As five programmes would be broadcast each week, we would group the objects in clusters of five, spinning the globe at various points in time and looking at five snapshots of the world through objects at that particular date.

The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally. … They would try to address as many aspects of human experience as proved practicable, and to tell us about whole societies, not just the rich and powerful within them.

The rules of the game for A History of the World in 100 Objects were set by Mark Damazer, Controller of Radio 4, and they were simple. … Colleagues from the Museum and the BBC would choose from the collection of the British Museum 100 objects that had to range in date from the beginning of human history around two million years ago and come right up to the present day.

Writing is one of humanity’s later achievements, and until fairly recently even many literate societies recorded their concerns and aspirations not only in writing but in things.

One of the things this object history makes clear is that the very word ‘Mediterranean’ – ‘the sea at the centre of the earth’ – is misconceived. It is not at the centre of the Earth, and is just one among many marine cultures.

These ceramics – all used, we think, by the same people, all broken and thrown on the rubbish dump at roughly the same time – demonstrate what was for long beyond the view of Europe: that between AD 1000 and 1500, the East African coast was in contact with the whole of the Indian Ocean. There was regular trade between China, Indonesia, India, the Gulf and East Africa, and raw materials and finished commodities were circulating widely.

We know that such drums were used to ‘dance the slaves’ on the ships to fight depression, and on the plantations sometimes rallied the slaves to revolt.

Human life began in Africa. … Here our ancestors created the first stone tools to chop meat, bones and wood.

It was this increasing dependency on the things we create that makes humans different from all other animals. … Our ability to make objects allowed humans to adapt to a multitude of environments and spread from Africa into the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

Using tools like this one to obtain bone marrow, the most nutritious part of a carcass, they set in train an ancient virtuous circle. This food for body and mind meant that the more cunning, larger-brained individuals would survive to breed larger-brained children, capable in their turn of making ever more complex tools.

All the carefully focused and planned creativity required to make this axe implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world and how their brains worked. … The handaxe may also contain the evidence of something even more remarkable: this chipped stone tool may hold the secret of speech, and it may have been in making things like this that we learnt how to talk to one another.

Recently, scientists have looked at what happens neurologically when a stone tool is being made. … They have used modern hospital scanners to see which bits of the brain are activated as knappers work their stone. … Surprisingly, the areas of the modern brain that you use when you’re making a handaxe overlap considerably with those you use when you speak. … It now seems very likely that if you can shape a stone you can shape a sentence.

The two reindeer represented on this piece of bone form the oldest artwork in any British gallery or museum. … It was made during the end of the latest Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago.

Around 50,000 years ago something dramatic seems to have happened to the human brain. … In short, they were making art.

This little sculpture is the result of four separate stone technologies. … In execution as well as in conception, this is a very complex work of art.

This carving of the two swimming reindeer had no practical function, only form. … Was it an image made just for its beauty? Or does it have a different purpose?

Spearheads like this are by no means rare; it is just one of thousands that have been found across North America and that are the firmest evidence yet of the first human beings to inhabit the continent. … They’re known as Clovis points, after the small town in the US state of New Mexico where they were first discovered in 1936, alongside the bones of the animals they had killed.

The sea between Russia and Alaska (the Bering Strait) became a wide and easily passable land bridge. Animals – bison and reindeer among them – moved across to the American side, and the humans hunting them followed.

By about 40,000 years ago, humans like ourselves had spread from Africa all over Asia and Europe, even crossing seas to get to Australia.

But no humans had yet set foot in the Americas. … They got their chance thanks to major changes in climate. First, about 20,000 years ago, an intensification of the Ice Age locked up a great deal of water in ice-sheets and glaciers, leading to a huge fall in sea level. The sea between Russia and Alaska (the Bering Strait) became a wide and easily passable land bridge.

Farming created a food surplus that allowed larger groups of people to live together and changed not just how they lived but how they thought.

The development of farming occurred independently in at least seven different parts of the world at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

It’s a big pestle, about 35 centimetres tall (just over a foot).

We think it’s about 8,000 years old, and a pestle then would have been used exactly as it is now – to grind food in a mortar and break it down, so that it can be made edible.

It shows two naked people literally wrapped up in each other. It’s the oldest known representation of a couple having sex.

This dramatic change of environment meant that people had to find an alternative to hunting. Of all the different animals these humans had hunted, only one could be tamed: cattle.

So drinking cows’ milk would probably have made these early Egyptians very ill, but over centuries their descendants and many other populations eventually adapted to it.

We are often told that we are what we eat; it might be truer to say that we are what our ancestors, with great difficulty, learnt to eat.

The plant from which maize derives, the teosinte, is wonderfully adaptable.

The raw kernel needed to be cooked in a mixture of water and white lime.

The easy digestibility of modern maize is thanks to the selective breeding of the crop by generations of farmers, each choosing seeds from the ‘best’ plant to cultivate for the next crop.

The habit of seeing something divine in the crops that sustain us, formed all over the world around 10,000 years ago, is still stubbornly alive.

The gold leaf was applied somewhere between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when ancient pots were being discovered, collected and displayed by Japanese scholars.

The world’s first crowded cities and states grew up in fertile river valleys: the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. This chapter’s object is associated with the most famous river of them all, the Nile.

This little ivory plaque is a name tag for an Egyptian pharaoh, made to accompany him as he set off to the afterlife, a label which would identify him to those he met. Through it, we’re immediately close to these first kings of Egypt – rulers, around 3000 BC, of a new kind of civilization that would produce some of the greatest monumental art and architecture ever made.

Only power of this order could organize the enormous building projects that these early pharaohs embarked on. Den’s elaborate tomb, with granite shipped from hundreds of miles away, and the later, even grander pyramids were possible only because of the extraordinary control which Egyptian pharaohs could exercise over the minds and the bodies of their subjects.

It became clear that this was a land of sophisticated urban centres, trade and industry, and even writing. It must have ranked as a contemporary and an equal with ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia – and it had been totally forgotten.

Between 3000 and 2000 BC the Indus civilization was a vast network of complex, organized cities with flourishing trade links to the world beyond, all apparently thriving. And then, around 1900 BC, it came to an end. The cities turned to mounds of earth, and even the memory of this, one of the great early urban cultures of the world, vanished. We can only hazard guesses as to why. The need for timber to fire the brick kilns of the huge building industry may have led to extensive deforestation and an environmental catastrophe. More importantly, climate change seems to have caused tributaries of the Indus to alter their course or to dry up completely.

It was stone axes that enabled them to clear the spaces they needed to sow their seeds and graze their beasts. … These were the people who would also construct monuments like the first Stonehenge.

But there are actually sources of jade in continental Europe and, only a few years ago, in 2003 – some 6,000 years after our axe head was made – the precise origin of the stone it was made from was discovered. This luxury object is in fact Italian.

That our axe has no signs of wear and tear is surely a consequence of the fact that its owners chose not to use it.

It comes from what is now southern Iraq, and it’s on a little clay tablet, about 9 centimetres by 7 (4 inches by 3) – almost exactly the same shape and size as the mouse that controls your computer.

The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like.

Was it thinkable that the Bible narrative, far from being a specially privileged revelation, was merely part of a common stock of legend that was shared by the whole Middle East?

The tablet, now universally known as the Flood Tablet, had been written down in what is now Iraq in the seventh century BC, roughly 400 years before the oldest surviving version of the Bible narrative.

It was only later that the Flood story was woven by storytellers into the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great epic poem of world literature.

And it has changed ‘our’ nature: for literature like Gilgamesh allows us not just to explore our own thoughts but to inhabit the thought worlds of others.

With the Epic of Gilgamesh, represented here by Smith’s Flood Tablet, writing moved from being a means of recording facts to a means of investigating ideas.

This object is the most famous mathematical papyrus to have survived from ancient Egypt, and the major source for our understanding of how the Egyptians thought about numbers.

From it we learn that if you force-feed a goose it needs five times as much grain as a free-range goose will eat.

Ancient Egypt also seems to have had battery-farming, because we’re told that geese kept in a coop – presumably unable to move – will need only a quarter of the food consumed by their free-range counterparts, and so would be much cheaper to fatten for market.

The bull and the leaper are both made of bronze, and together they’re about 5 centimetres (2 inches) long and between 10 and 13 centimetres (4 or 5 inches) high.

At first sight it is a surprise that it’s made of bronze at all, since neither copper nor tin – both of which are needed to make bronze – are found on Crete. Both came from much further afield, with the copper coming from Cyprus – the very name of which means the ‘copper island’ – or from the eastern Mediterranean coast.

There clearly wasn’t quite enough tin in the alloy, which explains why the surface is rather pock-marked, and also why the structure is weak, so that the hind legs of the bull have broken off.

Objects like this little bronze statue of the bull-leaper tell us a lot about one aspect of Crete’s history – its central role in the mastery of metals which, in a few centuries, transformed the world.

For example, the collection of small amber beads that was found with the cape must have come from the Baltic – many hundreds of miles away from Mold.

But, partly through the discovery of rare objects like the Mold Gold Cape, in recent years we have come to see these societies very differently.

But, partly through the discovery of rare objects like the Mold Gold Cape, in recent years we have come to see these societies very differently. For, while it’s unique in its complexity, the cape is just one example of several precious objects that tell us that societies in Britain must then have been extremely sophisticated, both in their manufacture and in their social structure.

Recent analysis of the gold-working techniques, and the decorative style of the cape, dates the burial to this very period.

The Mold Cape was buried relatively close to the largest Bronze Age copper mine in north-west Europe, the Great Orme.

The upper body alone is about 2.5 metres (8 or 9 feet) high, and it weighs about 7 tonnes.

To deliver our sculpture a literate, numerate and very well-oiled bureaucratic machine was essential – and that same machine was also used to manage Egypt’s international trade and to organize and equip its armies.

The granite for the sculpture was quarried from Aswan, more than 150 kilometres (90 miles) up the Nile to the south, and extracted in a single colossal block – the whole statue would have originally weighed about 20 tonnes.

The Ramesses in the British Museum was one of the first works to challenge long-held assumptions that great art had begun in Greece.

By 700 BC, the Assyrian rulers based in northern Iraq had built an empire that stretched from Iran to Egypt and covered most of the area that we now call ‘the Middle East’.

These lines of people, carrying their worldly goods and heading for deportation, must be one of the earliest depictions of refugees that exists.

Compared with the one at Giza, this sphinx is very small – about the size of a spaniel – but it is particularly interesting, because it’s not just a hybrid of a man and a lion but a fusion of Egypt and the kingdom of Kush, now northern Sudan. … Hieroglyphics on the sphinx’s chest spell it out: this is a portrait of the great King Taharqo, the fourth pharaoh to rule over the combined kingdoms of Kush and Egypt.

Taharqo, represented by the British Museum sphinx, was the most important of all the Kushite kings. … He initiated a golden age for his immense new kingdom, and he succeeded largely because, rather than imposing Kushite customs on the Egyptians, he absorbed and adopted theirs.

It’s a pattern that we see again and again in successful conquests: the conquerors use the existing symbols and vocabulary of power, because those are the ones that are already familiar to the population.

In the long history of Egypt, Kushite rule was a brief interlude of not even 150 years.

Yet it reminds us that the border between what is now Egypt and Sudan is a constant faultline, both geographic and political, that has frequently divided the peoples of the Nile Valley and frequently been fought over.

This spectacular bronze vessel, made about 3,000 years ago, is called a gui.

The Zhou were the first to formalize the idea of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the Chinese notion that heaven blesses and sustains the authority of a just ruler.

A society that could organize all this, and devote so much energy and resource to materials for burial, must have been both prosperous and very highly structured.

For more than 2,000 years states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand.

Fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time. The Chinese began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world the Lydians started making actual coins as we would still recognize them – round shapes in precious metals.

It was Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold standard starts here.

This new Lydian method of minting moved the responsibility for checking the purity and weight of the coins from the businessman to the ruler – a switch that made the city of Sardis an easy, swift and extremely attractive place to do business in. Because people could trust Croesus’s coins, they used them far beyond the boundaries of Lydia itself, giving him a new kind of influence – financial power.

You can tell a lot about a state from its transport system, and our chariot tells us a great deal about imperial Persia. … Public order was so secure that people could travel long distances without armed guards. And they could travel fast. With its horses specially bred for strength and speed, and with its large, steadying wheels, this chariot was the Ferrari or Porsche of its time. Broad dirt roads were kept wheel-worthy in all weathers, and there were frequent staging posts. Commands from the centre could be transmitted at speed across the whole territory, thanks to an entirely reliable royal postal service that used horsemen, runners and express messengers.

But what is an Egyptian god doing protecting a Persian on the frontiers of Afghanistan? … It’s a perfect demonstration of the Persian Empire’s striking capacity for tolerating different religions and indeed, on occasion, adopting them from the people that they conquered.

The most famous beneficiaries of Cyrus’s shrewd political judgement after the conquest of Babylon were the Jews. … Taken prisoner a generation before by Nebuchadnezzar, they were now allowed to return home to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple.

Around 1800, Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed some of the sculptures from the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens, and a few years later put them on public show in London.

Centaurs – half-horse, half-human – are attacking the Lapiths, who are a legendary Greek people.

The metopes are all about battles – battles between the Olympian gods and the Giants, between Athenians and Amazons, and, in the ones I want to focus on, between Lapiths and Centaurs.

The struggle against the Centaurs that we see on the metopes becomes an emblem of the perpetual battle that, for the Athenians, every civilized state has to fight.

These richly decorated flagons were stumbled on in 1927 by workmen digging in Basse-Yutz. Nothing quite like them had ever been found in western Europe before, and the strangeness of their style and decoration led many experts to assume that they must be fakes.

Nothing quite like them had ever been found in western Europe before, and the strangeness of their style and decoration led many experts to assume that they must be fakes. But the curators at the British Museum were convinced that they were genuinely ancient; that they represented a new, unknown chapter in European history. So the flagons were acquired for the then colossal sum of £5,000. Betting the bank on this kind of acquisition is a huge gamble on curatorial knowledge, but in this case it paid off, and research has since confirmed they were indeed made about 2,500 years ago, that is, at roughly the time that the Parthenon was being built in Greece, the Persian Empire was at its zenith and Confucius was teaching in China. The Basse-Yutz Flagons are now celebrated as two of the most important and earliest pieces of Celtic art anywhere.

Patterns on the base of the flagons are familiar from Brittany to the Balkans, while there are shapes inspired by palm fronds found in the art of ancient Egypt. And then the very idea of a flagon itself is foreign – it’s a popular shape created by people living in northern Italy. A feast with these flagons at the centre would leave the visitors to these new rulers in no doubt at all that the people they were visiting were international, cosmopolitan, rich and intensely sophisticated.

The bronze, the design and the craftsmanship of the Basse-Yutz Flagons make a nonsense of the Greek myth of these northern Europeans as crude barbarians, and they tell us a great deal about the scope of their world. These people lived in small communities, but they were masters of complex metal technologies, and the materials from which our flagons are made make it clear that they had plenty of international contacts: the source materials for making this bronze are copper, from the Alps to the south, and tin, probably from Cornwall in the far west.

On each flagon, there are at least 120 separate pieces of coral – probably from the Mediterranean. They’ve now faded to white, but originally they would have been bright red, giving a striking contrast to the lustrous bronze.

But elements of the Olmec culture lived on in central Mexico. … The culture of the Olmecs is truly the cultura madre for all Central America, casting a very long shadow, establishing models and patterns that were to be followed by other cultures for centuries to come.

To produce perfect tones they had to have absolutely standardized shapes, and the consistency of these shapes meant that the bells could also be used to measure standard volumes.

Augustus, the first Roman emperor, imitated Alexander by using his own image to represent imperial power to his subjects.

Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire in 334 BC ushered in an age of megalomaniac rulers and great empires.

When he became emperor he set out to complete the occupation of the whole subcontinent and attacked the independent state of Kalinga – modern-day Orissa on the east coast. It was a savage, brutal assault and one which seems afterwards to have thrown Ashoka into a state of terrible remorse.

With his conversion Ashoka renounced war as an instrument of state policy and adopted human benevolence as the solution to the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, this was a ruler who really did change the way that his subjects and their successors thought. Gandhi was an admirer, as was Nehru, and Ashoka’s message even finds its way on to the modern currency – on all Indian banknotes we see Gandhi facing the four lions of Ashoka’s pillar.

Ashoka’s political and moral philosophy, as he expressed it in his imperial inscriptions, initiated a tradition of religious tolerance, non-violent debate and a commitment to the idea of happiness which has animated Indian political philosophy ever since.

The Rosetta Stone itself was made in 196 BC, on the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V, by then a teenager.

A French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, then realized that not only the symbols for Ptolemy but all the hieroglyphs were both pictorial and phonetic – they recorded the sound of the Egyptian language.

Hardly surprising, then, that they were inordinately expensive; you could buy more than ten bronze cups for the price of one in lacquer.

Around the oval base of the cup runs a thin band with sixty-seven Chinese characters on it.

Today, when China wants to establish friendly relations, it still gives the present that nobody else can match – it’s known as Panda Diplomacy.

The glory of Augustus is not quite as unalloyed as he wanted us to believe.

Candace and her army took our statue back to the city of Meroë and buried the severed head of the glorious Augustus beneath the steps of a temple dedicated to victory. … It was a superbly calculated insult.

In 25 BC, so the writer Strabo tells us, an invading army from the Sudanese kingdom of Meroë, led by the fierce one-eyed queen Candace, captured a series of Roman forts and towns in southern Egypt.

The Warren Cup shows scenes of sexual coupling between adult men and adolescent boys. This 2,000-year-old piece of Roman silverware is a goblet that looks as though it would hold a pretty large glass of wine.

Although the homosexual scenes on the cup are ones that today strike us as explicit – some might say shocking and taboo – homosexuality was very much part of Roman life. But it was a complicated part, tolerated but not entirely accepted.

In one of the mounds there were around 200 stone pipes, one of which is our otter pipe.

In the colder north, though, there were no wrapping leaves to be had through the long winters, and smokers had to find another way of containing their tobacco – so they made pipes.

Tobacco was first cultivated in Central and South America, and smoked wrapped in the leaves of other plants, rather like a cigar.

We know that 2,000 years ago only select members of the community were buried in the mounds.

The rubber ball was heavy – it could weigh anywhere from 3 or 4 kilos (8 lbs) to almost 15 kilos (30 lbs)

Perhaps the key to understanding this object is that this toad excretes a hallucinogenic substance, and Central Americans believed that it represented an Earth goddess.

It seems that the painful intensity of the ball game symbolized the constant cosmic struggle between the forces of life and death.

The Spanish recognized the religious significance of the courts and wanted to replace the old local pagan religion with their new Catholic one.

It used to be thought that the losing team was always sacrificially slaughtered, and, though this did occasionally happen later, at the time of our belt we don’t know what lay in store for the losers.

About half of the scroll is made up of painted scenes, each one divided from the next by lines from the poem. … One frame shows a disturbing episode. A beautiful and seductive woman of the court harem is approaching the emperor. The billowing robes and red ribbons that she’s wearing accentuate her movement as she flutters coquettishly towards him. But, as we look more closely, we can see that she’s actually faltering: she’s just been brought up short by the emperor’s outstretched arm and hand, raised in an uncompromising gesture of rejection. The emperor is above fleshly desire. Her body twists as she abruptly begins to turn away, and on her face is the expression of a shocked, thwarted vanity.

In the Admonitions Scroll we find that a lady ought never to exploit the manners or weaknesses of her man. … Another scene in the scroll illustrates a real event, when a ferocious black bear escaped from its enclosure during a show put on for the emperor and the ladies of his harem. In this particular scene we first see two harem ladies running away from the wild beast and looking back in horror. We next see the emperor seated, frozen with shock, and in front of him the valiant lady who has not run away but has rushed to place herself between the emperor and the bear, which is leaping at her, snarling fiercely. But the emperor is safe. This, the picture tells us, is the kind of self-sacrifice we need and expect from our great ladies.

This scroll became the prized possession of many emperors, who may have found it to be a useful aid in subduing troublesome wives and mistresses but who also admired its sheer beauty and used the act of collecting this precious masterpiece as a way of showing just how culturally astute and powerful they were. … We know exactly whose courts it was viewed in, because each imperial ruler has left their mark on it, in the form of a stamp carefully placed in the blank spaces around the paintings and the calligraphy. Some of the previous owners have also added their own comments to the scroll.

When Visigoths attacked the city of Rome in AD 408, they were induced to leave only on the payment of a huge ransom that included gold, silver, large quantities of silk and one further luxury – a tonne of pepper.

Is it more than an extraordinary coincidence that at about the same moment Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism first start showing Christ, Hindu gods and the Buddha in human form?

And once buildings and sculptures exist, they last, and become the pattern for the future.

As with Christianity and Buddhism it seems to relate to empire, wealth, a faith that is gaining new devotees and the power of art.

For the Sasanian kings were not just secular rulers: they were agents of god, and Shapur’s full titles emphasize his religious role: ‘the good worshipper of god, Shapur, the king of Iran and non-Iran, of the divine race of God, the King of Kings’.

So images like this one are visual metaphors for royal power conceived in Zoroastrian terms. In killing the wild deer the hunter-king is imposing divine order on demonic chaos.

Silver dishes like this one were used by the Sasanian kings in vast quantities, sent as diplomatic gifts across the whole of Asia.

The decision to try to depict the face of Christ – probably taken because the Roman elite were so used to seeing their gods in statues, paintings and mosaics – was both a major theological step and one of the decisive turning points in European visual culture.

Yemen that supplied the whole Roman Empire with frankincense and myrrh.

A pound of frankincense cost the equivalent of a Roman labourer’s salary for a month, and a pound of myrrh twice as much.

Suddenly, in the 370s, offerings to traditional gods just stopped and their place was taken by other gods with a wider, universal reach.

Arabian aromatics had powered the religious life of the pagan Roman Empire, but when that empire converted to Christianity and no longer needed frankincense for worship, the incense trade was dealt a massive blow, contributing to a collapse in the Yemen economy.

But something quite unexpected happened to those coins with Abd al-Malik standing on them. … After a few years they simply vanished. During the Hijri year 77 (AD 697), the standing caliph coin was suddenly replaced with a design that could hardly be more different. There is no caliph, no figure, only words.

But their largest settlement, where now we find the southern outskirts of the modern Peruvian city of Trujillo, was the first real city in South America, with streets, canals, plazas and industrial areas that any contemporary Roman town would have been proud of.

Moche territory stretched for about 350 miles along the Pacific coast of what is now Peru.

There are no written records to tell us why, but the best bet seems to be climate change. … Whatever the cause, in the decades around AD 600, the Moche state and civilization collapsed.

The tile is about the size of a large old-fashioned roof slate – just under 30 centimetres by 30 (12 inches by 12) – and it’s made of heavy cream-coloured clay.

The dragon on our roof tile was, in a sense, just a humble foot soldier in the great battle of the spirits that was being perpetually fought out at roof level, high above the streets of Kyongju. … But, at ground level, there were other threats: there were always potential rebels within the state – the aristocrats who had been forced to live in Kyongju, for example – and on the coast there were Japanese pirates.

Khotan is now in western China, but in the eighth century it was a separate kingdom and the linchpin of the Silk Road, vital for water and refreshment and a major manufacturer of silk.

This story, plainly set out in three scenes, is a quirky document of a transforming shift of knowledge and skill from the East to the West.

It is a limestone relief carving, about the size of a small coffee table. It’s rectangular and it shows two human figures. A man stands holding a blazing torch over the kneeling figure of a woman. Both are elaborately costumed, with wonderfully extravagant headdresses. So far, so innocuous. But when you look more closely at the woman the scene becomes horribly disconcerting, because you can see that she is pulling a rope through her tongue – and the rope contains large thorns which are piercing and lacerating her.

This image is one of three found in the temple, each one positioned above an entrance. Together they make it clear that the act of pulling thorns through the tongue was not just to make the Queen’s blood flow as an offering but was deliberately intended to create intense pain – pain which, after due ritual preparation, would send her into a visionary trance.

The next lintel in the series shows us the consequence of the queen’s self-mortification. The ritual blood-letting and the pain have combined to transform Lady K’abal Xook’s consciousness, and they enable her to see, rising from the offering bowl that holds her blood, a vision of a sacred serpent. From the mouth of the snake a warrior brandishing a spear appears – the founding ancestor of the Yaxchilan royal dynasty, establishing the king’s connection with his ancestors and therefore his right to rule.

But some elements survive. … At the British Museum we have a few fragments of painted plaster from the harem quarters of an Abbasid caliph, which take us back into the heart of the Islamic empire of the ninth century and show us the real counterparts of the girls from the Arabian Nights.

The Lothair Crystal, also known as the Susanna Crystal, is a flat disc of rock crystal about 18 centimetres (7 inches) in diameter, and carved into it is a biblical (or in some traditions an apocryphal) story in eight separate scenes, like a crystal cartoon strip. It is a story based in Babylon, where the beautiful young Susanna is the wife of a rich merchant. While she is bathing in her husband’s orchard, two older men intrude and try to bully her into having sex with them. She calls her servants for help, and the furious elders falsely claim that they saw her in the act of adultery. We then see Susanna being led away to almost certain death by stoning, but at that point the brilliant young prophet Daniel intervenes and challenges the evidence for her conviction. Separating the elders, Daniel asks each of them one searching question in a classic courtroom drama: under what kind of tree did they see Susanna having sex? The men give conflicting answers, their story is exposed as fabricated, and it is they who are stoned to death, for perjury. In the final scene Susanna is declared innocent and gives thanks to God.

If Lothair had succeeded in divorcing his wife, and had had a legitimate heir, Lorraine might now rank with Spain, France and Germany as one of the great states of continental Europe.

In 869, when Lothair died undivorced, his uncles did indeed partition his lands, and all that remains of Lotharingia today is the name of Lorraine. For more than a thousand years, indeed until 1945, Lothair’s Middle Kingdom was bitterly fought over by the successors of the wicked uncles, France and Germany.

It’s very rare for a statue as big as this to survive and escape being melted down; indeed we know of no other example of this size from medieval Sri Lanka. … Tara, by contrast, is bronze through and through.

Tara shows that Buddhism and Hinduism are not tightly defined codes of belief, but ways of being and acting that can, in different contexts, absorb each other’s insights.

The hoard that they found was contained in a beautifully worked silver bowl, about the size of a small melon. Astonishingly, it contained more than 600 coins, all silver and roughly the same diameter as a modern £1 coin, but wafer thin.

The Vale of York hoard makes it clear that Viking England did indeed operate on a transcontinental scale. There is a dirham from Samarkand, and there are other Islamic coins from central Asia.

But this trade route also carried the dark side of the Vikings’ reputation. All through eastern Europe, Vikings captured people to sell as slaves in the great market of Kiev – which explains why in so many European languages the words for ‘slave’ and ‘Slav’ are still closely connected.

It is not made of silvered glass – the modern, silver-backed mirror we are all familiar with didn’t come into use until around the sixteenth century. Early mirrors like this bronze one were all made of metal, which was then so highly polished that you could see your face in it.

But lying right at the end of all the great Asian trade routes and isolated by sea, Japan, unlike almost any other culture, was able to opt out of this interconnected world.

At the beginning of the twentieth century this pond was drained in order to build a bridge for pilgrims. To the astonishment of the engineers, deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond they found around 600 mirrors (ours among them) which over the centuries had been consigned to the water.

It is this particular ability of Japanese mirrors to allow humans to speak to gods that has ensured the survival of our mirror, which with eighteen others was given to the British Museum in 1927.

Here, on the rich and strategically important island of Java, at the monument of Borobudur, is the supreme example of how the network of maritime trade allowed Buddhism to spread beyond the boundaries of its birth and become a world religion.

Borobudur is one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world and one of the great cultural achievements of humanity – a huge, square, terraced pyramid, representing the Buddhist view of the cosmos in stone, decorated with well over a thousand relief carvings and peopled with hundreds of statues of the Buddha.

All this trade made Kilwa very rich, but it changed it in more than material ways. … In due course, thanks to these Arab traders, the coastal towns were converted to Islam, and Arabic and Persian words were absorbed into the local Bantu language to create a new lingua franca – Swahili.

One of the puzzles of the Lewis Chessmen is that there are lots of major pieces and very few pawns. … The pawns are the only pieces that aren’t human; they’re simply small ivory slabs that stand upright like gravestones. … In medieval society, these represent the peasants brutally conscripted on to the battlefield.

These are the fighters called berserkers. … Berserker is an Icelandic word for a soldier wearing a shirt made of bearskin, and the word ‘berserk’ even today is synonymous with wild, destructive violence.

There’s one piece I have not mentioned yet, but which is perhaps the most fascinating figure of all the Lewis Chessmen, one that gives a crucial insight into the society that made it. … It is the bishop, who in medieval Europe was one of the great powers of the state, not only controlling spiritual life but also commanding land and men.

This object, however, a head cast in brass, is undoubtedly a great work of art. … The sculptures of Ife exploded European notions of the history of art, and they forced Europeans to rethink Africa’s place in the cultural history of the world.

The idea of black African civilization on this level was quite simply unimaginable to a European a hundred years ago. … In 1910, when the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius found the first brass head in a shrine outside the city of Ife, he was so overwhelmed by its technical and aesthetic assurance that he immediately associated it with the greatest art that he knew – the Classical sculptures of ancient Greece.

The discovery of the art of Ife is a textbook example of a widespread cultural and political phenomenon: that as we discover our past, so we discover ourselves – and more.

Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment cobalt to meet local Iranian taste.

This object is a stool from the Caribbean, from what is now the Dominican Republic. … It too tells a rich story – in this case of the Taino people, who lived in the Caribbean islands before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Actually, there is gold on our duho as well. … The wide gaping mouth and the straining, boggling eyes of the humanoid head at the front are emphasized by being inlaid with gold discs, adding enormously to the frightening power of the object.

In Huastec Mexico, penitents visited statues of the mother goddess asking for cleansing and forgiveness.

Hindu worshippers in India used temple statues to develop personal relationships with individual Hindu gods.

Across the world different religious systems used objects to bridge the gap between the human and the divine, to aid the dialogue between individuals, communities or even empires and their gods.

In the eastern Orthodox Christian Church, images of Jesus and the saints were venerated in the form of icons.

In the western Christian Church, pilgrims flocked to shrines to see holy relics, including the body parts of saints.

The amazing church of the Sainte-Chapelle, created to exhibit the king’s collection of relics, cost 40,000 livres to build; the Crown of Thorns alone cost the king over three times that amount.

So great was its power in medieval people’s eyes that through it Louis was linked directly to Christ himself.

In the late fourteenth century one came into the possession of a powerful French prince, Jean, duc de Berry, and we can be absolutely confident that the reliquary in the British Museum belonged to him.

What does a great empire do when faced with imminent invasion and destruction? It can rearm at home and seek allies abroad; but more cunningly it can revisit its history to forge a myth that will unite the people and carry them through to victory, a myth that will demonstrate to everyone that their country has been specially chosen by history to uphold justice and righteousness. It is what the French did in 1914 and the British in 1940. In such circumstances, history reimagined can be a very powerful weapon.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy – celebrated in feast and icon – did not secure the survival of the Byzantine Empire. In 1453 the city fell to the Turks, Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

Our sculpture would probably have been at the door of a temple, welcoming families as they approached, and offerings would have been made not just to Shiva but also to Parvati, to the pair of them as a divine couple.

In the Hindu tradition, by contrast, Shiva needs Parvati.

Our statue is about 1.5 metres (5 feet) high, so more or less life-size

This is a goddess who gets her hands dirty, and, according to Aztec myth, not just her hands: another of her names is ‘eater of filth’ – she consumes dirt and purifies it

Although we see him only from the waist up, he is about 2.7 metres (9 feet) high and dominates whatever gallery he’s in.

Rather than being abandoned along with the other monoliths, Hoa Hakananai’a was incorporated into the Birdman cult, was moved, placed in a hut and now entered a new phase of his life.

The Birdman cult, as it has been called, focused on an annual competition to collect the first egg of the migrating sooty tern from a neighbouring islet.

For thousands of years objects had travelled huge distances over land and sea. … In spite of these connections, the world before 1500 was essentially still a series of networks. … Nobody could take a global view because nobody had ever travelled round the world.

Between about 1350 and 1550 great swathes of the world were occupied by the superpowers of their day – from the Inca in South America to the Ming in China, the Timurids in central Asia and the vigorous Ottoman Empire, which spanned three continents and ran from Algiers to the Caspian, from Budapest to Mecca. … The enduring power we are looking at in this chapter is the great Islamic Ottoman Empire, which by 1500 had conquered Constantinople and was moving, with the confidence born of secure borders and expanding strength, from being a military power to an administrative one.

It is called a tughra. … This tughra has been drawn on heavy paper in bold lines of blue cobalt ink, enclosing what looks like a tiny meadow of colourful, golden flowers. … It’s an elegant, elaborate monogram cut from the top of an official document, and the whole design spells the title of the sultan whose authority it represents.

You need a bureaucracy. … Administrators all over the empire need to demonstrate that they have the authority of the ruler, which is done by issuing a visible emblem that can be carried and shown to everyone.

The tughra would be at the top of all important official documents, and Suleiman issued about 150,000 in his reign.

The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith. Paper money is truly one of the revolutionary inventions of human history.

Eventually, around 1425, the Chinese government gave up the struggle and suspended the use of paper money.

Gold was the attribute of the great Inca sun god and represented his generative powers – gold was described as the ‘sweat of the Sun’, while silver was the ‘tears of the Moon’.

But they discovered instead the richest silver mines in the world and began to mint the coins that would power the world’s first global currency.

Ulugh Beg’s cup is oval, just over 6 centimetres (2½ inches) high and 20 centimetres (7 inches) long – more a small bowl than a cup – and made from a superbly grained olive-green jade with natural cloud-like markings drifting across the glossy stone.

This is the time of the building of the great mosques of Bukhara and Samarkand, Tashkent and Herat, conceived and executed on a monumental scale, a central Asian equivalent of the European Renaissance.

Dürer’s Rhinoceros is a woodcut print, and it shows a massive beast, nicely identified over its head by the word RHINOCERVS, with the date 1515 above and the AD monogram of the artist below.

The story of how the rhino came to Europe tells us that the Portuguese were not just trading with India but were trying to establish permanent bases there – this is the very beginning of the European land presence in Asia.

Around 4,000–5,000 copies of Dürer’s rhino were sold in his lifetime, and many millions have sold in other forms since.

Our ship is an elaborately crafted model made of gilded copper and iron, which stands about one metre (40 inches) high. … Its intricate inner workings did once create noise, smoke and movement. … This fantastical mechanical galleon is one of the grandest executive toys of the European Renaissance, and it sums up not just shipbuilding in Europe but Europe itself between 1450 and 1650. … In the course of those 200 years Europe’s view of the world and its place in it was completely transformed.

What ruler, from Dresden to Kyoto, would not gaze in delight as figures moved to his command in strict and unswerving order? … So unlike the messiness of rule in the real world.

Observers repeatedly stressed the precision, the orderliness, the grace of mechanisms like this one, which embodied the ideal of the early modern European state as it ought to have been and rarely was, with everything working together harmoniously under the control of one guiding idea and one beneficent sovereign. … Its appeal went far beyond Europe: automata like our galleon were presented as gifts to the emperor of China and the Ottoman sultan and were greatly prized.

Even in the sixteenth century, automata like this were far more than just toys for the rich: they were central to the experimental sciences, mechanics, engineering and the search for perpetual motion, the growing desire to control the world by taking possession of the secrets of its workings.

None had been seen in Europe before 1897.

Part of that control was a total prohibition on the export of the brass plaques.

In 1548 just one German merchant house agreed to provide Portugal with 432 tons of brass manillas for the West African market.

But research quickly established that the Benin plaques were entirely West African creations, made without European influence.

It was the perfect opportunity for the Japanese, who stepped in to take China’s place in the porcelain export business and for a brief period were able to dominate the European market.

First there was the great boost, both in manpower and technology, given to the ceramics industry as a result of the Korean wars of the 1590s. … Then, in 1644, the Ming Dynasty in China was overthrown, and in the ensuing political chaos Chinese production of porcelain collapsed, leaving the European market wide open.

It is a fine example of how the continents of the world were for the first time being linked together by ships and by trade. … This new world now needed a functioning means of exchange – an international currency.

For the peso de ocho reales, the Spanish piece of eight, was the first truly global money. … It was produced in huge numbers, and within twenty-five years of its first minting in the 1570s it had spread across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, establishing a global dominance that it was to maintain until well into the nineteenth century.

The arrival of Spanish-American silver destabilized the East Asian economies and caused financial chaos in Ming China.

In the coin collection of the British Museum there is a display that gives a wonderfully clear idea of the global role of pieces of eight made in the Spanish-American mints. … One coin has been counter-stamped by a local sultan in Indonesia, while others were stamped by the Spanish themselves for use in their province of Brabant, now in modern Belgium.

Potosí remains proverbial for its wealth. … Spaniards today still say something is ‘vale un Potosí – ‘worth a fortune’ – and the Spanish piece of eight lives on as a romantic prop in fantasy pirate stories.

Visiting Europeans were astonished by this active religious tolerance, with Christians and Jews, each with their own places of worship, peacefully accommodated within a Muslim state – a level of religious diversity unthinkable in Christian Europe at the time.

The state is officially Shi’a, but Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians are all by the terms of the Constitution free to practise their religion in public.

The last Safavid shah, Husayn, was harshly intolerant of non-Shi’ites and gave religious leaders extensive powers to regulate public behaviour, a religious repression that may have contributed to his downfall.

Unlike Christians and Jews, Hindus are not recognized in the Qur’an as other ‘people of the book’, so in theory they were not even necessarily to be tolerated by Islamic rulers, as the Mughal emperors always had to be aware. They managed this potential difficulty by adopting a policy of wide religious inclusion. Akbar and Jahangir worked easily with many faiths.

It is almost impossible to imagine a European ruler at this date, or indeed any date, being represented so submissively taking instruction in faith.

The former president Sukarno, the first president after Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch following the Second World War, liked to identify himself with shadow-puppet characters, and especially with Bima – a righteous, mighty fighter, speaking like the common man rather than in elite language.

This may explain why so many of the names of land holders on the map show marriages between Spanish settlers and native Indian aristocrats, evidence of a remarkable fusion between the two peoples and the emergence of a new, mixed, ruling class.

It was there, on the site of an Aztec shrine, that in December 1531, just ten years after the conquest, the Virgin Mary appeared to a young Aztec man whom the Spaniards called Juan Diego.

After the Vatican, it is now the most visited Catholic shrine in the world.

The first of all these modern centenary celebrations seems to have been organized in Germany, in Saxony in 1617; the event it was commemorating had taken place a hundred years earlier.

In 1517, the story goes, Martin Luther picked up a hammer and nailed what was effectively his religious manifesto – his ninety-five theses – to a church door; in doing so he triggered the religious turmoil that would become the Protestant Reformation.

This conviction, dearly and bloodily bought, that there are many ways to truth, changed the intellectual and political life of Europe, so that in 1717, when the bicentenary of Luther nailing his theses to the church door came round and new broadsheets were produced, the whole continent was well on the way to a revolution just as profound as the Reformation and, in many ways, a consequence of it – the Enlightenment.

China under the Qing Dynasty was regarded by many Europeans as the best-governed empire in history, and was enjoying its own version of the Enlightenment.

The dialogues and exchanges, the difficult transactions and misunderstandings, the straightforward clashes which resulted from encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans all over the world created an often deeply troubling history, since much of it resulted in the suppression of peoples and the fracturing of societies.

The complicated relationships between African Americans and Native Americans in the eighteenth century are often overlooked, but there was a good deal of contact, including intermarriage.

Feathers were the most valuable raw material at the Hawaiians’ disposal; their equivalent of turquoise in Mexico, jade in China or gold in Europe.

Chiefs donned feather helmets and capes to make contact with the gods – when making offerings to ensure a successful harvest, for instance, to avert disasters such as famine or illness, or to propitiate the gods before a battle.

But as he and the chief walked on the beach at Kealakekua Bay the chief’s men raised the alarm and in the ensuing mêlée Cook was killed.

The Seven Years War left the British government in charge of the lands to the west of the existing British colonies, from the Great Lakes down to the Mississippi.

Virtually none of the European settlements are there.

Two quite different readings of the same physical experience: you could hardly have a better demonstration of a central Enlightenment problem, the difficulty of any society in trying to understand another.

It is made of red mangrove wood, one of the woods chosen for making Australian shields, because it is tough enough to absorb the impact of a spear or deflect a club or boomerang and is extremely resistant to insects and rot, even when submerged in sea-water.

In doing so, he transformed the ancient bi into an object of the eighteenth-century Chinese Enlightenment.

This bi – a fine, plain disc with a hole in the centre, of a type often found in ancient Chinese tombs – was already more than 3,000 years old when the emperor decided to study it.

His greatest cultural achievement was the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the largest anthology of writing in human history, encompassing the whole canon of Chinese writing from its origins to the eighteenth century. Digitized, today it fills 167 CD-ROMs.

The problem of accurate timekeeping at sea was finally cracked in the middle of the eighteenth century by John Harrison, who invented a clock – a marine chronometer – which could go on accurately telling the time in spite of fluctuations in temperature and humidity and the constant movement of a ship, thus making it possible for the first time for ships anywhere to establish their longitude.

This particular chronometer sailed on many ships – always issued and set, as others were, at Greenwich; but it is famous because in 1831 it was issued to HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his great voyage to South America, the Galapagos Islands and on around the world, which ultimately led to his theory of evolution and his great work On the Origin of Species.

As a result, the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time were increasingly widely used by the international community until, in 1884, the Washington Convention formally ratified the practice.

By the middle of the nineteenth century it was established that all British shipping would take Greenwich as its point of reference for time and therefore for longitude, and all the oceans of the world had been mapped by British ships on that basis.

What could be more domestic, more unremarkable, more British, than a nice cup of tea? You could of course put the question the other way round and ask what could be less British than a cup of tea, given that tea is made from plants grown in India or China and often sweetened by sugar from the Caribbean. It is one of the ironies of British national identity – or perhaps it says everything about our national identity – that the drink which has become the worldwide caricature of Britishness has nothing indigenous about it, but is the result of centuries of global trade and a complex imperial history.

The ruling classes had a real interest in promoting tea drinking among the growing urban population, who were poor, vulnerable to disease and perceived as prone to disorderly drunkenness. Beer, port and gin had become a significant part of the diet of men, women and even children, partly because alcohol as a mild antiseptic was much safer to drink than unpurified city water. But by the nineteenth century alcohol was a growing social problem.

As the century went on, tea plantations were established in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and large numbers of Tamils were moved from south India to Ceylon to work on them.

But a loving, tranquil cup of tea has a violent hinterland. When all tea came into Europe from China, the British East India Company traded opium for silver and used that silver to buy tea. The trade was so important that it brought the two countries to war. The first of the conflicts, which we still refer to as the Opium Wars – they were in fact just as much about tea – broke out more or less as our teapot was leaving the Wedgwood factory.

So our tea set is really a three-piece social history of nineteenth-century Britain.

This bestselling woodblock print, made around 1830 by the great artist Hokusai, is one of his series of thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

But there are other ways of reading Hokusai’s Great Wave. Look a little closer and you see that the beautiful wave is about to engulf three boats with frightened fishermen, and Mount Fuji is so small that you, the spectator, share the feeling that the sailors in the boats must have as they look to shore – it’s unreachable, and you are lost. This is, I think, an image of instability and uncertainty.

Prussian blue was imported either directly by Dutch traders or, more probably, via China, where it was being manufactured from the 1820s.

Japonisme became a craze and was absorbed into the artistic traditions of Europe and America, influencing the fine and applied arts well into the twentieth century.

After Commodore Perry’s forced opening of the Japanese ports in 1853 and 1854, Japan resumed sustained contact with the outside world. It had learnt that no nation would be allowed to opt out of the global economic system. Japanese prints were exported in large numbers to Europe, where they were quickly discovered and celebrated by artists like Whistler, Van Gogh and Monet; the Japanese artist who had been so influenced by European prints now influenced the Europeans in return.

It is made from a single piece of reddish African coralwood, a durable hardwood found in the forested areas of Central Africa and valued for making drums because it stands up well to repeated striking, maintains a constant tone and is resistant to termites.

This thinning would materially change the sound of the drum, evidence that although it might continue to be used for its original purpose of music-making or calling people to arms, it would now do so with a different voice.

It was then presented to Queen Victoria.

At this point they were still calling themselves suffragists, but after a few years of activism the Daily Mail would dub these new, feisty protestors ‘suffragettes’ – a derisory, diminutive term to distinguish them from women who stuck to peaceful means.

But by 1903, the Pankhursts and others had had enough. … Under Mrs Pankhurst’s leadership the suffragettes swung into direct action.

In 1918 British women over the age of 30 were given the right to vote, and in 1928 the Equal Franchise Act extended the vote to all women over the age of 21, on the same terms as men.

So we have the surprising situation of a socialist revolutionary regime making luxury goods to sell to the capitalist world.

Hockney began work in 1966, while the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was drafting the legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in England and Wales ; and it was published in 1967, just as Parliament passed Jenkins’s Sexual Offences Act.

This insistently unspecific image reminds us that sexual behaviour, although totally private, is also totally universal. Society’s responses to it, on the other hand, are most definitely not.

For the first time in this history we are examining an object that is a record of war but which does not glorify war or the ruler who waged it. The Throne of Weapons is a chair – or throne – constructed out of parts of guns that were made all over the world and exported to Africa. If a striking feature of the nineteenth century was the growth of mass markets and mass consumption, the twentieth century can be characterized by mass warfare and mass killing: the two world wars, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia’s killing fields, Rwanda – the list goes on. If there is one small, positive side to all this devastation it is that the twentieth century has more than any previous one recorded and articulated the mass suffering of ordinary victims of war – the soldiers and civilians who paid with their lives. Across the world there are Tombs of Unknown Soldiers; the Throne of Weapons is in this tradition. It is a monument to all the victims of the Mozambique civil war and a record of crimes against a whole country – indeed a continent. It is also, most unusually for such a commemorative piece, a work of art that speaks to us of hope and resolution. The Throne of Weapons is about human tragedy and human triumph in equal measure.

Although it is entirely made from chopped-up guns, in its shape the Throne of Weapons looks like a conventional wooden armchair – the homely sort you might find in a kitchen or at a dinner table. But that’s the only conventional thing about it. The guns that make up this chair in fact track the twentieth-century history of Mozambique. The oldest, forming the back, are two antiquated Portuguese G3 rifles – appropriately so, as Portugal was the country’s colonial master for nearly 500 years until independence in 1975. That independence was won by a left-wing resistance movement, FRELIMO, which was supported by the Soviet Union and its allies. This explains why all the other elements of the chair are dismembered guns manufactured in the communist bloc: the arms of the chair are from Soviet AK47s, the seat is formed from Polish and Czechoslovakian rifles, and one of the front legs is the barrel of a North Korean AKM. This is the Cold War as furniture, the Eastern Bloc in action, fighting for communism in Africa and across the world.

The main challenge in Mozambique was to decommission the millions of surviving guns and to equip the former soldiers and their families to rebuild their lives. The Throne of Weapons became an inspirational element in this recovery process. It was made as part of a peace project called Transforming Arms into Tools, which is still going today, and in which weapons once used by combatants on both sides were voluntarily surrendered under amnesty, and in exchange the people who gave them up received practical and positive tools – hoes, sewing machines, bicycles, roofing materials. Surrendering the guns was an act of real bravery on the part of these ex-soldiers and one of enormous significance for their families and the whole country. It helped break the addiction to the gun and to the culture of violence that had afflicted Mozambique for so many years. Since the beginning of the project more than 600,000 weapons have been relinquished and handed over to artists to be disabled and turned into sculpture. In the words of the project’s patron, Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s first independent ruler Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela, the aim was ‘to take away instruments of death from the hands of young people and to give them an opportunity to develop a productive life’. The guns themselves were to be turned into works of art. The project was started in 1995 by the Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, of the Christian Council of Mozambique, with the support of Christian Aid:

This piece seems to me to have a very special pathos, precisely because it has been made in the form of a chair. When we talk about chairs we always speak as though they were human beings – we say they have arms, legs, backs. They are, after all, made to be an echo of the human form, and they become almost a metaphor for living people. So there is something particularly disturbing about a chair made out of weapons designed specifically to maim backs and arms, legs and feet.

Money is now more likely to be numbers and digits on statements and invoices than physical coins and notes.

Every credit card in the world is of the same internationally agreed size and shape, to fit in all the ‘holes in the wall’ that now puncture our urban world.