The History of the World in 100 Plants

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The objects are interesting and well chosen to illustrate the cultures they came from and the changing technologies, beliefs, and challenges of the people who made them. If you regard the pieces as academic then they're pretty engaging. If you consider them for the lay reader / mass public ... then they're a little dry in places. The Paracas textiles, dating to 200-300 BC in Peru, which I think are not usually on view to the public because of their fragility. They are intricately sewn flying half-human figures that appear quite whimsical until you realize that they carry in one hand a curved blade and in the other a severed head.

I used to dislike history lessons in school, and I could not reconcile that with my love and curiosity for ancient civilisations like Egypt, Greece and Rome. Now I know that the problem was with the dispassionate method of teaching employed at school. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn’t live for a day without plants. Our past is all about plants, our present is all tied up with plants; and without plants there is no future.If you read about the Oxus Gold Chariot and didn't think know the tradition of respect for religious diversity in Zoroastrian Iran persisted into the Muslim era, this chapter is for you. Shah Abbas, a contemporary of Elizabeth I, eager to develop trade relationships, had a very multicultural court at Isfahan, and this standard, made for a Shi'a ceremony but with skills and materials from distant lands, shows what a cosmopolitan place Iran was through the period. There are some peculiar things about our copy of this book. Its owner has underlined and marked a few passages, some with a graphite pencil and some with a type of marker called a highlighter (which left a bright streak of color without obscuring the text). This was a common practice at the time: readers marked passages that they liked or that they needed to memorize or use in some way, since otherwise it could be difficult to find it among such a mountain of text (all of which, you will recall, is composed of the same handful of symbols in various combinations, which took years of training to decode). The book is organized into 20 sections of 5 objects. Those 20 sections are arranged chronologically, but more interestingly, a common theme for each section ties the objects together. So for example, section 1 is titled “Making us Human” and the 5 objects are: 1.) Mummy of Hornedjitef; 2.) Olduvai Stone Chipping Tool; 3.) Olduvai Handaxe; 4.) Swimming Reindeer; and 5.) Clovis Spear Point. Each section is organized similarly.

Another book that was bought for me as a present. The collection of objects featured is taken from the British Museum, although there’s enough in that establishment to allow the author to avoid Anglo or Eurocentrism, which he is careful to do. That is what one has to do while reading this book. Let the imagination roam free across space and time: as MacGregor describes the object, puts it in its historical context, and pulls in experts from various fields like art, literature, history etc. to give their opinions on it, the mind of the reader is engaged in a continuous dialogue with history. As we trace mankind’s origins from the Olduvai gorge in Africa to the interconnected modern world, the sense of linear time slowly disappears history starts looking like a geography of time.

Summary

Objects force us to the humble recognition that since our ancestors left East Africa to populate the world we have changed very little. Whether in stone or paper, gold, feathers or silicon, it is certain we will go on making objects that shape or reflect our world and that will define us to future generations”, thus the closing remarks at the end of the book! Though the book acts as an enthusiastic and informative guide to the ways in which objects can tell us stories about ourselves and our past, it remains aware of the issues with museums and the destructive process of collecting that filled them. It engages with the debate, offering no answers, but posing questions that the reader can consider, and manages to balance a celebration of the artefacts and their cultures without negating the controversial aspect of their current home. Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.

This book is the written from of a series of talks given by the author, Director of the British Museum, on the BBC. In the preface and introduction, the author talks about the many challenges: the main one (absent from the book!) being the medium of the radio, where visual imagery is impossible. But then, he realised that this is also one of the strengths-because the listener is forced to use his imagination, not only for the object, but also for the story behind it. It is so informative , original in its perspective and also tells us about how more recent generations sometimes altered artefacts to show their appreciation of the object, and these have therefore layers of history to them. 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" I am tempted to reply 'it's a bit late to get critical' but it wouldn't be fair, because MacGregor has viewed war-making raiders and cruel traders critically throughout. One thing that this history has in common with the more familiar kind is that extent to which it is a history of power, but it is, much more than traditional history, a narrative in which the vanquished answer and cannot be silenced. It is not, in my view, a radical history, but it contains the seed of radical histories, and in this object, one of them begins to germinate. This object totally blew my mind, because I didn't realise that "for a million years the sound of handaxes being made provided the percussion of everyday life". The earliest made thing in the book, a chopping tool, is 2 million years old, and this is about half a million years later, putting the speed of technological advance in my own lifetime into perspective. I didn't know about the handaxe, the 'Swiss army knife of the stone age', the thing over which we maybe learned to speak, and which enabled us to spread from Africa across the whole globe. A few chapters later is a Clovis spear point, from 11,000BC, even more precisely designed and perfectly made after another 500,000 years or so of development!

Table of Contents

It is mentioned that sometimes only objects can tell about the people, since there was no writing, or the written texts were on a material that couldn't stand the wear of time (the climate, the place, the robbers and so on). One of the objects I have as a museum souvenir (the Rosetta Stone) - a paperweight.