What the Ancients Did for us -- The Indians

India is an awe-inspiring country with a rich and mysterious past that's full of surprises. While we British were still in the Stone Age, the Indians had developed one of the most advanced civilisations in the ancient world. Over thousands of years, they've come up with some amazing ideas. With the help of designer Marty Jobson, here at my base in Britain, I'll be recreating some of their remarkable inventions.

Let me show you how they worked. I'll find out how the first plastic surgery was performed back around 400 BC and try out one of the world's most terrifying weapons, the rocket. And Jamie Darling, roving reporter, is off to where it all happened. What a way to travel this country.

It's full of it. He'll be travelling the length and breadth of India to investigate the origins and history of its inventive past. The culture of India has always been closely linked to religion. Several world faiths began here, such as Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism.

And over the millennia, they have all left their imprint on Indian thought. Buddhism began back in the 6th century BC. Religious practices and beliefs often led to particular discoveries or inventions, and Buddhism resulted in a rather intriguing idea. Devout Buddhists needed to meditate and to observe their religious rituals at particular times of the day.

But they had no reliable way of telling the time. How do you tell the time? Well, you can always stick a stick in the ground and look at the shadow or, in other words, have a sundial like this one and it says 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, 10... Hang on a sec, I think my sundial's a bit fast.

In fact, it's just the director of photography pushing a light around. The point is that sundials are brilliant on bright sunny days, but completely useless when it's cloudy like this. And in fact, they're not much use at night either. So, what those Indians decided to do was to try and make a different sort of clock, a water clock.

And Jamie's gone to see if he can find one of the few remaining working models. Is this the right carriage? Why, I'm up at five o'clock in the morning and I'm on a train to Jallawar. is because one of the last water clocks still in use is apparently to be found there. The only problem is, no outsider has seen it since 1994.

So I've learned a new phrase, which is, where is the Gattaca Yatra? Or, where is the water clock? I've made it to Jallawar, but now we have come six miles south to a place that is known as the City of Temples, or the City of Bells. And I suspect that the Indian water clock may be in a temple.

But just where? That way. I'm after an Indian water clock. Gatika Yantra.

The water clock seemed remarkably difficult to find. Perhaps it had sprung a leak. Eventually, one man sounded as if he might be able to help. Just go for it.

You know where the Gatika Yantra is? Yeah, I know. You do? Yeah, I do.

Would you take me to it? Yeah, why not? Yeah. He took me to the local Jain temple.

Like the Buddhists, Jains had used water clocks for hundreds of years to keep time for their religious rituals. And this is the temple? This is the temple. Right.

We're going to die? OK. And I have trousers on. Is there anything else I need to do?

So my journey was nearing its end. Was I about to come face-to-face with one of the last remaining water clocks? You can see the globe there. Fantastic.

It's perfect. This is exactly what I was after. Thank you very much. Simpler than I imagined, the clock seemed to consist of a copper cup in a large bowl, and every time the cup sank, a gong was sounded.

I've got my own water clock. It's a Gatiha Yantra, a brilliantly designed piece of engineering by Marty. Look, it's a coconut shell, half coconut shell, with a hole in the bottom. Isn't that fantastic?

Thank you, Marty. I'm really impressed. And the way this works is I put it in a tank of water like that, and the water comes in the bottom, and it slowly fills up. And the critical thing is when it gets to the bottom, when it sinks and hits the bottom, and that's a fixed time, probably something like half an hour.

And now it's about to go, get your gong ready, Marty. Water's trickling over the back, it's sinking, go! And move a bead along, and the moment it hit the bottom, they rang the gong, moved along one bead, and started the whole process again, all the way round the clock. Well, actually, this was the clock.

Now, there's a rather sad story about a princess called Lilavati in the 12th century. The astrologer said she would never marry. But her dad worked out there was one propitious moment when she could marry. And he built her a special water clock so that at the moment it hit the bottom of the tank, she could get married.

Understandably, she was a bit nervous about all this. And she went and peered into the tank and a pearl from her dress dropped into the coconut shell and blocked up the hole. and it never got to the bottom and she was never able to marry. Centuries after the water clock, the Indian enthusiasm for measuring the passing of time led to one of the most extraordinary monuments ever constructed, which includes several sundials. This is the huge Jantamanta Observatory at Jaipur.

It was built by the Maharaja Suwai Jai Singh II in the 18th century. He wanted to improve the accuracy of the Indian calendar. To do this, he needed to be able to measure the sun's location as precisely as possible. So he built this impressive observatory.

And it has a number of different instruments. Labu Sumrat Yantra, small sundial. Rama Yantra, which measures distance above the horizon. Rashi Valley Yantra, which measures positions in the zodiac, is the only one in the world, and which one's mine?

Perhaps most impressive of all is the big sundial, the Sumrat Yantra, which is one of the largest in the world. And when the sun shines, which is quite a lot around here, it's surprisingly accurate. Professor Kim Plofker is one of its great admirers. Kim, this is the Sumrat Yantra.

That's right. And how does it work? It's basically a big equatorial sundial. A sundial of that sort is essentially a sort of skeleton model of the Earth.

There's its backbone, the Earth's axis, and this is the big rib, the Earth's equator. We can measure time with this because, of course, what we think of as passage of time during the day is just the turning of the equator. So here, the edge casts a shadow. The sun ray is essentially projecting onto this model what the time is.

The size of it, is that what gives it its accuracy? Absolutely. For a sundial, it's amazingly precise. You can measure time down to the nearest minute.

The engineering skills shown in the building of this observatory was part of a long tradition in India. All over the country, there are examples of their architectural ambition and ability. In fact, these skills were first shown by an extraordinary civilization thousands of years ago. And I'm on my way to visit one of their ancient ruined cities in the north-west of India, built when the landscape looked very different.

We're about 20 miles from the city of Dholavira, and as you can see, this whole area is covered in salt flats. And this is because, back 4,500 years ago, this was ocean and Dholavira itself was an island. Dholavira is one of the cities belonging to a remarkable civilisation. It was built more than 4,000 years ago by the Harapan people Nothing was known of these people until 1922 when the Harapan city of Mahenjadaro was discovered Excavations revealed it was laid out on a grid system showing a level of planning unrivalled in the ancient world Remarkable artefacts came to light, like this ingenious toy There was a set of weights together with a pair of scales It's proof that the Harappans were already trading.

These seals have mysterious ancient inscriptions, but to this day the language of the Harappans has defeated all efforts to decipher it. Since the 1920s, more Harappan cities have come to light. It seems that from north to south, their territory spanned over 1,600 kilometres. The city of Dholavira is the most recent discovery, And that's where Jamie has gone to meet Harapan expert, Professor Kaldip Bhan.

Yeah, welcome. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much. Tell me, how old is the city?

The city is around about 4,500 years ago. How many people would have lived in this city? It is difficult to guess how many people lived in this city at one point of time, but at least 18,000 to 20,000 people must have lived in this city. The Harapan people lived in a city remarkably advanced for its time.

The centre was enclosed by thick square walls. Inside was a citadel, a wealthy residential area, public spaces and even a sports stadium. Beyond the city walls, the poorer community would have lived. The whole complex was huge, covering more than one square kilometre.

Professor Ban led me through what would have been one of the main streets of the city into the residential area. This is the main thoroughfare of the middle town, and what you'll see. So we are entering a harapan house, and here you can see the bathroom, and there is a drain below. One of the biggest surprises is that the architects of Dholavira designed the world's earliest proper sewage system.

Houses had a well, drains, bathroom, and a lavatory, and waste was discharged through earthenware pipes. The dirty water collected from the bathroom must have been collected here. So this is a 4,500-year-old sewage bathwater collection pot shard? Yeah.

These remarkable drains and sewers illustrate more powerfully than anything the Harrapans' extraordinary skills in planning and engineering. They would not be surpassed until the Romans, 2,000 years later. I was so impressed, I decided to commission my very own harapan lavatory. It's really good.

You can see brick built, wooden seat, a drain going out through the wall into the main sewer outside. I'm very fond of ancient lavatories, and these are undoubtedly the most elegant, and every house had one. Quite extraordinary. Let me show you how they worked.

The stuff went out down this little drain here, down a chute into the sewers outside, and the sewers ran all along the main streets and they were a metre and a half below ground level and two metres deep, brick-built sewers. And every now and then they had cesspits and all along the drains and over the cesspits they had manhole covers like this one. The Harrapans were among the most technically advanced of all ancient civilisations. They had a particular skill in casting beautiful metal statues.

This bronze sculpture of a dancing girl is about 4,000 years old. It's superbly finished and there are no signs of any joins. How did they manage to produce an object as delicate as this? Jamie is heading south in search of an answer.

This is going to take me to Swamimalai. And I think it'll take about a day. What a way to travel this country. Swamimalai in southern India is steeped in Hindu tradition.

It is also home to one of the last workshops in India, where they produce sculptures by an ancient technique called lost wax. Lost wax is a method for casting metal, which involves making a model from wax, covering it in clay to make a mould, and then heating the mould so the wax melts or is lost. The final stage is to pour molten metal into the clay mould. When broken open, a replica of the original wax model is revealed.

Most of the work done here produces sculptures of Hindu gods. Each one is made according to strict measurements laid down in ancient texts. Hindus believe unless these instructions are precisely followed, the spirits of the gods will not enter these bronze models. An eye-piercing ceremony is performed on each sculpture using a nail.

It's at this point that Hindus believe the god starts to inhabit his image. So this last wax process is how the ancient Harappans made their sculptures. And for the last 4,000 years, Indians have been using the same technique to create religious statues of their many gods. But the craftsmen of Swami Malay don't just make religion.

It's fantastic. I just have a little double chin, just there. Just a little bit longer. My present from Jamie in India has arrived.

It's completely encased in a giant clang of gold. So I've set a challenge to a couple of metal experts to create a bronze sculpture using the ancient Indian lost wax technique. Andrew Baldwin and Dana Goodrun have never before attempted anything on such a large scale. So this is a real experiment.

Yeah. It might be awkward to kind of wiggle it out. Put it in and pour the sand around it. If it's not gone to earthenware, the water will go straight through.

First, they must empty out the clay mould by melting the wax model inside. With a model this size, it takes nearly a day to melt all the wax. We don't want to jostle it. Wouldn't it be better to hand-carry it?

I don't think we will. No? It's too heavy? Well, it was heavy when we put it in there. in there the empty mold must be filled with mons using the technique the indians have always used it's a slow process dana will have to wait for several hours for the furnace to get them up to the right temperature if it's fast we hope the bronze is ready fantastic wonderful well it seemed to go well into the mold didn't it yeah it was pouring quite poor beautifully it was really good hot.

You were leaning back a bit, you know. It's very hot. How long is that going to cool down? Several hours.

So we've got time for a long cold drink. Yeah, come on. Hey, you're making some real progress. Bronze and Hanson.

This ancient technique is still used today to engineer a huge range of plants, from surgical tools to aircraft components. And it revs modern mathematics. and it came about because they answered a question that no one had managed to do before which is what number do you get if you take away three from three the answer is obvious surely the funny thing is that the number zero actually had to be invented it may have come out of the sort of mystical idea of nothingness and one of the first records we have of this curious symbol happened up in a temple in the very north of India. I'm travelling to the remote town of Gwalior when I'm hoping to find one of the first inscriptions of the symbol zero, evidence of just how advanced Indian mathematics was. But first of all, I have to meet my local guide, Vijay.

Would you be Vijay? Yes, sir. Very nice to meet you. Do you know where the Vishnu temple is?

Yes. With the inscription? Yes, we'll go there. fantastic fantastic a man like yourself who knows where things are is absolutely perfect oh is this this is the temple this is the temple uh-huh this is one of the oldest temple in gwaria fort this was built in nine centuries by the khanos king mahir bhoj it's very dark inside and difficult to see the inscription but this stone rubbing shows the engraving in all its remarkable detail if you look carefully here you can see one of the first records of zero ever recorded the text describes the dimensions of a local garden where flowers were grown for the temple it's extraordinary to think that this was carved by an indian man back in the 9th century revealing a mathematical understanding way beyond the level we'd achieved in the dark ages in Europe. So they had this symbol for zero, but what did it mean?

Well, with me is Marcus de Soto, who's a professor of mathematics. Marcus, why were they making all this much ado about nothing? Well, I think it was very important that the Indians actually realised that talking about nothing was something that they wanted to do. I mean, it's an abstract concept, which was quite difficult for people.

For example, the Europeans actually hated the idea of zero. They really realised how powerful it was. The strength of Indian mathematics didn't just lie in their use of zero. They were also responsible for developing our modern numbering system, inventing the symbols for one to nine.

Passed on to Arab traders, these rather unfairly became known as Arabic numerals. This new system was far more effective than the cumbersome Roman numerals that the Europeans had been lumbered with now i'd like to find out how difficult it is to do sums with numerals so we have a professor of mathematics and we have lizzie smith behind you we've got two sums laid out on the ground one in roman numerals and one in ordinary numbers lizzie you good at roman numerals no no should we give them to him then oh you can have the roman numerals marcus okay right this is a race right you've got to each do your own some no looking i'd like to look at his you might pick up and you can do them on the ground or on your pads and when you finish and say you finish okay are you ready one two three go we've given them both the same sum 26 times 11 Marcus's efforts show that Roman numerals are really not geared to easy Manipulation Okay finished, so what have you got?

Oh, well, I've got two hundred and sixty-six Yes, yes, you're 20 you're 20 20 hours it just shows that it's incredibly difficult to do this with Roman numerals I'm very glad I don't have to do it frankly Me too. So, Lizzie, the winner, come on in. Congratulations. Well done.

Well done. Excellent. Yeah, congratulations. Fair cop.

So, Marcus, why is it so much easier to do our sums with the numbers we use today? I think you saw from the problem I had is the numbers get bigger and bigger. I need new symbols with Roman numerals. I needed Ls and Ms and Cs and things like this.

And with the Indian system, with this zero, you only need the symbols from zero to nine, which makes calculations so much simpler. And were there long-term advantages too? Absolutely. They were able to do, for example, calculations in astronomy much quicker, navigation, merchants were able to make calculations very quickly.

So it really revolutionised science and industry. And I suppose we wouldn't have the computer today, for example, without the concept of a zero. I mean, there's zeros and ones, something being there, something not. So this new number system that the Indians developed for us and came to Europe really changed the face of science.

The Indian numbering system didn't reach Europe until the 13th century. Initially, resistance was fierce. The Roman Catholic Church proclaimed the new Indian numerals to be the work of the devil. Mathematicians who used them were branded heretics and could be burnt at the stake.

Several centuries went by before this new numbering concept became widely accepted. The ancient Indians came up with some of the best ideas around, but they also came up with one of the worst. There was a chap called Brahmagupta in the 7th century AD who was a mathematician and astronomer and he was captured by the Buddhist philosophy that time is eternal and goes round and round and things get reborn and reappear and he wondered maybe there should be a machine that would do that, a machine that would go on and on forever and he designed a perpetual motion machine. We don't know whether he built it or not but we've built a version of it. he said there should be mercury in each of the hollow spokes and we put blue water in because it's a bit easier and the idea is that on this side you see this one will push hard harder downwards than that one because the mercury is at the outside end and so obviously when i let go it'll go spinning around in that direction there you are oh well if i give it a push anyway It's bound to go forever.

You see? No problem at all. Just maybe we haven't got it quite balanced. Yeah, yeah, it's going.

I've got perpetual motion. No, it's not going to work. Despite this early failure, the search for perpetual motion has proved an irresistible challenge to inventors, and I've asked Marty to build me a brand-new machine. Now, Marty, tell me how it works. you well um it's rather don't get too close right a bit splashy um in here is a large bin full of water right that blue thing there is a pump and it's being driven by this huge vast water wheel here okay and i'm pumping water up and over into the cups here and that's driving the water wheel around right so that the water's driving the water wheel that's the water wheel's driving the pump and the pump's pumping the water so when you let go right okay so give it a push and let go This one will work, this one will work, and you'll see that there are all these spokes on the wheel which can go either that way or this way, and they've got great weights on the outside, but because these are sticking out, they will push down harder and turn the wheel around.

I think it'll go that way. Oh Marty, come on. You watch. I'm going to pull the stick out and it'll zoom round this way.

You see? I was right. It just needs a little push. It does not work.

No perpetual motion machine can work. Let me explain why. You can convert energy from one form to another. So if you have wind, you can convert it with a windmill to rotational energy and you can turn that to grinding corn or making electricity, whatever you like.

But you can't make energy out of nothing. And that's why these perpetual motion machines will never work. They can't work because they break the laws of thermodynamics. Which say you can't create energy and you always lose something in friction.

But we might not know this if it hadn't been for Brahmagupta and his dreams of perpetual motion. The British knew little about Indian culture and achievements until they began to trade with the country in the 17th century. Gradually, they learnt the value of many Indian traditional skills and were keen to borrow them and exploit them back home. One of the first industries to attract the attention of the British was cotton.

In ancient times, the Indians were famous for their fine cotton, which they exported all over the world. India was one of the first countries to cultivate gossipium arboretum, otherwise known as cotton. Its cotton was so fine that the ancient Greeks and Romans often mistook it for silk. The traditional techniques of hand spinning and weaving still flourish in rural areas, like here in Kanchipuram in southern India.

The equipment is often basic and improvised, but the skills have been handed down for hundreds of years. This loom is being operated by expert weaver Palani. He controls it by an agile combination of hand movements together with a set of foot pedals. The shuttle weaves through the upright threads, gradually creating a piece of woven material.

It's weavers like Palani and his ancestors who perfected the art of weaving using tried and tested techniques, which made India famous for its cotton cloth. As well as working out how to produce the cloth, the Indians also developed original dyeing techniques to produce vibrant colours. They used a wide variety of ingredients, pomegranate rinds to make green, other plant extracts to create vivid blues and reds. The end result was beautiful and elaborately patterned fabrics.

It was mastery like this which led to India becoming the world leader in cotton production, its material exported all over the globe. But by the 18th century, the British had learned the techniques themselves and started to weave cotton cloth on a huge mechanised scale. As a result, Britain became the biggest cotton manufacturer in the world. But inevitably, this had a damaging effect on the cotton industry back in India.

The Indians had also developed expertise in another manufacturing process, the making of huge metal objects. Again, they were way ahead of the British. Some of the extraordinary work created by their master craftsmen can still be seen today. This is Kutub Minar, the site of one of India's oldest mosques.

But it is also the place where you will find where you will find one of India's greatest technological wonders. The pillar was originally part of a Hindu temple. It was uprooted by invading Muslim forces in the 11th century and installed here at the Kut of Minar. They, like the British 700 years after them, were fascinated by this very strange pillar of iron.

This inscription has been here since the 4th century and in 1700 years it is still perfectly clear, which shows just how durable this material is. The things about this pillar fascinated British scientists. how the Indians came to cast such a large piece of iron so early on, and secondly, why in 1,700 years it had never rusted. Scientists brought back some slivers of metal from the surface and they found, first, that there's some slag mixed in with the iron, second, that the surface is protected first by a layer of iron oxide and then by a whole lot of dust. And I expect that the dry climate out there helps to prevent it from going rusty.

But the Indians' talent for ironworking had developed centuries before this pillar was cast. From the 3rd century AD, Indian metalworkers came up with an amazing new material called wutz. Wutz is a sort of steel, and like all steels, it's iron with a little bit of carbon in it. But wutz is amazingly flexible and still amazingly strong.

So it was ideal for objects like knives and swords, and it could be polished to give a distinctive patterned finish. But how the Indians had made it was a mystery. The British didn't manage to make equivalent steel until the 18th century. So what was the Indians' secret?

We've challenged archaeologist Dr Anne Feuerbach to see if she can make some woods using the ancient Indian technique. So, two days ago, she built a furnace, packed it with charcoal, set it burning, and used a fan to blast air through it to get it up to temperature. Next, Anne fashions small clay crucibles in which to make the woods. We have our crucible, and what we're putting in it is a piece of wrought iron.

The wrought iron has no carbon in it, so in order to make steel you need iron and carbon. So we're using pieces of dried wood to add carbon to the iron, and the idea is that the carbon will diffuse from the pieces of wood, and it's heated up into the piece of iron and the end product will be steel. The whole thing was left for 36 hours while the carbon from the wood chips combined with the iron. So, had Anne succeeded in creating this ancient metal?

So in there is wood? We hope so. So what temperature was it getting to down there, do you reckon? Probably between 1350 and 1400.

Shall we see what's in there? Ooh. So what's that bit? Iron that has been melted, it looks like.

So this sort of melted bit at this end, I mean, presumably this sort of chunk at the top is what you put in. Yep, that was the wrought iron. So is that steel there? Yep, looks like it to me.

So that's wood steel, we've made wood steel. Yep, we made some. It may not look very appealing yet, but let's see what a blacksmith can do with a lump of woods. To turn it into something useful, he needs to heat it up to red heat and then beat it into shape.

Then he lets it cool down and grinds it into a knife. Not bad, but not quite as impressive as these beautiful swords made by skilled metalworkers in India. When their patterned surfaces catch the light, you can see why Woods was the envy of the Western world. Science in India was never far from the country's religious roots, and this was especially important in the field of medicine.

The Indians developed an advanced system of health care called Ayurveda which aimed to unite the spiritual and the physical to produce health and long life. One of the most important elements of Ayurveda is yoga. In the 60s yoga seemed to be the preserve of the hippies and the yuppies claimed it but it was born here over 4,000 years ago. I think with 4,000 years of practice, I might be able to do some of these positions.

But until then... Good. Good. Just close your eyes.

Very good. Posture is fine. Yoga is first mentioned in a collection of Indian scriptures which date back 4,500 years. Yoga postures work by stretching and toning muscles and ligaments.

This keeps the spine and joints flexible and helps improve circulation. And yoga has been shown to help a huge range of medical conditions, from arthritis to asthma. Forehead, look up and see. Now what you do?

No. Another fundamental part of Ayurveda is the extensive use of herbal medicines. They include liquorice, used for heartburn, cocoa butter, for keeping your weight down, and ginger, as a remedy for sickness and stomachache. and several of these treatments are now used in Western medicine. Dr.

Mabel Mendonga has offered to give me one of the more unusual Ayurveda treatments. I am slightly nervous as it's going to involve oil being poured directly into my eyes. Ayurveda believes that the mind, the body, the indriyas, which are the senses and the soul, they form an equilibrium in the body. Everybody has their own different equilibrium?

Yes, everyone does. As long as the equilibrium of the person is in harmony with the external environment, the person is in a state of health. When this goes haywire, either by faulty diet or lifestyle, the person tends to fall ill. Jamie, they're on the procedure now.

Your eyes are being immersed in ghee. Ghee is a form of oil. It's made from clarified butter. It feels very strange.

How do you feel? Any irritation? It stings a bit, I must say. You sort of get them about half open and then they just want to close again.

It feels as if your orbs have filled up with goo, which I think they have. And now that the ghee is actually trapped in against my eyeballs, what will it be doing? It will be taken up, absorbed, so to say, and your eyesight will be clearer. Well, the ghee may have improved my eyesight, but it was a painful process and I don't think I'll be in a hurry to make another appointment.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the Indians' knowledge of surgery. They were centuries ahead of anyone else and the greatest pioneer of all was a surgeon called Sharuta who lived 2,500 years ago. He wrote an extraordinary book describing in detail a huge range of surgical procedures. Good.

And he also developed a fearsome selection of instruments. Surgeon Manu Sood knows how they were used. The way Sushruta would have had it. Here's an instrument that was used for couching cataracts.

Eye surgery? That's correct. And they were able to make an incision in the eye and either push the cataract out of the way of the pupil or extract it by making the patient cough or sneeze when the eye had been opened. And the cataract would pop out?

Well, that was the theory of it. Wow. And what did they, in the end, specialise in, the Indians? There were a whole series of things, but the most famous procedure that Indian surgeons are known for is the Indian forehead rhinoplasty, which is used for reconstructing a nose that has been cut off.

In India, especially in olden days, if you were captured in war as a prisoner or if you were convicted of adultery, it was not uncommon to have your nose cut off. So you want to reconstruct the nose. So how did they do it? What they would have done in India was to use a leaf, which is this, to create a pattern to know how much skin is required for your nose.

If you could take a spectacle of... I've got a big one, yes. I didn't want to say that. Right.

So they would use a leaf to judge how much skin you needed and then transpose that onto the forehead. But I'll do it with something else we use to plan things with. And then we put it on your nose to see exactly how much we need to plan the reconstruction. So this has presumably all died out long ago?

Not at all. This is exactly how we do it today. This has been going for 2,500 years? yes that is amazing they were very far ahead of us in their understanding of anatomy so that's roughly what i would need to make up your nose so basically you're making a map of my nose on my forehead that's correct and if i just take that away for a second so that's the sort of skin that i would use and i would leave this anchored to the eyebrow right and turn it down like so so that i could make up a nose with the skin that we've taken from the forehead so okay You cut round that skin on the forehead, fold it over without taking it off, and fold that round around and it remains brand new. In the West, the techniques of plastic surgery really developed during the Second World War, when they were used extensively to help pilots.

Many had been badly burnt when trapped on their burning aircraft. The surgeons rebuilt many faces, using the principles first worked out by Sharuta around 400 BC. In India, as in many countries across the world, there was one disease that really struck fear into the population. Smallpox.

It was a really horrible disease. Millions died from it. Even those who survived were left with disfiguring pockmarks all over their bodies. So everyone was desperate to find an effective way of tackling this awful disease.

The best preventative treatment was developed in Gloucestershire, hundreds of years later by a country doctor called Edward Jenner. He used to ride around the country and he found that milkmaids never seemed to catch smallpox. Now, Cathy, have you had smallpox? No.

And no pockmarks on your face. He realised that milkmaids are always very pretty. Indeed, that's the song, you know. What is your fortune, my pretty maid?

My face is my fortune, sir, she said. That was all about the milkmaids. He realised there was something about milking cows that prevented them from catching smallpox. It turns out that cows can catch cowpox, the milkmaids can catch cowpox from the cows, and the cowpox gets in the way of smallpox.

And he invented vaccination, and that eventually wiped smallpox off the face of the earth. But he wasn't the first, because in ancient India, they'd had a preventative treatment for smallpox hundreds of years earlier. In India, they saw smallpox as a visit from the goddess Sitala. She was the goddess of smallpox and disease generally.

And when she came she made you hot and made all these horrible pockmarks appear and she sometimes killed you and they wanted to try And prevent that and so they developed a primitive form of inoculation that I'm going to demonstrate on Marcy Now Marcy you haven't had smallpox. Have you know? Well, I want to prevent any visits from the goddess Atala Okay So what they used to use was an instrument like this In fact, this is a replica and they would make four little scratches on the back of somebody's arm And then they would take the pus From the it's quite unpleasant. Yes from the sores of a smallpox victim Sadly, they wouldn't let me use real pus.

So this is the best gloop that makeup could provide and we'll put that on your Wound like that and I don't want this you're not like take this off, right? It stays on day and night and in a day or two, you're going to feel really quite ill But we can sort that out. Okay, okay, and it's first of all as a bit of a diet. So, do you like milk?

Yeah, well, you can't have any milk. And how about fish? No, you can't have any fish either. But there is one thing you can have.

According to the ancient texts, four pots of cold water, morning and night. But it wasn't a drink. It was to reduce the fever. That should keep you really nice and cool, and it should prevent any more visits from the goddess Sitala.

Now, although this treatment may have seemed pretty wicked it was actually amazingly successful because before it came along out of every hundred people who called smallpox more than 30 would die but after they brought in inoculation only two out of a hundred would die they must have saved millions of lives and there you are marty i think possibly you may survive till the morning although you are a bit damp oh we need another pot yeah could we have some more water please nurse more water cold make it cold the Indians also had a fascination with games. They invented lots of them, including one of the world's most successful, chess, which didn't arrive in Britain until the Middle Ages. It's generally thought that chess developed from a complex game of military strategy, which I thought I ought to try out. And this is Chacharanga, and Steve Nicholls, you're an expert, aren't you?

Well, I've been playing it for 20 years or so. It looks like chess. We've got a board that's 8x8 with some, well, some funny squares on it and we've got pieces that look a bit like chess pieces but steve there seem to be four sets of pieces the word chaturanga originally meant four parts meaning the four divisions of the indian army so we need four players for this game marty you're free you come and play and dana you come and play there the players at opposite corners play together as teams and a long die is thrown to start the game chuck it in the middle of the board and see what What do you get? It's not bad.

Four. I'm afraid that's the elephant or the rook. There's no legal move. Oh, you miss out.

I'm going to start the offensive, Adam. Check. So, a rather disappointing start for Dana and me. Chacharanga is a complicated game, although it does have the feel of chess.

Several of the pieces are the same, the king, the rook and the pawns, and they even have identical moves. But, unlike conventional chess, there are two enemy kings to checkmate. That was about the worst move. It was playable.

Having four players adds a whole new dimension. But sadly, half an hour into the game, Dana and I were headed for disaster. Now, I think this is killer. That is checkmate.

Lucky. Marty, you were lucky. Don't know. I apologise.

I'll let you down. Next time. We'll get him next time. Anyway, the Indians weren't interested only in the theoretical side of warfare.

They were also pretty good at disposing of real enemies. The Indian army are legendary for their bravery and resilience. So much so, in fact, that during the First World War, Indian Sikh soldiers won more Victoria Crosses, percentage-wise, than any other foreign troops. In the 18th century, it was the British colonial forces that came up against the ruthless efficiency of the Indian military.

At the Battle of Gunter in 1780, the British faced India's first freedom fighter, the Tipu Sultan. Tipu Sultan was a great military innovator. His artillery consisted of cannon, of poisoned arrows, and he also had a secret weapon, the rocket. As the British charged onto the battlefield, they were confronted with a barrage of missiles.

Rockets landed in front and behind the British lines, completely disorientating the soldiers. They had never seen anything like it, and the normally unflinching British troops broke down and ran. The Chinese had used rockets in warfare for ages, but Tipu Sultan took the art to new heights. Now, this is Matthew Buck from the Royal Artillery Museum, and you brought along some rockets to show us.

Well, what we have here are what are thought to be the last two surviving Indian rockets anywhere in the world. These are original? Absolutely. 200 years old?

Now, presumably it was just packed with gunpowder and you lit it and stood back? Slightly more to it than that. It's thought that most of them had iron tips at the end, and so what you have effectively is a rocket-powered spear. And tell me about this one.

Well, the immediate thing to notice about this is the whacking great big sword blade on the end of it. Absolutely. These things didn't generally explode. What they were meant to do was to frighten the enemy cavalry.

And presumably they didn't fire one at a time? No. If anything, they would have been fired in enormous numbers. Tipu had 5,000 rocket men in his rocket brigade.

OK, well, we've got our own rocket brigade. Rocket brigade, advance! It's quite neat. You can change the angle, I can see.

So if you wanted to fire them high up, you'd lift it up to there and prop it like that. And if you want it lower down, you have a lower trajectory like that. Well, you've got a nice, tidy batch of enemy over there. You think we can pick them off?

I think it's worth a try. Let's get them lit. I think we'd better go back to a safe distance. So, a battery of six.

Wow! Amazing. They all took off, turned left a bit, and went all over the place. If I were an enemy horse, I'd be over the next hill.

In 1799, a whole lot of those Indian rockets were brought back and taken to William Congreve at Woolwich Arsenal. He examined them, made his own, and he eventually had a chance to try them out in 1806. The French fleet was nestled in the harbour at Boulogne. He fired off 200 rockets in half an hour, but unfortunately they all got caught by the wind like ours did.

They all turned left and he didn't hit a single French ship. But they set fire to the town, burnt most of it to the ground and he claimed a great victory. But it wasn't just the rockets. Think of what else the Indians achieved.

One of the world's most advanced ancient civilisations. Cotton fabric in all its exotic colours. The amazing wood, steel and they gave us chess Most important of all they invented the zero which revolutionised mathematics and all the science that was to follow To receive a free Open University leaflet which accompanies this series and details of Open University programmes telephone 0870 900 0352 or go to bbc.co.uk slash history Next time we're off to Mesopotamia modern-day Syria and Iraq. From the wheel to writing, armies to agriculture, beer to bread, the people who lived here were the greatest innovators of the ancient world.

A 5,000-year-old corpse. He's the diamond in terms of recent human history. A 21st-century murder investigation. The Iceman was shot in the back.

We've got blood from four different individuals. If somebody murdered him, why didn't they take his copper axe? The oldest whodunit in history, the Iceman murder. Tuesday at 9 on BBC One.