Secrets

- Season 4

(2017)

The ancient city of Petra, hidden in the barren desert of southern Jordan, has captured the global imagination. Its breath-taking ruins spread over one square mile with temples, a great theatre and hundreds of tombs half built and half sculpted straight from the desert's rocky cliffs. But Petra also holds a mystery that has long puzzled historians: What could have led such a grand and elaborate city to be abandoned?

Stonehenge is a 5,000 year-old mystery. Despite years of investigation, archaeologists can't agree about why or how this stunning and mysterious monument was built. Some argue the world famous monument, with its careful alignment to the midwinter solstice, was a giant calendar or observatory. Others insist it was cathedral to some unknown gods. One widely held theory is that Stonehenge had spiritual significance for healing sick pilgrims. But now the discovery and dating of an ancient mass-grave at the Stonehenge site is overturning all of these assumptions and ...

It was one of grizzliest finds in Roman archaeology. The decapitated remains of over 80 battle scarred skeletons, all buried in the same plot, in the same ritualistic manner nearly two thousand years ago. So who were these people? The macabre discovery took place in 2004 when archaeologists were excavating a plot of land in the Historic city of York in North East England. Within days of unearthing the first skeleton, the body count had reached double figures - and kept rising.

In 1950, three Danish farmers came across a grizzly find - a body, buried in a peat bog. It was a murder, but the police will never catch the killers. This crime took place more than 2000 years ago. The victim was named "Tollund Man", and he is a so-called "Bog Body" - a naturally mummified corpse buried in a peat bog during Europe's Iron Age. From Ireland to Russia, hundreds of Bog Bodies have been discovered in these soggy environments on the margins of civilization.

The story of how Adam and Eve came to be thrown out of their paradise is one of the most famous in the world. For many the story is considered an allegory; a moral lesson not based in fact. But for others, the possibility of God's Paradise on Earth being a real place remains, fuelled by the Bible's intriguingly specific description of its location somewhere in the modern Middle East. Now the discovery of a huge complex of ancient stone monuments in southern Turkey, between the headwaters of the Biblical river of the Tigris and Euphrates, has sparked the interest of ...

The ten plagues in the Bible's book of Exodus is one of the greatest and strangest stories ever told. A tyrannical pharaoh holds an army of Israelites captive. God orders Moses to warn that ten plagues will sweep across Egypt unless the slaves are released. But pharaoh refuses. So Moses turns the River Nile into a torrent of blood, sends frogs and flies into the Egyptians' houses, blights the livestock with disease and the people with boils; hail, fire, locusts and darkness descend upon Egypt. And still pharaoh refuses to release the captives. Until the final, ...

Inside the legendary city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq lie the remains of a vast structure, which ancient records suggest was the Tower of Babel. Is it possible that this biblical stairway to heaven actually existed? Experts think it did, and thanks to satellite technology and new discoveries, they have pinpointed exactly where the legendary tower once stood, and what it looked like. Join us as we revisit the inspiration for one of the strangest stories in the Bible, and then recreate the spectacular skyscraper in all its glory.

They're macabre curios that captured the imagination of intrepid nineteenth century explorers and collectors: decapitated human heads shrunk to a fraction their original size. Displayed in museums and locked away in private collections, there are thousands of these shrunken heads around the world.