This week I embark on an epic journey through space and time to look at the science and technology of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on (What the Ancients did for us, xxx). The series begins with the ingenious people of the Islamic world, who not only invented all sorts of new things but also did the world an immense service by hoovering up all the previous knowledge they could find, and writing it all down for posterity, partly because the Koran positively encourages the faithful to study science. One result of this is that many of our words in science and technology begin with al-, the Arabic for the: alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkali, altitude, and so on.

The cradle of modern civilization was Mesopotamia, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which is now mostly Iraq. This land was first settled more than 5000 years ago by a succession of peoples: the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Between them they invented agriculture and the plough, writing and the cuneiform script, and a system of laws, which they carved in stone. They may even have invented electricity.

Most people give the credit for the first electric battery to the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, who made one in 1799, but the Mesopotamians may have made one a thousand years earlier. In an ancient site near Baghdad was found what is now known as the Baghdad battery – a ceramic pot about the size of a milk bottle, a copper cylinder that fits inside it, and inside that, an iron rod that is insulated from it with a ring of bitumen. All you need to do is add some acid solution – vinegar or grape juice, for example - and the battery will generate about half a volt of electricity.

What could they possibly have used electricity for? Perhaps it was part of the doctor’s high-tech equipment, delivering mild shocks to stressed-out Babylonians in search of a magical cure. Or perhaps it was used to plate silver statues and figurines with a thin layer of gold, which would greatly enhance their appearance and their value. We don’t know the details, but we have to marvel at the ingenuity of those early electricians.

Of all these ancient peoples, my favourite were the Greeks, who were arguably the nearest to us in temperament. They gave us mathematics, theatre, and democracy, but above all they gave us ideas. Pythagoras developed the musical scale that we use today; Archimedes leaped out of his bath in his excitement at an idea in hydraulics; Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth in 240 BC. But perhaps their most astonishing legacy was the Antikythera mechanism. It’s a collection of brass cogwheels in a wooden box, rather like an old clock, but it was built about 90 BC, and it is actually a computer designed to predict the movements of the planets. We celebrate Charles Babbage, who tried to build a mechanical computer in the 1830s – but the Greeks had done it nineteen hundred years before.

Before we began working on this series I knew a little of the history. I knew about the Chinese making gunpowder and the brilliant Indian invention of the number zero, but I knew nothing of the peoples who lived in central and south America, the Aztecs, Incas, Mayas, and Olmecs. They came up with chocolate, quinine, tobacco, and suspension bridges made from grass. And they found out how to make rubber balls, which they used in what must have been a lethal ball game, judging by the helmets worn by the vast stone heads carved by the Olmecs.

This series is full of these surprises. Everyone knows that the Chinese made silk, and exported it along the silk road, but did you know that they invented football, and made silk nets for their goals? We all know there are fish in the Nile, but did you know that the Egyptians were the first to take up fishing as a hobby?  Noblemen living on the banks constructed channels from the Nile into their gardens, and sat for hours watching their floats… And the most ancient thing in the series is a multi-purpose cutting tool - a stone-age Swiss Army Knife - that was found on the beach in Norfolk, and is 700,000 years old, even older than Homo Sapiens.

Just in case you are overwhelmed by the thought of my travelling all over the world in pursuit of these wonders, I should explain that for the filming I sent trusty assistants to China, India, Egypt, Greece, Mexico, Peru, and so on. My only excursion was a one-day trip to Orkney – but I did have the excitement of visiting the oldest lavatories in the world.