In 690 a woman who had entered the Tang palace at fourteen declared herself emperor of China, the only woman in three thousand years to hold the title in her own name. This film follows the Tang and its printed sutra, Murasaki and the Tale of Genji, Charlemagne, the Vikings and the Althing; Aksum, Great Zimbabwe and Mali; Song China, Angkor and Borobudur; the canoes that settled the Pacific, Cahokia and the Great Law of Peace of the five nations south of Lake Ontario; the Crusades, the first universities and the cathedrals, Dante and the charter at Runnymede; Genghis Khan and the Black Death; Timur, the Ottomans and Shah Ismail's Persia; Sejong's alphabet and the fleets of Zheng He; Florence and Gutenberg; the Inca and the Aztecs; Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, and the exchange of crops and diseases between the hemispheres; Cortés, the dying of the Americas, the silver of Potosí and the Atlantic slave trade; and Nzinga of Ndongo, who would not sit on the floor.

It opens with a short prologue on the roads, sea lanes and pilgrim ways that already tied the old world together. The film is drawn from our series The History of Humanity and stands on its own.

0:00 The Roads Between the Worlds
1:15 The Woman Emperor
3:43 The Tale of Genji
4:11 Charlemagne and the Vikings
6:17 Africa
8:03 Song China and Angkor
10:31 The Open Ocean
13:14 The Travels of a Page
14:20 Crusades and Cathedrals
17:21 Genghis Khan
19:09 The Black Death
20:31 Timur, Joan and Constantinople
23:19 Sejong and Zheng He
25:12 Florence and Gutenberg
28:05 The Inca and the Aztecs
29:57 Columbus
32:14 Conquest
34:14 Silver and Slaves
35:54 Nzinga

Music (our own piano recordings of public-domain scores, each piece played whole):
Augusta Holmès, Thrînôdia, Mélodies No. 12
Frederick Delius, Le ciel est par-dessus le toit, Two Songs RT V/16 No. 2
Arthur Somervell, Into my Heart an Air that kills, A Shropshire Lad No. 9
Helena Munktell, La dernière berceuse, Ten Songs No. 7
Ernest Chausson, Hébé, Op. 2 No. 6
Johanna Kinkel, Klage, Op. 16 No. 6
Charles Villiers Stanford, The splendour falls, A Cycle of Songs Op. 68 No. 3
Roger Quilter, Come Away, Death, Three Shakespeare Songs Op. 6 No. 1
Edward Elgar, A Song of Autumn, Seven Lieder No. 3
Josephine Lang, Gedenkst du mein, Op. 10 No. 1
George Butterworth, When the Lad for Longing Sighs, Bredon Hill and Other Songs No. 3
Peter Warlock, Along the Stream, Saudades No. 1
Pauline Viardot, Chanson mélancolique
Arthur Somervell, White in the moon the long road lies, A Shropshire Lad No. 7 (under the prologue and the credits)

Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, some cropped to the frame:
CC BY-SA 3.0 igo (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/): Lazare Eloundou
CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/): Herman Blondeel; Petter Ulleland; Tesfawel; Khalidsalewa; Janice Bell; Satdeep Gill; York Museums Trust staff; Andreas F. Borchert; Ideophagous; Arosha-photo(Reza Sobhani); Amir Pashaei; Livioandronico2013; Mike Peel
CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/): Maomao de Rijiben; D. Gordon E. Robertson; GayleKaren; Phil Uhl; Skubasteve834; Myrabella; Martin St-Amant (S23678); Claus Ableiter
CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/): Xvlun
CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/): Philip Halling; Samuraijohnny; NYC Wanderer (Kevin Eng); Dot Boughton (Portable Antiquities Scheme)
CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): Wellcome Collection; Vyacheslav Argenberg; Christian Ferrer
CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/): Sailko; Heaven's Army
CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/): McKay Savage; Arian Zwegers; Richard Mortel; Joshua Keller
CC0 or public domain: Gary Todd, British Library, Fujiwara no Takayoshi (attributed), Raphael, Abraham Cresques (attributed), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, W. Roberts, Sc., Unknown author, Aurbina, Bgabel, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), author of the text, Eugène Delacroix, Tangopaso, Domenico di Michelino after Alesso Baldovinetti, Earthsound, Abraham Cresques, Atlas catalan, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jehan Froissart, Unknown artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gentile Bellini, Wilhelm Luebke / Max Semrau (1908), Titian, Michelangelo, Jebulon, Unknown cartographer, after Hernán Cortés, Ridpath, John Clark, 1840-1900, John Vanderlyn, Abraham Ortelius, Jean-François Millet, Bernardino de Sahagún, Amable-Paul Coutan, Mhwater, Library of Congress, Unknown engraver, Achille Devéria

The maps are drawn for the film from Natural Earth (public domain) and Terrain Tiles elevation data (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1).

The narration and most of the pictures are made with AI; the photographs and the maps are not.