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A review by jwsg
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
5.0
It didn't occur to me until I read the Introduction to A History of the World in 100 objects, that "if you want to tell the history of the whole world, a history that does not unduly privilege one part of humanity, you cannot do it through texts alone, because only some of the world has ever had texts, while most of the wold, for most of the time, has not." And so MacGregor embarks on this ambitious attempt to tell of the story of vanished cultures and peoples through their material objects, a task that requires a "considerable leap of imagination, returning the artefact to its former life, engaging with it as generously, as poetically, as we can in the hope of winning the insights it may deliver". People like early humans who lived in the Olduvai Gorge 1.8 to 2 million years ago, the Natufians from 9000 BC, the Mesopotamians, the Olmecs in Central America in 900-400BC, the Moche people from Peru (AD 100-700).
The stories of the artefacts themselves - the context in which they were used, what they tell us about the societies that created them - are expectedly interesting. Like how the chapter on an Egyptian clay model of cattle from 3500BC explained that Egyptians kept cows not for milk (since digesting milk is a skill acquired relatively recently) but probably to be tapped for blood - to be drunk or added to stews for protein.
Or how the chapter on a clay tablet from 3100 BC found in southern Iraq is a reminder that "we tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral - learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn't turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting."
But what I especially loved was when MacGregor unpacked how ancient beliefs and practices shape modern mindsets, or how different these societies' mental models are from contemporary ones:
Like how the chapter on the Maya maize god statue explained how maize was seen as divine food, which is why for some Mexicans, "it's unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank" or genetically modified.
Or how the chapter on a North American buckskin map from 1774-75 explained how different Native American and European conceptions of land ownership were. "Land for tribal people is not a commodity...it was a place where you lived, that you shared, that you utilised, but it was not something that you particularly owned. One could not any more own the land than one could own the air above the land or the rain that fell on it or the animals that lived on it...land is so intricately bound into the very soul of most tribal people that it's not something that you trade back and forth." Yet, for the Europeans, discussions on land were about exclusive ownership. In their interactions and negotiations with each other, both were starting from positions that their counterparts could not grasp.
We tend to think that communications technology has made the world so much smaller these days. Indeed, MacGregor reminds us that historically "it was much easier to go by water than it was by land..so that people in say, modern Swindon would have been on the edge of the world to [people in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk], whereas people in Denmark and Holland would have been close neighbours...Seas usually unite more than they separate the peoples who live on their shores. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has created a huge interconnected world, where local history is always likely to be intercontinental". The artefacts in this book, whose component materials are drawn from far flung places, remind us that even hundreds and thousands of years ago, the different continents were connected by trade. (New discovery: The blue and white porcelain that we associate with China has Iranian influences; Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment cobalt to cater to Middle Eastern tastes).
Reading MacGregor's book reminded me how much I miss visiting London's museums. It reminded me that "if we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, most of us have the sense that we have changed enormously while the things have remained serenely the same. But they haven't: thanks to continuing research and new scientific techniques, what we know about them is constantly growing". So visiting and revisiting museums allows for new layers of learning and insight, even if the artefacts on display have not changed.
A brilliant read.
The stories of the artefacts themselves - the context in which they were used, what they tell us about the societies that created them - are expectedly interesting. Like how the chapter on an Egyptian clay model of cattle from 3500BC explained that Egyptians kept cows not for milk (since digesting milk is a skill acquired relatively recently) but probably to be tapped for blood - to be drunk or added to stews for protein.
Or how the chapter on a clay tablet from 3100 BC found in southern Iraq is a reminder that "we tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral - learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn't turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting."
But what I especially loved was when MacGregor unpacked how ancient beliefs and practices shape modern mindsets, or how different these societies' mental models are from contemporary ones:
Like how the chapter on the Maya maize god statue explained how maize was seen as divine food, which is why for some Mexicans, "it's unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank" or genetically modified.
Or how the chapter on a North American buckskin map from 1774-75 explained how different Native American and European conceptions of land ownership were. "Land for tribal people is not a commodity...it was a place where you lived, that you shared, that you utilised, but it was not something that you particularly owned. One could not any more own the land than one could own the air above the land or the rain that fell on it or the animals that lived on it...land is so intricately bound into the very soul of most tribal people that it's not something that you trade back and forth." Yet, for the Europeans, discussions on land were about exclusive ownership. In their interactions and negotiations with each other, both were starting from positions that their counterparts could not grasp.
We tend to think that communications technology has made the world so much smaller these days. Indeed, MacGregor reminds us that historically "it was much easier to go by water than it was by land..so that people in say, modern Swindon would have been on the edge of the world to [people in Sutton Hoo, Suffolk], whereas people in Denmark and Holland would have been close neighbours...Seas usually unite more than they separate the peoples who live on their shores. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has created a huge interconnected world, where local history is always likely to be intercontinental". The artefacts in this book, whose component materials are drawn from far flung places, remind us that even hundreds and thousands of years ago, the different continents were connected by trade. (New discovery: The blue and white porcelain that we associate with China has Iranian influences; Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment cobalt to cater to Middle Eastern tastes).
Reading MacGregor's book reminded me how much I miss visiting London's museums. It reminded me that "if we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, most of us have the sense that we have changed enormously while the things have remained serenely the same. But they haven't: thanks to continuing research and new scientific techniques, what we know about them is constantly growing". So visiting and revisiting museums allows for new layers of learning and insight, even if the artefacts on display have not changed.
A brilliant read.