Man is one of a number of animals that make things, but man is the only one that depends for its very survival on the things he has made. That simple observation is the starting point for an ambitious history programmed that the BBC will begin broadcasting in which it aims to tell a history of the world through 100 objects in the British Museum (BM). A joint venture four years in the making between the BM and the BBC, the series features 100 15 minute radio broadcasts, a separate 13 episodes in which children visit the museum at night and try to unlock its mysteries, a BBC World Service package of tailored omnibus editions for broadcasting around the world and an interactive digital programmed involving 350 museums in Britain which will be available free over the Internet.
The presenter is Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director, who has moved from the study of art to the contemplation of things. "Objects take you into the thought world of the past," he says. "When you think about the skills required to make something you begin to think about the brain that made it. " From the first moment this series is radio at its best: inventive, clever, and yet always light on its feet.
In the mid-17th century Archbishop James Usher, an Irish prelate and scholar, totted up the lifespan of all the prophets mentioned in the Old Testament and concluded that the world had been created on the night preceding October 23rd 4004 B.C. Mr. Macgregor, a more modern historian, begins nearly 1.8m years before that with the Swiss Army knife of the stone age, a hand axe found by Louis Leakey at Moldavia Gorge in Tanzania in the 1930s.
Discovering how to chip stones to make a tool that would cut flesh was the moment man learned to be an opportunist. Once invented, the hand axe would hardly change over lm years. It became a passport to the world, and was carried from east Africa to Libya, Israel, India, Korea and even to a gravel pit near Heathrow airport where one was buried 600,000 years ago.
Mr. Macgregor is less interested in advertising the marvels of the 250-year-old universal museum he heads than in considering who made the objects he discusses. That involves drawing together evidence of how connected seemingly disparate societies have always been and rebalancing the histories of the literate and the non-literate. "Victors write history; the defeated make things," he says. This is an especially important distinction when considering Africa. The great "Encyclopedia Britannica" of 1911 assumed that Africa had no history because it had no written history. The statues of black pharaohs that Mr. Macgregor discusses in an early programme, for example, are the best visual evidence that a Nubian tribe once seized control of ancient Egypt and that Africans ruled over the Nile for more than a century.
The BM’s curators spent two years choosing the objects Mr. MacGregor examines. In particular, they sought out things that would help him draw out universal themes. Periclean Athens and Achaemenid Iran existed at more-or-less the same time, between 500 BC and 450 BC. By examining objects from each place, Mr. MacGregor is able to compare two different ways of constructing a highly efficient state and nimbly reassesses Athens in the context of the Persia it was fighting.
The importance of trade is another theme. Silver pieces of eight were a passport to trade, and, as the first object of a global economy, a key step in the history of money. Minted in South America from the end of the 15th century, they crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. So widely were these silver coins used that interruptions in the production of silver in Mexico and Peru had a severe knock-on effect. In Europe silver shortages led to a sudden massive expansion of the money supply and the hyperinflation of the mid-17th century.
Mr. Macgregor also uses coins, the simplest common sign of a centralized rule, to explore the personification of power as well as the history of money and of trade. In the Middle East the head of the Byzantine emperor was stamped on coins for several centuries. But in the early 690s, for example, Umayyad diners from Damascus suddenly switched from displaying heads of rulers to showing the Shahabad, the declaration of belief in the oneness of Allah. It was the first time political power, as represented by coinage, was connected to a set of unchanging universal ideas rather than a person.
Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr. Macgregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time.
All the following themes are mentioned EXCEPT