The Original 100 Objects

In 2010, a history of the world in a hundred objects hosted by Neil McGregor premiered

on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim.

“It was a groundbreaking series that told a complex and interconnected history of the world”

through 100 objects housed in the British Museum collection. For 2026, BBC Studios decided they wanted to revamp and reimagine that ambitious series. This time, focusing on the history of the United States, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To the great credit of the BBC, they thought that maybe British broadcasters weren't the best

equipped to take on the curation of a hundred objects that told the history of the United States, so that's when they reached out to me. Live long American. Roman Mars.

With our 100 objects series, we knew we wanted to get out of the museum and focus on objects

that were overlooked, thrown away, mass produced and misunderstood, not priceless museum pieces, but the everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large. But from the beginning, I knew I needed sage advice to do the job right, and so I sought the council of the original 100 objects host Neil McGregor.

Here's our conversation. Whereas hoping you could do it to begin with, is taking back to January 2010, a history of the world and a hundred objects is launching. It starts with a mummy that you saw as a boy.

“Were you aware of the phenomenon that this was going to be when you started?”

No, absolutely not.

I was intimidated, we were all intimidated by the fact that the BBC had committed to a series

of 100 programs, we had no idea how it was going to be received at all, and in a strange way, the project began really almost as an internal project in the British Museum. What's interested me having come from the National Gallery, to where a painting is collection, to a museum, the ambition of which was to show really the history of humanity through things, so not an art museum, but to try to explore what it meant to put objects more over the world

into one building. So it really began as a way of exploring what happens when you think of a museum as a place where different objects are exploring the same kind of human experience. And of all the things in the building, how did you choose the hundred? Well, this was the greatest fun.

The British Museum is created in the middle of the 18th century, really at that moment of the Enlightenment when people begin to have a totally different notion of what humanity means. It's the physical expression of that enlightenment notion that there is one humanity. So what we decided to do was to try to organize the hundred objects, well the BBC decided

that there would be five programmes a week and then needed to be a theme for each week. And we wanted to go effectively on the beginning, the earliest hand tools made by anything that can roughly be called human right up to today. So that gave us the format and that in each week we would go around the world. So you take, let's say, you know, 1000 BCE and look at a theme, let's say power.

“And how do different societies represent power at 1000 BCE?”

Yeah. But what it meant in turn was that for every week I would sit down with a curator from the Chinese collection, the unique collection, Egyptian collection, the America's collection. And we would have to think of what objects might speak to each other. Of course, for academics and particular disciplines, this is a totally new way of thinking.

There was no connection between ancient Egypt and ancient China. So no Egyptologist was likely to have asked what in my collection might relate to something that's happening at the same time in China. Yeah. Because there's no connection.

It's an anthropological question asked to people who are historical scholars and they found that completely thrilling because it's allowed them all really to look at familiar objects and ask a totally new kind of question and suggest the commonalities of human behavior wherever we are, we all behave roughly equally badly, equally well and surprisingly more or less in the same way.

Yeah. Were there heated arguments?

Directors don't normally pound the table. There was a certain amount of shrill advocacy for my particular piece and a certain amount of sulking that others didn't make it. But it was normally extremely good tempered and because it was a new kind of conversation for all of them very, very, very exciting because what we were looking at was not the history

of the world. But, ah, it's very peculiar about it and one of the histories we wanted to tell almost unspoken through it because every object came from the museum was how did it happen that

every one of these objects ultimately wound up in London.

Was there a sense that you had to present a variety of objects? Because you could certainly do, you could do a history of the world in a hundred coins. The joy of a collection at the British Museum is that you have so many different media

“in which humans articulate what matters to them, which are what all these things are about.”

But the main purpose of doing history through objects was we wanted to allow people who don't have a voice to be heard. History is, on the whole, used to mean of course, just written history. But limits were immediately to that small bit of humanity that wrote and people also did it to normally, to the people that were in control because they were the ones that wrote

the history and they made sure it survived.

So part of our project was to have a history told by the people that had never been able

to tell their story through the things they made. And that only is really important. How do you give a voice to the voiceless of the past? Yeah. Particularly when you're talking about indigenous histories, then the objects become

of huge importance as carrying the stories that weren't written and may not have survived in song or myth. So around the same time in 2010, I launched my show called 99% of visible and it's about architecture and design and there was a certain kind of perversity to doing a radio show about architecture and design because it's just hugely visual things.

And you made the same choice to do a radio series on these things that most people take in with their eyes. Why did you do that? What did you get out of that? Well, at one level, it is a totally counterintuitive attitude that we're talking about things,

the materiality of things, how they're made, the skill with which they're made, and yet you go out and see it, this is where I think the BBC Radio, they know how to do it. But it's not just that BBC has, I think, understood very profoundly and built on the fact

“that if you can only hear something, then you have to imagine what it is and you can take”

possession of something you imagine much more fully than something you just see reproducing

in front of you. It's why I think we're nearly always disappointed, but we see a film

of a book because in reading the book, we imagine the character of the place and they've become ours, the part of the way we live and think, and the same with objects, if you have to do the mental imaginative work of creating the object for yourself, you are invested in it, you possess it in a way that is not really possible, I think, with just an image. I find that if you lead with the story of an object, you fall in love with it in a different

way, whereas your visual reaction to maybe seeing Rosetta Stone is like, "Um, I was expecting something more impressive or something like this, but you can tell us for the import of it what it meant, all of the story of how it was created and even the mundane way which it actually is.

“That's what we were really trying to tell was a hundred biographies of an object, and it was”

we only have one life, but objects have many, many lives, and what we got very interested in was the changing role of the object through time, in ways out of nobody, one of the people carve the Resetta Stone, this attacks, decreases, it's a tax law, and it's so boring, beyond boring, nobody carving that tax law in the three languages were administered to purpose and at any idea what it would one day come to mean, and there is something wonderful about

that in an object that the object can play a role that nobody could have guessed, in the extrobiography is much more engaged, much more alive, I think than our own dull little predictable

Totally. So when you wrote and conceived of the series and produced it, you know, you were at the head director of this Augustin Attitude and the British Museum, as people hold it in greatest team, and I wondered if you noticed your relationship with the public changed when you weren't director, Neil McGregor, you were my pal, Neil McGregor, who I've been invited

into my home to tell me a story about a cool thing. I think everybody's discovered that if you speak a lot on the radio, people feel they know you

“were. And you must have the same thing that, very disconcerting experience of actually being”

recognized and eloped by your voice, is the first time it happens, it's very, very peculiar.

One of the things that I think is interesting about is that it allows us to read from the public collections in Britain, as in the United States, are not the collections of the state, but the collections of the people. When the British Museum is created in the 7050s, the idea is that it should be the private collection of every citizen, not the collection of the king open to everybody, completely

different conception from the continental European model. So the idea of speaking directly into people's houses, about their collection, their things, everything I was talking about,

belonged to the people listening to it. Why did you choose to examine the hundred objects chronologically

and what problems did that cause or what solutions did it provide? I think it has to be chronological, because one of the things that happens across human issues, that we create a technology, and then it helps us do something, and then we become completely dependent on it. We can't live without it. The hand axe, the simple stones scraping hand axe, is what lets us, as humans, live anywhere in the world. But then once you are there, you can't live without

it. We've seen the same with mobile phones in the last 20 years. It opens something, and then it creates what can be a dangerous dependence. So that was one strand, and one of the key meta narratives, I think of any museum, is the growing connectedness of the world. The fact that you can't tell a single story to use, to remember her, a teacher's phrase, the story of the world is an interconnected story. So if you like, why wanted chronologically was to show that constantly

intensifying power of exchange, curiosity about other places, trade, greed, war, whatever, but that has intensified steadily across the millennia until you can't really tell a single narrative of a national story. And that was one of the points we wanted to make. The idea of a national history, I'm sorry to say that someone was right in the United States, but I don't even national history, is unthinkable without situating that nation. Absolutely. In the global context. We are in agreement

for sure. But it does present this problem is like the beginning set of objects, or all objects

“they're pre-historical. There's not written records about them, like you have to sort of”

conceive of the story differently, because there isn't a record of how was made or why it was made and so your set of stories really gets sort of limited and then it opens up as you go along. So what was that? It's agree, I disagree. Nara is down the more we know about it. I guess that's true. I mean, the whole point of the central point of any kind of historical investigation is your poetic involvement with somebody else, that you have to think, what is it like to be

somebody else? Because that's the basis of all tolerance. I mean, the whole venture was really Governor's travels. You go off around the world. You're trying to use astonishing things, wild, but the point of Governor's travels is not that the people in broadening Naga, huge and little bit tiny. The point is that when you come back to England, you know, as we're pretty peculiar. We're the old ones. Interesting. And it's to de-normalise to remove yourself as the

“norm is the precondition of tolerance. And that's what Governor was about, is what the British”

Museum is about, and it's what the series was meant to be about. Yeah, that's interesting. I love

that approach. One thing that I marvel at the series is you're touching everything. You're always

describing it as a first-in experience. And for one reason you do that is for it's a little more radiophonic. It allows you to have something happening as you're talking. So it's not just a lecture. But the other part of it is it puts you in the first person narrative of this object. It does. The difficult thing about that, which I found very hard to know how to manage,

it's own kind of sacred existence. It's own life. And how one ought to then, with proper reverence,

“proper respect, hold or touch this object without having those beliefs. And that took us into”

very interesting areas of the extent which you study, can study objects in ways which are contrary to the belief patterns, belief assumptions of those who made them, how do we address an Australian original object, which may have sacred resonances in a respectful way. Interesting. Interesting. So one of the things that I found, there's this moment in the series, quite late into it, where you talk to David Hockney, which is the first person you talk to, who made the object

that you're talking about, which is it's such a change compared to the rest of the series. What was that like? Well, it was very thrilling. We had it had been waiting to get to an object made by somebody, where we would have speech to the maker. The very first object, which one I

have million years ago, under stone chopping tools, obviously, but David Hockney, instead.

Yeah, well, that's pretty good. Almost almost do. Tell us what's going on, what how this fits into the animal human differentiation, right? But it was wonderful with David Hockney, because the objects we were talking about were a series of prints he'd made, really about gay life in Egypt, the poems of Kavafi, and we chose the objects for several reasons. In the 20th century, we wanted to choose objects that would address the questions of new kinds of freedom. So we had votes for women,

it was one gay rights, another. We wanted to, of course, to present what it was like to make the objects, and why David himself, obviously, very committed to gay rights, what it meant to him to read the poems above all, and then to make the prints, and then what it would mean to him to have the prints used, looked at, and spread the campaign, advanced the campaign for gay rights internationally. So as you say, it was a real tending point to be able to speak to the maker

for the first time. There was also, there was a lot of excitement for the choice of the final

100th object. You deliberately didn't reveal it until the last minute. You invited listeners to

“suggest it. What was it? Why did you choose it, and how did people react to it?”

We, in all this fun, trying to decide what was the last object to choose. We wanted to choose an object that spoke to a totally globalized world. We also wanted to end, of course, on a note, there would be hope for them. So we eventually came down to two objects. One was a football shirt. Okay. A whole shirt of West African, of what we're a drugbath, a francophone, West African, who was the great star of Chelsea. Yeah. And Chelsea was owned by a Russian oligarch,

rigidly. And the football shirt had been made illegally in China, but bought in Latin America. So that object seemed to us to pull together quite a lot of the world as it now is. What we

ultimately went for was slightly more serious. It was a solar panel rechargeable mobile phone.

Because the mobile phone seemed to us to be the equivalent of the hand axe, the chopping tool. The first technology that had enabled humans to move around the world. And this latest one that enabled humans to communicate around the world. We were interested in it because it's become, of course, in so many areas, an element of emancipation, particularly women, enabling women to bank, enabling women to trade. And of course, the other dimension of solar power, which we wanted to

“bring in, is that in political terms, this has become a very important thing because in large”

areas of African Asia, the electric currents, cables to areas could be controlled by political bosses. And areas could either be knocked cable, or have cables removed, or whatever. The solar power

many ways, an emblem of liberation, an emblem of the growing technologies, which change our lives, then we become dependent on them. It's also about talking, and, of course, many people listen to BBC on them about phones. So it was also a nod to patron.

Absolutely, radio is the most important thing, BBC. Of course, you know where your bread is

butter, that makes sense. But it was also the solar powered lamp, which also like extended the day, and it's all about this sort of individualized freedom and the ability of this technology

“frees you for all kinds of things. That's what we wanted to, again, finish on how these technologies”

do unquestionably make life better, because the solar panel will give you the lamp, which means you can work at home if you're a student without it, just whatever. And it also means you don't need to burn for your lighting, materials, which are likely to cause you long problems and health difficulties.

So, in every way, it's potentially a good thing. We wanted to end on a good hundred thing.

I'm interested in what you think of this series, Legacy. Now, it's an early example of podcasting, being really successful. I think it had more listeners globally than I did inside of the UK. What do you think of it like I see in the show? Well, we've been asked surprised by the legacy, as we were by the response initially. I think it has definitely had an impact in terms of reminding people that the everyday object has its own biography, its own history. And that

takes you back to the dignity of the maker and the user. So, what it does as a history is it takes away

the great moments that we're taught. You don't have the battle of Waterloo. Yes. Why would it figure?

Absolutely. That's not the kind of history. So, it opens the way to other histories told by

“other people. Yeah. And that's why A history versus the A and that was very important. One of the”

slightly is been translated into a lot of languages, the book. One of the vexing things is in some countries, some translations, the publisher insisted on making it the history. So, that's maybe in translation the and our mean different things in different languages. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this idea of a history and the fact that objects mean different things to different people. This came up a lot as you alluded to already. We would talk to folks who would

differ from even designation of it being an object at all. What is that like navigating that in the storytelling? It is difficult, of course. And it's where it's quite useful to be able to say, well, the BBC only gave us 13 and a half minutes for this. So, you can point to the controversy. You don't have to fully adjudicate it. But it's a very real one and it's very central to museum experience. And that's one of the differences between the series we were doing, your series.

We were talking very much about objects in a museum to be presented the public. But in a museum, the question for instance should some objects be shown at all when it will cause offence to members of a community from which in the past they came. That's a very delicate thing. Because what you're really talking about there are putting limits on the quest for knowledge. Am I not to be allowed to pursue certain lines of inquiry? Because it might offend your beliefs.

That's a huge question. The 18th century was very brisk about this. Partly because it was really about the constraints of the churches. And it was saying that the constraints put on academic scientific research by the churches was simply unacceptable and that you had to go on pursuing the questions even if the faithful were distressed. We can't take that position with the same confidence. So I might choose not to take it a tour today in relation to other beliefs outside the European

“experience, particularly. I think a very big philosophical question.”

Yeah. And I don't know the answer. But it's a question that comes again and again,

Yeah. Yeah. Because even like putting a date on a Clovis, the spirit point of Clovis spirit point,

“people don't want to hear a data associated with it. They don't want to hear that people arrived.”

This was a very interesting discussion. Because as I understand it, the archaeological evidence and the DNA evidence points to the fact that the Americas are people from North East Asia, sometime around 15,000 years ago. That, of course, is a historical account that is at odds with the traditional beliefs of many Indigenous Americans. How one presents the one without defending the other is a very serious question. Yeah. We decided simply to elude to it,

but not to explore it, but to present what we believe the thing tells us. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a

very, I don't know whether that was the right decision. Well, I don't know what other decision

you could quite make, honestly. I don't know. Because you have two irreconcilable understandings of the relationship between the people in the place and the story of the world. Yeah. And we have different views of, you know, how reverent to sort of treat that object. I mean, like you treated the object with great reverence. Like it was super important for close point is there that meant 80% of the megafauna was gone. Death to the mama.

You know, it's all interesting and important stuff, but they are an odds. And so you just have to do your best to present the signs of it, I sure. I think that's as much as one can do in this kind of format. Yeah. So we're now making a history of the US and 100 objects. If you had an

“advice for like things that you would think I must, you must include. First of all, we're not going”

chronological. I decided this for a very beginning because I needed the freedom to jump around. And we also were like, we're open. We've sort of conceived of 25 or 30. And we have an open and we're trying to solicit responses from people. So what is this type of thing that you think

from your experience in the first 100 objects series is important to include? You're talking

about the history from its kind of 1776. It could be things that lead into it. I think what would be interesting is an outsider. We all know that things that came as we're from the Europeans settling into America. But the things that came from, friends, it's tobacco. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what, and there is something that's an America gave the world that changed the world. Absolutely. And the smoking tobacco peers almost have begun in the territory of the United States. What object

you would choose? I don't know, but that sounds completely changed the world. That's a good point. And there was certainly in my childhood in the '50s and '60s. I mean, you couldn't be a credible teenager without a cigarette. And it could be a French one, but it could just be a lucky strike or whatever. But even the French ones were of course American derived. So that

“kind of notion and the same with blue jeans. Why did blue jeans represent a kind of freedom?”

I mean, when we were talking about the new freedoms, political and economic and sexier, we went objects that told those stories. And there were coins for votes for women, hockles, prints, whatever. Blue jeans and cigarettes means something the same. That's the truth. But what are the about it? And how does that happen? And then that seems to me something that's where the history of the US is the history of the world.

I hope some of the Europeans would be chosen ready to make that point. That's right. I mean, you've heard a couple of the early episodes. One of the ones that's sort of like the cigarettes and blue jeans, but maybe like not quite as known is this '60s-degree threaded screw, which is an object that has very little outward significance to people, but really dominated and changed the world. I found that completely fascinating. There's such a different way of using what we were doing.

I mean, you're taking an older, but I mean, almost any screw would be done. They're taking the screw and using it to plot how the US dislodged the UK as the industrial determined of the world. And that huge shift in economic, political military power can all be read through the discussions about how to standardise globally, thread on the screw. And you know nothing about it. And it was completely fascinating. And of course, it's not at all surprising

that would have happened. It was brilliant. Oh, thank you. Thank you. So, do you have any advice for me as I'm embarking on this? Is there a moment that I should be aware of? Is it like object number 68? We're just like, where it's? Yes.

“That's exactly the old. And would you will wonder why am I doing that there to go on?”

Am I ever going to get to the edge? Is anybody still listening?

I'll just watch out for that moment. And the answer is yes. Well, you will, and they are,

and we need it. So, thank you. Neil McRagger, thank you so much for talking with me. And it's such a good time. Thank you. [ Music ] And now, here's an episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects. Enjoy. [ Music ]

Every day, I walked through the Egyptian sculpture gallery of the British Museum.

“And every day, there are tour guides, speaking every imaginable language,”

addressing groups of visitors who are craning to see the object that I'll be talking about in this

program. It's on every visitor's itinerary. And with the mummies, it's the most popular object in the British Museum. Why? To look at, it is decidedly dull. It's a gray stone about the size of one of those large suitcases. You see people trundling around on wheels at airports. And the rough edges show that it's been broken from a larger stone with the fractures cutting across the text that covers one side. And when you read that text, it's pretty dull too. It's mostly bureaucratic

jargon about tax concessions. But as so often in the museum, appearances are deceiving. Because this dreary bit of broken granite has played a starring role in three fascinating and different stories. The story of the Greek kings who ruled in Alexandria, after Alexander the Great Concord Egypt, the story of the French and British imperial competition across the Middle East, after Napoleon invaded Egypt. And the extraordinary but peaceful scholarly

contest that led to the most famous decipherment in history, the cracking of highroglyphics. In the Memphis decree, we find a Greek view of the world in Egyptian terms.

“I think it's quite weird why you would put this sort of a statement, which is a basically a statement”

of tax exemption on such a heavy stone. I mean, it's 760 kilograms. Why did they do that? A history of the world in 100 objects. The Rosetta Stone erected in 196 BC. Find a tell Rashid Egypt.

Because it's a special case. It's about a ruler who's not strong, but weak. A king who has to bargain for and protect his power by borrowing the invincible strength of the gods, or more precisely the priests. We're in Egypt, with tolemy the fifth, a Greek boy king who came to the throne as an

orphan in 205 BC at the age of six. Tolemy the fifth was born into a great dynasty. The first tolemy

was one of Alexander the Great's generals, who around 100 years earlier had taken over Egypt following Alexander's death. The Tolemy didn't trouble to learn Egyptian. This simply made all their official speak Greek, and so Greek would be the language of state administration in Egypt for a thousand years. Perhaps their greatest achievement was to make their capital city, Alexandria, into the most brilliant metropolis of the Greek-speaking world. For centuries, it was

second only to Rome. It was a cosmopolitan magnet for goods, people, and ideas. The vast library of Alexandria was built by the Tolemy's, in it they plan to collect all the world's knowledge, and Tolemy's one and two created the famous Feros Lighthouse, which became one of the seven wonders of the world. Such a lively diversity needed strong leadership. When Tolemy the fifth's father died suddenly, leaving the boy as king, the dinner stand its control of Egypt looked fragile.

the country, which delayed the young Tolemy's coronation for years. It was in these volatile

“circumstances that Tolemy the fifth issued the Rosetta Stone, and others like it. The stones”

are not unique, there are another 17 similar inscriptions quite like it, or in three languages, and all proclaiming the greatness of the Tolemy's. These were put up in major temple complexes

across Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was made in 1906 BC, on the first anniversary of the coronation

of Tolemy the fifth, by then a teenager. It's a decree issued by Egyptian priests, ostensibly to mark the coronation, and to declare Tolemy's new status as a living God, divinity went with the job of being a Pharaoh. The priests had given Tolemy a full Egyptian coronation at the sacred city of Memphis, and this greatly strengthened his position as the rightful ruler of Egypt, but there was a trade-off. Tolemy may have become a God, but to get there,

“he'd had to negotiate some very unheavenly politics with his extremely powerful Egyptian priests.”

Dorothy Thompson, emeritus professor at Cambridge University, explains. One of the clauses of the Memphis to create the Rosetta Stone is that priest should no longer come every year to Alexandria. Alexandria was the new Greek capital. Instead, they could meet Memphis, the old centre of Egypt. This was new, and it may be seen perhaps as a concession on the

part of the royal household. The priests were critical in keeping the hearts and minds of the Egyptian

masses on the side for Tolemy, and the Rosetta Stone was their reward. Not only does the decree allow the priests to remain in Memphis rather than coming to Alexandria, it also gives them a number of very attractive tax breaks. Of course, no teenager is likely to have thought this up. Somebody behind the throne was clearly thinking strategically on the boy's behalf, and more importantly on the dynasties behalf. So the stone is simultaneously an expression of power

and of compromise, although to read the whole content is about as thrilling as reading a new EU treaty written simultaneously in several languages. The content is bureaucratic,

“priestly, and dry, but that, of course, is not the point. What matters about the Rosetta Stone”

is not what it says, but that it says it three times under three different languages. In classical Greek, the language of the Greek rulers and the state administration, and then in two forms of ancient Egyptian, the everyday writing of the people known as Dymotic, and the priestly, howroglyphics, which have for centuries baffled Europeans, it was the Rosetta Stone that changed all that, and while the text of the stone itself is pretty unexciting, it dramatically opened up

the entire world of ancient Egypt. By the time of the Rosetta Stone, 196 BC, highroglyphs were no longer in general use. They were used and understood only by the priests in the temples. 500 years later, even this restricted knowledge of how to read and write them had disappeared. The script of ancient Egypt was lost. The Rosetta Stone survived unread through 2,000 years of further foreign occupations, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Muslim Arabs,

and Ottoman Turks, all had stretched as a rule in Egypt. At some point, the stone was moved from the temple at Sais in the Nile Delta, where we think it was first erected, to El Rashid, or the town of Rosetta, as we now know it, about 40 miles away. Then, in 1799, Napoleon arrived. The French invasion was not only military, but intellectual, with the French army came scholars. Soldiers rebuilding fortifications in Rosetta dug up the stone, and the scholars

knew immediately that they had found something of great significance. The French took the stone

as a cultural trophy of war, but it never made it back to Paris. Perced by Nelson, Napoleon

was defeated, and in 1801 the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria signed by the French British and Egyptian generals included the handing over of antiquities, and the Rosetta stone was one of them.

on the broken side, you can see that in fact, there are four, because there, stenciled on in English,

“you can read, captured by the British army in 1801, presented by King George III.”

Nothing could make it clearer that if the text on the front of the stone is about the first European

Empire in Africa, Alexander the Greats, the finding of the stone, says that the beginning of another European adventure, the bitter rivalry between Britain and France for dominance in the Middle East and in Africa, which continued from Napoleon until the Second World War. We asked the Egyptian writer Adav Sueff for her view of this history. So this stone so makes me think of how often Egypt has been the theatre of other people's battles.

It's one of the earliest objects through which you can trace western colonial interest in Egypt, because of course it was found by the French, in the context of Napoleon's invasion of the country,

“and then appropriated by the British when they defeated him, and the French and the British”

argued over it, that no one seems to have considered that it belonged to neither of them.

But Egypt's foreign rulers from the Romans to the text to the British have always made

free with Egypt's heritage. Egypt for 2,000 years had foreign rulers, and in 52 much was made of the fact that no sir was the first Egyptian ruler since the Pharaohs, and I guess we had two more sense although with the very results. The stone was brought back to the British Museum, and immediately put on display, in the public domain freely available for every scholar in the world to see, and copies and

transcriptions were published worldwide. European scholars now set about the task of understanding the mysterious hieroglyphic script. The Greek inscription was the one that every scholar could read,

“and was there for seem to be the key, but everybody was stuck. A brilliant English physicist and”

Polymath Thomas Young, correctly worked out that a group of hieroglyphs repeated several times

on the risotto stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of tollamy. It was a crucial first step,

but young hadn't quite cracked the code. A French scholar, Jean-François Jean-Paulillon, then realised that not only the symbols for tollamy, but all the hieroglyphs were both pictorial and phonetic. They recorded the sound of the Egyptian language. For example, on the last line of the hieroglyphic text on the stone, three signs spell out the sounds of the word for stone slab in Egyptian, a high, and then a fourth sign gives a picture showing the stone as it would originally

have looked, a square slab with a rounded top. So sound and picture work together. Bayesian 22 Jean-Paulillon had finally worked the whole thing out. From now on, the world could put words to the great objects, the statues and the monuments, the mummies, and the papyrae of ancient Egyptian civilization. By the time of the risotto stone, Egypt had already been under Greek rule for over 100 years, and the tollamy's dynasty would last

for another 150. The dynasty ended infamously with the reign of Cleopatra VII, the Cleopatra, who beguiled and seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. But with the death of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was conquered by Augustus, who's the image I'll be talking about later this week. And the Egypt of the tollamy's became part of the Roman Empire. In the next programme, Arby and Rome's Great Contemporary, China,

looking at how the Han dynasty operated a super-state and expanded their frontiers by keeping close control over every aspect of society. All this through a lacquer cup. Listen to the full 100 object series on Friday's right here in the 99% of visible feed. A history of the world in 100 objects was a landmark collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum. If you'd like to hear more of a history of the world in 100 objects,

you can listen on BBC sounds in the UK, and if you're outside the UK, you can find it wherever you get your podcast.