英文纪录片：15分钟带你了解欧洲的起源和历史

I'm Christopher Clark, Cambridge historian. I was born in Australia, the Europeans. That's practically the other end of the world. But the European continent and its incredible diversity always fascinated me. Even in the far off country where I grew up, I was always aware that so much of our world has its roots in Europe. 


And module  Europe is one of the greatest achievements in human history. I want to share the grand Saga of this continent. And in the process I hope to are  rediscover its wonders for myself.


Where does Europe start? And where does it stop? I'm at the south western most point of the continent. From here on there`s just water. Next stop America. Louis to Camoes. The national poet of Portugal described this cape in the 16th century. And these words ,where the earth ends and the ocean begins.  In fact, most of Europe surrounded by water. Europe is a continent in name only. And in reality, it's a peninsula, and it's history is deeply shaped by this fact that history begins 135 million years ago。


Actually Europe, as we know it isn't really all that old in a geological sense. In the beginning, all the continents are one, then the world is set in motion. Land masses break off, drift apart, can reunite, creating mountains and rivers in the process bit by bit. The continent, as we know it today, begins to take shape. 


Ice masses form fields, mountains unfold. The lava flows, we can still see today, give us an inkling of earth's incredible power to create and reshape. and at some point, these elementary forces will produce a dense array of unique cultures and peoples than anywhere else on the plant.


How did it all begin? Asia? To which this rather small continent is a kind of appendix has always been the gateway to Europe. Also for the first humans to arrive here , but who were the first Europeans. And Where were they from? 


It's during an ice age that the first people leave Africa to conquer the rest of the world. A sheet of ice kilometers thick covers the continent, where today we find cities like London, Berlin and Warsaw. But homo sapiens will not be deterred. From what we know today. It seems. They travel to the continent via the Middle East,  the levant and Romania, and slowly it begins to grow warmer in Europe.  the ice age is coming to an end.




This is where the first migrants come into contact with the neanderthals and begin to mix with them. Even today, all Europeans have a bit of neanderthal in them. By 30000 years ago, the neanderthal have died out and homo sapiens, the wise human has taken over. They hunt and gather, live in groups of varying sizes, and spread out across massive swathes of territory, often in rocky areas with caves such as southern France in northern Spain. 


It's around this time that the intellectual world of the early Europeans actually begins to take shape. The depths of the caves are secret places for these early peoples. prehistoric cathedrals where they feel the presence of the supernatural world. But above all the caves offer protection and warmth, absolute necessities that allow these early Europeans just survive. 




Here we can see the first evidence of the ancient Europeans. I'm in the Chauvet  Cave in southern France and I can hardly believe that people painted something like this 30000 years ago. 


The talent and precision of these early European artists are staggering. When public person first saw the case pending of the stone humans he was shocked .we`ve learned nothing since then he said. 


The people of the Ardehe Valley in modern day France created these first European works of art nearly 40000 years ago, and they did it for eternity, probably without realizing it .how could they know that we would one day and my woolly rhinoceros, cave lions, mammoths and bison that they drew with such energy and elegance.


A quantum leap in human history. Homo sapiens became a cultural being humans reflected on their own existence, observed and record their environment, and invented a new form of communication. 


A bison with eight legs, like the time lapse image, we can't know for sure that they were probably supposed to suggest movement. A kind of stone age cinema.


These works are among the oldest expressions of human creativity anywhere on eart, a kind of cultural big bang, we have no idea what brought it about.  all human societies have produced art. And There have always been moments in which something new emerged. 


What was special about Europe was the tension between memory new, and renewal between continuity and rupture? Michelanglo  may have imitated the Greeks, but he also creating something new, something that had never been seen. 


Landscapes, objects, and people came to be seen in new ways,Art rebelled against tradition with escapin from its authority , Images and objects from Asia and Afric  without skipping from its authority enriched the visual repertoire boundaries were tested on breached Free from the obligation to depict anything. 
Real paintings took on a life of their own. And These astonishing moments of creativity would have been unthinkable without the diversity of the countries on this continent and cultural competition between. 




It would be difficult to underestimate the spiritual effect these caves had on the people of that year. We`re now fairly certain that some caves were use specifically for rituals, humans already lived in groups at this point, and they divided up the work among themselves. It's easy to imagine that during the winter when the opportunities for hunting and gathering were limited. they would hold their cultural skills. And that's how we get the lion man carved from mammoth task 35000 years ago, half man half line, perhaps even a demigod.


It began in caves, but soon spread into the world beyond the first outdoor venues of collective worship sprang up in multiple locations across Europe around 5000 years ago. The first settled peoples positioned, enormous boulders in circles, creating sites like stonehenge. They were aligned with the course of the sun and primarily served as observatories. Transporting and setting up the stones must have been an incredibly challenging task for the people of that era. They had to be highly organized and must have developed specialized skills and technologies for the job. Ancestor worship played an important role here. They want to immortalize the world forebears in stone for all eternity. 


Cults and strictly defined rituals seem to been the glue that held these early societies together. Of course We need to see this in perspective. While the Europeans were positioning borders, the Egyptians were building pyramids.


Stone monuments sprang up from Spain to Sweden and Poland to France. For the first time these megaliths market a visible commonality among the various peoples of Europe. 


But at the same time, the first cities are already appearing in modern day Iraq and Syria,  Europe is still at a developing country in the eastern Mediterranean on the other hand, things started to get interesting myths and legends are being woven .


Why is Europe called Europe? the answer lies here in Greece. A myth relates that zeus, father of the gods, fell in love with beautiful Europe daughter of the Phonetician king of Sido in today`s Lebanon. Europe immediately fell in love with the bull or rather Zeus, and climbed onto his back, together they swam to Crete. There the bull took human form and aske  the beautiful maiden to be his queen, the part of the world where she live would forever bear here name. 


it's a myth of course but like all myth, it contains a kernel of truth, because the origins of Europe really did lie outside this continent in Asia Minor, the Levant and Africa from the very beginning, Europe was a place where cultures met and mixe. And this will be one of the keys to its power and creativity. 


It all started on Crete. The islanders were gifted seafarers and traders. Crete became Europe's. First commercial power crafting an impressive trade network that stretched across the entire Mediterranean to Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Cretans grew olive and  exported  the valuable oil to places like Egypt. 


King Minos who according to Legend, was the son of Zeus and Europa commissioned the construction of a magnificent palace in Knossos, over 3000 years ago, Today is still bears witness to the golden age of both the island and Minoans, the first advanced civilization in Europe.


Europe's first kingdom emerges here. But there are many indications that the Minoans aren`t particularly interested in personally exercising power. For everything we know about this mysterious culture, it appears that leaders and heroes didn't play an especially eminent role. 


The first European laws and courts have their roots in Minoan society. Their legal codes government everything from family law to criminal law, literally letter by letter, the  Minoans were the first Europeans who could read and write. They adopted their writing system. From the Phoenicians. 


This middle Eastern alphabet is the mother of all European writing systems, the Minoans even stamped these symbols in clay on the famous Phaistos Disc nearly 3000 years before Johannes Gutenberg  invented modern printing. 


The meaning of the ancient symbols may have been forgotten over time, but the Greeks ultimately base, their own alphabet on the Minoan writing system and both are Latin alphabet and the Cyrreli Eastern European alphabet have their origins in Greek.


For centuries to come Europe`s path would be shaped by the legacy of ancient Greece.


what was so special about Greece. well partly it was the question of geography. 
The Greeks were scattered in some 1500 cities. The polis around the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The terrain of the Greek mainland crisscrossed by mountains and ravines favored small communities, but also obliged them to trade and negotiate with each other. 


Not all the cities were democracies, some were ruled by oligarchs or by tyrants, but one city established a system of government that would leave a deep imprint on world history.


Nothing compares to Athens in its golden age. Many of the traits that define modern Europe can be found here. The Greek`s world consists of numerous gods to whom they dedicate the temples they also brilliant thinkers who spend their days investigating earthly concerns. 
 
The ground Parthenon Temple on the acropolis is the most beautiful representation of what the streets and squares of ancient Athens brought forth into the world, architecture, science, philosophy, art, literature, and also political thought.


Athens isn`t ruled by a king but by the people. For the first time in the continent's history. All men share responsibility for the decisions that affect everyone. 
Women don't yet play a political rule, but it's a start. Democracy is born. 


Calm down, all opposed to the proposal raise your hands. and all in favor raise  your hand now. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the ancient Athenians. They used a voting machine known as a kleroterio to fill political offices. Men were elected by lottery, so there was no opportunity for corruption or for lobbying. 


Leonidas Linas, you are elected, but all of this didn't happen overnight. Democracy in Athens developed slowly, step by step, and it was repeated be reformed. 


The senior democracy possessed three institutions that remain crucial to the political organization of any Free society. A basic law or constitution dating back to the 5th century BC .A parliament, the Ecclesi where matters of state were discussed by the citizenry and the system of independent courts. And these perform their tasks in magnificent public buildings located at the heart of the city. 
The climate must have helped because a lot of the public life of this culture took place outdoors.