And they put it into this tank here. Now this tank has already got water in it. So as they pour the olive oil in, it flows to the surface, all of the impurities go down to the bottom. And see this little trench here? A vital piece of gourmet equipmen...
Just like the people of modern Istanbul, the Byzantines loved fresh bread and fresh vegetables. While the bread，at least the grain for it, they brought from their province of Egypt, the vegetables they grew themselves, in little plots beside their...
This was once a marble square on a highway at the middle of Constantinople. I didnt suppose the Turks on modern Istanbul think much about ancient Byzantine victories. Yet, therere still some fragments here of that great memorial column that made it a...
Southwest of Istanbul, three days sailing on an ancient slave ship, is the Isle of Marmara, its very name in stone. In the first centuries of Byzantium, slaves in their tens of thousands worked in these marble hills. How the Byzantines love marble! I...
Once though, Constantinople held the palace of all palaces, the palace of the Christian empire. Church, hippodrome and palace, Constantine had made a sacred engine that would power Byzantium for ever. To protect the holy city of Constantinople, the e...
Its only a little building, but it was actually the heart of ancient Palmyra. Its the senate, the Oval Office where government was conducted, where the town elders met, where plots were hatched, all that sort of thing. Of course, in Constantine's gre...
This was the extent of Constantines ambition, the late Roman Empire, with Constantinople, not Rome, as its capital, and in the far north, in Germany, the city of Trier, a great imperial garrison. It still shows something of what ancient Constantinopl...
A lonely ancient relic in a modern city. In the year of our Lord 330, on a lovely May morning, A great procession came down this road whichs the highway of an ancient city called Byzantium, and the procession was led by the great Roman Emperor Consta...
Istanbul, one of the very greatest of Islamic cities, the monuments of the conquering Turkish Sultans whod ruled here since 1453, dominating its skyline. Underneath there are much older ghosts, brushed each day by people of the living city, the ruins...
The eye of all the world， the ancients called it, the heart of a lost empire that had lasted for a thousand years and more. Saint Sophia, the church of the divine wisdom, this was their crowning glory---the glory of Byzantium. The vanished empire o...
This is not something that is fly-by-night. This is something big and important. Islam has come to stay. In just a hundred years, Muhammads vision had transformed the spiritual and political map of the world. And his followers had established an empi...
With Byzantine artisans, they had decorated it with golden mosaics of an Islamic paradise. The Great Mosque of Damascus would become a model for new mosques to come all across the empire. The Arabs transformed their conquered lands, maintaining, impr...
By now, the empire was larger than Rome. It stretched from Morocco in the west to the Indus River in the east where the border of India is today. How had it happened that so small an army could conquer an area so large, so fast, so easily? Islams suc...
But it was not the pagan people Muhammad had come to destroy. It was their Gods. He raised his staff and the tribal Gods of his ancestors smashed into dust. When Muhammad entered Mecca and entered the shrine and destroyed the idols of the shrine, thi...
For three years, the Muslim army held out against staggering odds. As word of the fighting spread, other Bedouin tribes saw God's hand in Muhammad's victories. One by one the peoples of the desert began to join in his struggle. The Muslim army grew a...
