesus comes in his final week to worship at the Jerusalem temple. He's crucified, he's buried, he's resurrected in the city of Jerusalem. For Islam, it is the site where Mohammed comes in a sacred night journey; and, today, the Dome of the Rock marks that spot. In Judaism the stories of the Hebrew Bible, of Solomon, of David, of the temples of Jerusalem, all of these take place, of course, in Jerusalem. So Jerusalem is a symbol of sacred space today, important for all three traditions.

NARRATOR: Despite the difficulties, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar went digging in the most ancient part of Jerusalem, today called the City of David.

EILAT MAZAR: We started excavations here, because we wanted to check and to examine the possibility that the remains of King David's palace are here.

NARRATOR: But because this area has been fought over, destroyed and rebuilt over thousands of years, it was a long shot that any biblical remains would survive. But then...

EILAT MAZAR: Large walls started to appear, three meter wide, five meter wide. And then we saw that it goes all directions. It goes from east, 30 meters to the west, and we don't see the end of it yet.

NARRATOR: Such huge walls can only be part of a massive building, and Mazar believes her excavations, to date, represent only 20 percent of its total size.

EILAT MAZAR: Such a huge structure shows centralization and capability of construction. It can be only royal structure.

NARRATOR: This huge complex may be evidence of a kingdom, but is it David's kingdom? For these walls to be David's palace, they would have to date to his lifetime, around 1000 B.C.

The problem is stone walls can never be dated on their own. Biblical archaeologists date ruins based on the pottery they find associated with those ruins. Pottery dating is based on two ideas: pottery styles evolve uniformly over time, and the further down you dig, the further back in time you go. If pottery style A comes from the lowest stratum, then it is earlier than pottery style B that comes from the stratum above it.

By analyzing pottery from well-stratified sites, excavators are able to create what they call a relative chronology. But this chronology is floating in time, without any fixed dates. To anchor this chronology William Foxwell Albright, considered the father of biblical archaeology, used events mentioned in both the Bible and Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts to assign dates to pottery styles.

Albright's chronology, slightly modified, is what Mazar uses to date her massive building and what most archaeologists use today.

EILAT MAZAR: What we found is a typical 10th century pottery, meaning bowls with hand burnish you can see from inside, together with an import, a beautiful black-on-red juglet. What is so important is that this is a 10th century typical juglet.

NARRATOR: So has Mazar discovered the Palace of David? She adds up the evidence. The building is huge, it is located in a prominent place in the oldest part of Jerusalem, and the pottery, according to Albright's chronology, dates to the 10th century B.C., the time of David. Mazar believes she has indeed found the Palace of David.

But that evidence and, indeed, the kingdom itself rest on the dates associated with fragments of pottery, and some critics argue the system for dating that pottery relies too heavily on the Bible.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: Archaeologists in the past did not rely too heavily on the Bible, they relied only on the Bible. We have a problem in dating. How do you date in archaeology? You need an anchor from outside.

NARRATOR: Today, there is a more scientific method to anchor pottery to firm dates, radiocarbon dating. It is a specialty of Elisabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute.

ELISABETTA BOARETTO (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel): The first step is, of course, in the field, which relates this sample material like olive pits or seeds or charcoal to the archaeological context.

NARRATOR: If an olive seed is found at the same layer as a piece of pottery, the carbon in the seed can be used to date the pottery.

When the seed dies, its radioactive carbon-14 decays at a consistent rate over time. By measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12, Boaretto can determine the age of the olive seed, which, in turn, can be used to date the pottery.

Boaretto has meticulously collected and analyzed hundreds of samples from over 20 sites throughout Israel. Her carbon samples date the pottery that Albright and most archaeologists associate with the time of David and Solomon to around 75 years later.

For events so long ago, this may seem like a trivial difference, but if Boaretto is right, Mazar's Palace of David and Tappy's ancient Hebrew alphabet have to be re-dated. This places them in the time of the lesser-known kings Omri, Ahab, and his despised wife Jezebel, all worshippers of the Canaanite god Baal.

With no writing or monumental building, suddenly the Kingdom of David and Solomon is far less glorious than the Bible describes.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: So David and Solomon did not rule over a big territory. It was a small chiefdom, if you wish, with just a few settlements, very poor, the population was limited, there was no manpower for big conquest, and so on and so forth.

NARRATOR: This would make David a petty warlord ruling over a chiefdom, and his royal capital, Jerusalem, nothing more than a cow town.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: These are the results of the radiocarbon dating. He or she who decides to ignore these results, I treat them as if arguing that the world is flat, that the Earth is flat. And I cannot argue anymore.

NARRATOR: But it's not so simple. Other teams collected radiocarbon samples following the same meticulous methodology. According to their results, Mazar's palace and Tappy's alphabet can date to the 10th century, the time of David and Solomon.

How can this discrepancy be explained? The problem is that these radiocarbon dates have a margin of error of plus- or minus-30 years, about the difference between the two sides.

NARRATOR: Pottery and radiocarbon dating alone cannot determine if the Kingdom of David and Solomon was as large and prosperous as described in the Bible.

Fortunately, the Bible offers clues of other places to dig for evidence of this kingdom. The Bible credits David with conquering the kingdom, but it is Solomon, his son, who is the great builder.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Kings 9:15): This was the purpose of the forced labor which Solomon imposed. It was to build the House of YHWH ... and the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.

NARRATOR: Here in Hazor, Amnon Ben-Tor, director of excavations, believes this may be evidence of Solomon's building campaign.

Archaeologists call it a six-chambered gate, a massive entryway, fortified with towers and guard rooms. Ben-Tor's predecessor, Yigal Yadin first uncovered this structure.

AMNON BEN-TOR: It turned out to be a six-chambered gate, and Yadin immediately remembered that a very, very similar gate was excavated at Gezer, and then Chicago University excavated this gate, here at Megiddo.

NARRATOR: Stunned by the similarity of these three gates, Yadin recalled the passage in the Bible.

AMNON BEN-TOR: Here we have a wonderful connection of the biblical passage as it shows up in archaeology.

NARRATOR: Three monumental gates, all based on the same plan, would seem to be powerful evidence not only of prosperity, but also of a central authority. Throughout its history the Israelites had been divided into tribes, then into kingdoms, north and south. The locations of these strikingly similar gates in both regions suggest a single governing authority throughout the land.

But how can we be sure this is the Kingdom of David and Solomon? The answer, once again, lies in Egypt.

DONALD REDFORD: The head-smiting scene, which you see on this wall, commemorates a military campaign conducted by Pharaoh Shishak, or Sheshonk, the founder of Dynasty 22, in Egypt.

NARRATOR: The Egyptian pharaoh Shishak invades Israel, an event the Bible reports and specifically dates to five years after Solomon's death, during the reign of his son, Rehoboam.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Kings 14:25–26): In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt marched against Jerusalem and carried off the treasures of the House of YHWH and the treasures of the royal palace. He carried off everything.

DONALD REDFORD: The importance of this, in fixing one of the earliest dates, specific dates, in which Egyptian history coincides with biblical history is really startling and has to be taken note of.

NARRATOR: This stunning convergence between the Bible and Egyptian history gives a firm date for the death of Solomon. Shishak's campaign, according to the well-established Egyptian chronology, dates to 925 B.C. And the Bible says Solomon dies five years earlier, which means 930 B.C. This is further evidence that David and Solomon lived in the 10th century, but there's even more hidden in these walls.

These ovals, with their depictions of bound captives and city walls, represent places Pharaoh Shishak conquered in Israel. One of those places is Gezer, where archaeologists find the hallmark of Solomon's building program, a six-chambered gate.

Bill Dever directed the excavations in the late 1960s.

WILLIAM DEVER: We can actually see vivid evidence here of a destruction. Down below, we have the original stones, pretty much in situ, but, if you look in here, you see the stones are badly cracked. You can even see where they're burned from the heat of a huge fire that has been built here. And then, up in here, you see the fire had been so intense that the soft limestone has melted into lime, and it flows down like lava. This is vivid evidence of a destruction, and we would connect that with this well-known raid of Pharaoh Shishak.

NARRATOR: And if the gate was destroyed by Shishak, in 925 B.C., then it must have been built during the lifetime of Solomon, who died just five years earlier.

WILLIAM DEVER: Surely this kind of monumental architecture is evidence of state formation, and if it's in the 10th century, then...Solomon.

NARRATOR: Although a minority of archaeologists continue to disagree, this convergence of the Bible, Egyptian chronology and Solomon's gates is powerful evidence that a great kingdom existed at the time of David and Solomon, spanning all of Israel, north and south, with its capital in Jerusalem.

But Jerusalem is more than a political center, it is the center of worship.

SHAYE J. D. COHEN (Harvard University): The magic of Jerusalem is the magic of the Temple, one temple for the one god. The result is that Jerusalem and the Temple emerge as powerful symbols, not just of the oneness of God, but also the oneness of the Jewish people.

NARRATOR: The worship of the ancient Israelites bears little resemblance to Judaism today. It centered around the Temple, built by David's son Solomon, and seen as Yahweh's earthly dwelling. To understand how the ancient Israelites worshipped their god, scholars must discover what the Temple looked like and how it functioned. But, although archaeologists know where its remains should be, it is impossible to dig there. It lies under the third holiest site in Islam, which includes the Dome of the Rock.

Not a stone of Solomon's Temple has ever been excavated, but the Bible offers a remarkably detailed description.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," First Kings 6:2, 23 and 28): The house which King Solomon built for YHWH was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. In the inner sanctuary he made two cherubim...each 10 cubits high. He overlaid the cherubim with gold.

NARRATOR: The Bible's description suggests a floor plan for Solomon's Temple, and it is strikingly similar to temples built by neighboring peoples who worship many gods. The closest in appearance is a temple hundreds of miles to the north of Jerusalem, at Ain Dara, in modern-day Syria. They have similar dimensions and the same basic floor plan. Guarding both temples are sphinxes or "cherubim," as the Bible calls them. Unique to the temple at Ain Dara are the enormous footprints of the god who lived here. They mark his progress as he strode to his throne in the innermost sanctuary.

LAWRENCE STAGER: If we take the details that we find of Solomon's Temple in the Book of Kings and compare it with the Ain Dara temple, we can piece together a fairly good picture, I think, of what this temple might have looked like in the age of Solomon.

NARRATOR: Now it is possible to reconstruct, with some confidence, how Solomon's Temple may have looked and how the ancient Israelites worshipped their god.

JOAN BRANHAM: Out front was an enormous altar. Beyond that was a porch area that led into the inside of the Temple. There was a room, the holy place, and then beyond that the most sacred room, the holy of holies where tradition says the Ark of the Covenant held the tablets of the law. And this room was considered to be the most sacred site on Earth, because it is the room where God's presence could be found.

NARRATOR: And the ancient Israelites believed their god demanded a very specific form of worship. Evidence of this survives today, on Mount Gerizim, in Palestine. The Samaritans, who live here, claim direct descent from the ancient tribes of Israel. According to their tradition, for over 2,500 years, they have been practicing the ancient Israelite form of worship, animal sacrifice.

JOAN BRANHAM: The primary function is to make a connection between our mundane world and the divine world, and the means, for the ancient Israelites, is embodied in blood. Blood is the most sacred substance on the altar, and blood is the substance that embodies life. So it is the most precious substance in the human world.

NARRATOR: But while the priests were offering sacrifice to Yahweh in the Temple, many Israelites were not as loyal. At Tel Rehov, archaeologists are digging at an Israelite house that illuminates the religious practices of its ancient inhabitants.

AMIHAI MAZAR: Well, we just found this beautiful, exceptional clay figurine showing a goddess, a fertility goddess that was worshipped here in Israel. Here, in this case, she is shown holding a baby.

NARRATOR: Who is this fertility goddess? And what is a pagan idol doing in an Israelite home? Dramatic evidence as to her possible identity first surfaced in 1968. Bill Dever was carrying out salvage excavations in tombs in southern Israel, when a local brought him an inscription that had been robbed from one of them.

WILLIAM DEVER: When I got home and brushed it off, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Executed in clear eighth-century script, it's a tomb inscription, and it gives the name of the deceased, and it says, "Blessed may X be by Yahweh"—that's good biblical Hebrew, but it says—"by Yahweh and his Asherah." And Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite mother goddess.

NARRATOR: More inscriptions associating Yahweh and Asherah have been discovered and thousands of figurines unearthed, throughout Israel.

Many scholars believe this is the face of Asherah.

Dever concludes God had a wife. Even hundreds of years after the Israelites rise from their Canaanite pagan roots, monotheism has still not completely taken hold.

WILLIAM DEVER: This is awkward for some people, the notion that Israelite religion was not exclusively monotheistic. But we know, now, that it wasn't.

NARRATOR: The Bible admits the Israelites continue to worship Asherah and other Canaanite gods, such as Baal. In fact, the prophets, holy men speaking in the name of God, consistently rail against breaking the covenant made with Moses to worship only Yahweh.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Hosea 11:2): The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols.

MICHAEL COOGAN: The Israelites had made a contract with God. If they kept it, God would reward them. If they broke it, he would punish them. He would punish them by using foreign powers as his instruments.

NARRATOR: Events seem to fulfill the prophets' dire predictions. Soon after Solomon's death, the 10 northern tribes rebel and form the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Then a powerful new enemy storms out of Mesopotamia to create the largest empire the Near East had ever known, the Assyrians.

PETER MACHINIST: The Assyrians were the overpowering military force, and Israel and Judah, the two states that the Bible talks about as the states making up the people Israel, fell under the sway of the Assyrian juggernaut.

NARRATOR: Numerous Assyrian texts and reliefs vividly document their domination of Israel and Judah.

NARRATOR: In 722 B.C., the Assyrian army crushes the Northern Kingdom. Those who escape death or exile to Assyria, flood south into Jerusalem, where the descendents of David and Solomon continue to reign.

One of them, Josiah, according to the Bible, finally heeds what the prophets prescribe.

MICHAEL COOGAN: We are told, in the Book of Kings, that King Josiah, in the late 7th century B.C., was told that a scroll had been discovered in the Temple archives. The scroll was brought to him, and as the scroll was being read, Josiah began to weep, because he realized that it was a sacred text containing divine commands which the people had been breaking.

NARRATOR: Scholars believe that the lost scroll is part of the fifth book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, a detailed code of laws and observance. It inspires another group of scribes, in the seventh century B.C., whom scholars call the D writers.

According to the Documentary Hypothesis, after J and E, D is the third group of scribes who write part of the Hebrew Bible. D retells the Exodus story and reaffirms the covenant Moses made between God and the Israelite people.

MICHAEL COOGAN: "You should love the Lord, your God, because he has loved you. He has loved you more than any other nation." So the divine love for Israel requires a corresponding loyalty to God, an exclusive loyalty to God. And Deuteronomy, more than other parts of the Bible, is insistent that only the God of Israel is to be worshipped.

NARRATOR: To enforce the covenant, Josiah orders that idols and altars to all other deities be destroyed. The book of Deuteronomy contains the clearest prohibition of the worship of other gods, the Ten Commandments.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Deuteronomy 5:6–9): I am YHWH, your God, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

NARRATOR: The Ten Commandments appears in two books of the Bible, in Deuteronomy and in Exodus. It is not only a contract with Yahweh, it is also a code of conduct between people.

THOMAS CAHILL: The revelation of the Ten Commandments is an ethical revelation. And that's where the idea of justice comes in, because that's the most important thing about the way in which we treat one another. We will not kill him, we will not steal from him and we will not lie about him. We will abide by the commandments. The commandments, as God, himself, repeatedly says through the later prophets, are already written on the hearts of human beings.

NARRATOR: By associating the belief in one god with moral behavior, the Ten Commandments establishes a code of morality and justice for all, the ideal of Western civilization.

Despite Josiah's reforms, the ancient Israelites continue to worship other gods. Their acceptance of one god and the triumph of monotheism begins with a series of events vividly attested through archaeology, ancient texts and the Bible. It starts with the destruction of Yahweh's earthly dwelling, Jerusalem Temple. In 586 B.C., after defeating the Assyrians, a new Mesopotamian empire invades Israel: the Babylonians ransack the Temple and systematically burn the sacred city.

Before his eyes, the Babylonian victors slay the sons of Zedekiah, the last Davidic king, then blind him. The covenant—the promise made by Yahweh to his chosen people and to David that his dynasty would rule eternally in Jerusalem—is broken. After 400 years, Israel is wiped out.

ERIC M. MEYERS (Duke University): The destruction of Jerusalem created one of the most significant theological crises in the history of the Jewish people.

NARRATOR: The Babylonians round up the Israelite priests, prophets and scribes, and drag them in chains to Babylon. Babylonian records confirm the presence of Israelites, including the king, in exile.

WILLIAM DEVER: In every age of disbelief, one is inclined to think God is dead. And surely those who survived the fall of Jerusalem must have thought so. After all, how could God allow his temple, his house, the visible sign of his presence among his people to be destroyed?

NARRATOR: Without temple, king or land, how can the Israelites survive? Their journey begins with the ancient scrolls, which, some scholars speculate, were rescued from the flames of the destruction.

MICHAEL COOGAN: Among the exiles from Jerusalem to Babylon were priests from the Temple, and they seem to have brought with them their sacred documents, their sacred traditions.

NARRATOR: According to the widely accepted Documentary Hypothesis, it is here in Babylon, far from their homes in Israel, that priests and scribes will produce much of the Hebrew Bible, as it is known today. Scholars refer to these writers as P, or the priestly source.

MICHAEL COOGAN: It was P who took all of these earlier traditions, the J source, the E source, the D source and other sources, as well, and combined them into what we know as the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

NARRATOR: But more than just compiling, P edits and writes a version of Israel's distant past—including the Abraham story—that provides a way for the Israelites to remain a people and maintain their covenant with God.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Genesis 17:11): You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you.

SHAYE COHEN: When Genesis 17 attributes a covenantal value to circumcision, it's not really talking about Abraham. It is really talking about the exiles of the sixth century B.C.E., who, far from their native home, were desperately trying to find a way to reaffirm their difference. Therefore they began to look at circumcision as, not simply another practice, but rather as the marker of the covenant and they attributed this view back to Abraham.

NARRATOR: To the exiles, the Babylonians are the new Canaanites, the idol-worshipping, uncircumcised peoples, from whom they must remain apart.

But the Abraham story, with its harrowing tale of a father's willingness to sacrifice his own son, is also about the power of faith. It is no coincidence that the exiled P scribes place Abraham's origins in Ur, just down the river from Babylon. Perhaps with the same faith as Abraham had, so, too, will the exiles be returned to the Promised Land.

MICHAEL COOGAN: One of the pervasive themes in the Torah is the theme of exile and return: Abraham goes down to Egypt and comes out of Egypt; the Israelites go to Egypt and get out. For the exiles in Babylon in the sixth century B.C., that theme must have resonated very powerfully. God, who had acted on their behalf in the past, will presumably do so again.

NARRATOR: The Israelites still have a problem. How, in a foreign land without the Temple and sacrifice, can they redeem themselves in the eyes of Yahweh?

MICHAEL COOGAN: To assure that divine protection, the P tradition emphasizes observances, such as the Sabbath observance. You don't need to be in the land of Israel to keep the Sabbath.

ERIC MEYERS: And we have allusions in the biblical writings and the prophets to the fact that the exiles also learned to pray in groups, in what was to become the forerunner of the synagogue.

SHAYE COHEN: It is during this period, through the exile, that the exiles realized that, even far away from their homeland, without a temple, without the priesthood, without kings, they are still able to worship God, be loyal to God and to follow God's commandments. This is the foundation of Judaism.

NARRATOR: The experience of the exile transforms ancient Israelite cult into a modern religion. By compiling the stories of their past—originally written by the scribes J, E and D—the exodus from slavery to freedom, Moses and the Ten Commandments, Abraham's journey to the promised land, P creates what we know today as the first five books of the Bible.

Though this theory is widely accepted, physical evidence of any biblical text from the exile or earlier is hard to come by.

The most celebrated surviving biblical texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls. First discovered by accident, in 1947, the scrolls represent nearly all 39 books of the Hebrew Bible, at least in fragments. They survived because they were deposited in the perfect environment for preservation, the hot, dry desert. Archaeologists suspect there were at least hundreds more scrolls throughout Israel, but because they were written on papyrus or animal skins, they have long since decomposed.

JODI MAGNESS (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): Even though the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls date to the third and second centuries B.C., that doesn't mean that they're the first copies or examples of this work that were ever written. It means they already stand in a line of tradition that had been established by the time the scrolls were written.

NARRATOR: Still, the earliest of the Dead Sea Scrolls dates to at least 300 years after the Babylonian exile. In the absence of proof of earlier text, some scholars claim the entire Bible is pious fiction and even doubt whether Israel and the Israelites ever existed.

WILLIAM DEVER: For many of the revisionists, these extreme skeptics, there was no ancient Israel, Israel is an intellectual construct. In other words, these people were not rethinking their past, they were inventing their past. They had no past, so the Bible is a myth, a foundation myth, told to legitimate a people who had no legitimacy.

NARRATOR: The legitimacy of the Israelite past hinges on finding a piece of evidence to prove the ancient origins of the Bible.

What would be the discovery of a lifetime, starts outside the walls of Jerusalem, in an old cemetery.

GABRIEL BARKAY: We came here and excavated seven of these burial caves. The burial caves date back to the seventh century B.C., somewhere around the time of King Josiah. But the caves were found looted, so we didn't anticipate too much.

NARRATOR: Gabriel Barkay instructed a 13-year-old volunteer to clean up a tomb for photographs.

GABRIEL BARKAY: Instead of that, he was bored, he was alone, and he had a hammer, and he began banging on the floor.

NARRATOR: But the floor turned out to be a fallen ceiling, and beneath it were some artifacts that had escaped the looters.

Among the hundreds of grave goods, one artifact stood out.

GABRIEL BARKAY: It looked like a cigarette butt. It was cylindrical, about an inch in size, about half an inch in diameter, and it was very clear it is made of silver. It was some kind of a tiny scroll.

NARRATOR: A second, slightly smaller scroll was also found and both were taken to the labs at the Israel Museum. But unraveling the scrolls to see if they contain a readable inscription could risk destroying them completely.

Andy Vaughn was one of the epigraphers on the project.

ANDREW G. VAUGHN (American Schools of Oriental Research): Archaeology is basically a destructive science. In order to learn anything, you have to destroy what's there. Gabriel Barkay and his team had to make a decision: does one unroll these amulets or does one preserve them? They decided that it was worth the risk, and hindsight would tell us that they could not have been more correct.

NARRATOR: Through painstaking conservation, technicians devised a special method for unrolling the scrolls and revealing their contents.

GABRIEL BARKAY: I went over there, and I was amazed to see the whole thing full of very delicately scratched, very shallow characters.

The first word that I could decipher already, on the spot, was YHWH, which is the four-letter, unpronounceable name of God.

NARRATOR: Further investigation revealed more text and a surprisingly familiar prayer, still said in synagogues and churches to this day.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Numbers 6:24–26): May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

ANDY VAUGHN: There is no doubt at all that these two amulets contain the Priestly Benediction found in Numbers, 6. These inscriptions are thus very important because they are the earliest references we have to the written biblical narratives.

GABRIEL BARKAY: The archaeological context was very clear, because it was found together with pottery dating back to the seventh century B.C. Also, the paleography, the shape of letters, points towards somewhere in the seventh century B.C., beyond any doubt.

NARRATOR: The silver scrolls with the Priestly Benediction predate the earliest Dead Sea Scrolls by 400 years. It is an amazing find, proving that at least some verses of the Bible were written in ancient times, during the reign of King David's descendents.

By giving us text from before the Babylonian exile, the silver scrolls confirm that the Hebrew Bible is created from poetry, oral traditions and prayers that go back to the time of Josiah's D writer and likely beyond, to writers E and J.

As modern scholars suspect, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, takes its final form during the Babylonian exile. But dwarfed by the mighty temples and giant statues of Babylonian gods, the Israelites must also confront the fundamental question: why did their God, Yahweh, forsake them?

MICHAEL COOGAN: In the ancient world, if your country was destroyed by another country, it meant that their gods were more powerful than your god. And the natural thing to do is to worship the more powerful god, but the survivors continued to worship Yahweh and struggled to understand how this could have happened.

PETER MACHINIST: They resort first to a standard form of explanation, which is found elsewhere in the ancient Near East: "We must have done something wrong to incur the wrath of our God."

WILLIAM DEVER: It's out of this that comes the reflection that polytheism was our downfall; there is, after all, only one God.

NARRATOR: The Israelites abandon the folly of polytheism, monotheism triumphs, and the archaeological evidence proves it.

EPHRAIM STERN (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Before the destruction of the First Temple, wherever we dig, in whatever part of the Judean country, we find sanctuaries, and, more often, we find hundreds and thousands of figurines, even in Jerusalem itself.

NARRATOR: But after the destruction there are none.

EPHRAIM STERN: We are speaking about thousands before and nothing—completely nothing at all—after.

LEE LEVINE: Monotheism is well-ensconced, firmly ensconced, so something major happened which is very hard to trace. But that was a searing experience, that time in the exile.

NARRATOR: Through the experience of the exile and writing the Bible, the concept of God, as it is known today, is born.

KYLE MCCARTER: In a way, P created something that was much greater, because it was greater than any individual land or kingdom. It was a kind of universal religion based on a creator god, not just a god of a single nation, but the God of the world, the God of the universe.

CAROL MEYERS: This moves Yahweh into the realm of being a universal deity who has the power to affect what happens in the whole universe. This makes the god of ancient Israel the universal God of the world that resonates with people—at least in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition—to this very day.

NARRATOR: In 539 B.C., the Babylonian empire is toppled by the Persians. As written in the Bible, Yahweh, in his new role as the one invisible God, orchestrates a new exodus. Among one group of returning exiles is the prophet Ezra. Back in Jerusalem, he gives a public reading of the newly written Torah to reestablish the covenant.

VOICEOVER (Reading from the Bible "Revised Standard Version," Nehemiah 8:1–3): All the people gathered together...They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel...He read from it...from early morning until midday...and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

ERIC MEYERS: To me, it's one of the most moving moments in the whole Bible. Ezra returns with the Bible in his hand, so we have the feeling that the process begun in the exile is finally finished, and Ezra has a copy.

NARRATOR: The scrolls that chronicle the Israelites' relationship with their god is now the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, a sacred text for over three billion people. Through its writing, an ancient cult becomes a modern religion, and the Israelite deity, Yahweh, transforms into the God of the three great monotheistic religions.

Through its teachings, the Bible established a code of morality and justice, aspirations that resonate through the ages. More than fact or fiction, at the intersection of science and scriptures, is a story that began over 3,000 years ago and continues to this day.

On NOVA's Bible's Buried Secrets Web site, share your thoughts on the program, ask questions of biblical scholars, explore a timeline of archeology and more. Find it on PBS.org.
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