Object 101

Back in 2010, Radio 4 and the British Museum embarked on what was to become a remarkable project. to tell a history of the world. A history of the world based not on written texts, but on what objects communicate to us across time. In these programmes, I'm travelling back in time and across the globe to see how we humans over two million years have shaped our world and been shaped by it.

And I'm going to tell this story exclusively through the things that humans have made. All sorts of things. Carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used, broken and thrown away. I've chosen just 100 objects from different points on our journey, from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card. And in each programme, I'm going to be talking about one object.

from the British Museum's collection. When I see it, I immediately think of a mastery of technology and art, the welding of the two. I just thought it was beautiful to look at. That made me feel that it was used and used again and again. Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African savannas. You knew. that this was a statement of your own subordination. A history of the world in a hundred objects. The idea caught on.

There were tens of millions of downloads, and in the decades since then, countless other histories in a hundred objects appeared, even on Radio 4, a history of Ambridge and the Archers in a hundred objects.

But those ten years have also been turbulent and tragic ones. A journey through a frozen ocean transformed into slush. This is the high Arctic, where temperatures are rising. and the ice is stirring. We need this fire. We need to be alive in this minute. You can hear. I can. Please save us. Please. No, no. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country. Because you'd be in jail. Secretary Clinton.

But first, there is a new virus about, bringing with it a new respiratory illness. It's a coronavirus, we don't have a name for it yet, but it's similar to other outbreaks of recent years, such as SARS. Now this is an ongoing story and the numbers are changing... So Radio 4 asked me to select a further object, Object 101, something made since 2010 and brought into the collection of the British Museum.

Something that in 50 or 100 years' time will capture this last decade, which by then will be merely a blink in the eye of history.

The original series involved teams of people both inside and outside the British Museum, working over years. Radio 4 gave me just three weeks. So I decided that the only practical way was to ask a small group of people to help me identify not so much a particular object, but the issues that Object 101 should reflect and represent. And where are they?

Maybe it's one of those parties people aren't going to come to. That'll be very embarrassing, won't it? Before Covid, getting five busy people together for a conversation. would have taken weeks to arrange. But video conferencing software has, as we've all discovered, changed all that. And within a few days, I was welcoming the dream team to my screen at home.

Oh, Mary, hello. The Cambridge classicist, Mary Beard. And here's Hisham. You're very punctual and impressed. The British-Libyan author, Hisham Matar, who has written powerfully about the human consequences of conflict in the Middle East. Hello Scarlett, hello. Scarlett Curtis, writer and activist, who was 15 years old when the series was first broadcast.

and whose career has been shaped by social media. Hello Chibundu, how good to see you. Chibundu Onuzo, the young Nigerian British writer and historian whose books and articles explore how a youthful Africa... now engages with the world. And the man who voices the concerns of the planet about environmental change, Sir David Attenborough. No, but we can hear you, David. In the series...

Object 100 was a solar-powered lamp and mobile phone charger, made in China, sold round the globe, which in 2010 seemed said to give many of the poorest in the world a new level of control over their lives.

The smartphone was still in its expensive infancy, as were global social media. I began by asking Scarlett Curtis, in every sense a child of the digital age, what she thought was the biggest change of the decade.

the thing i feel represents the last 10 years most is i think the camera phone just that access to Almost everyone in the world having a means to record the world around them has revealed so much about our society, both positive and negative, despite the long history across the globe of racial injustice. Accessibility to camera phones has really allowed individuals to end the systematic silence around acts of police violence. And I think none of that would have been possible unless we had these.

devices in our hands that were previously held by the media and often male photographers and people that were allowed to tell these stories for us. Not surprisingly, everybody agreed that the ability to see other people in real time... had radically changed the way we see ourselves. Indeed, how we think about humanity. Well, I think Zoom has actually changed us in a quite extraordinary way in terms of communication. It's very difficult.

to explain what I mean, except that I know that if I've talked to somebody on Zoom, I have had a communication which is more meaningful and more long-lasting than a telephone call. And it's brought the world together in a way... that human beings communicate with one another quite fully right around the world, which is going to be of huge importance in the coming decades. We really have to become one nation, the whole globe. Internationalism...

is the crucial thing if we're going to solve the world's problems. When I think of my generation and the younger generation... There's been a real blurring of those lines between in real life communication and online communication and what friendship means and what connection means. I have friends that I call my best friends who I've never met and who live across the world.

was describing them, it would take about 10 adjectives for me to mention that I'd never met them in person. But everybody sensed a new energy in the idea of a global community based on digital media and the sharing of images. And we all felt that it's allowing the young, more than ever before, to shape how we together respond to the big challenges that face us all, not least the injustices that Scarlett Curtis mentioned.

One of the things in the past decade that I think definitely has stood out is the Black Lives Matter movement. And it began in America. It was very localized. But of course, there's... a black diaspora around the world and so it began with just the sympathy for african americans but it certainly spread around the globe and you see a lot of hashtags for example in Nigeria you had the end sales movement against police brutality also on the African continent there's a

big disparity between the age of the citizens, the average age of the citizens and the average age of. the leadership and I think it's something that's going to become increasingly topical in the following decades because you're going to see more migration if you don't have African leadership that reflects

the people that are being led. Youthful protests spread on social media, unresponsive politicians, violence, despair, migration. The points that Chibundu Onuzo raises... are the five acts of the political tragedy of the Middle East, which began with the Arab Spring of 2011 and is still being fought out in Syria.

And it's here that Hisham Mata sees some of the more sinister aspects of digital communication. Of course, the Arab Spring was about so many different things, but I think one of the things it was about is this, the question. between the extent to which a people can compel the state to listen to reason. And the extremes to which that state is willing to go in order to secure its authority, the amount of people it's willing to kill and imprison and banish in silence. And that question seems to...

Remain with us, because I don't think it was just about those countries over there. I think it's a question that concerns us all. And we've seen the ways in which that question continues to articulate itself, whether it's through Brexit or through the American elections. This new power of the lie. The way that you can say something, it's proven to be wrong, yet it continues to work. And how unable we are to respond to facts that should make...

our hearts shudder and make us respond in ways that we are not right now. Are we now unable to respond to facts? Few topics have been more bedeviled by the currency of lies, by fake news.

than the question of climate change and its impact on all our lives. But David Attenborough has no doubt that this news is true. The readings from the Arctic in this summer have been more alarming than they've ever been. There are many aspects of the melt which is going on, which shows that it's going faster than it ever did since the end of the last ice age. And if the Arctic ice cap continues to melt...

rate at which it's doing, the whole world is in trouble from every point of view. We built many of our cities on coastline because they were ports, and they are within a few inches of the average ocean level. So our cities would disappear. But equally, the change in the ocean currents, which would be brought about by this huge surge of meltwater from the Arctic, would change climates.

so that the whole pattern of life on this planet is going to change if the Arctic ice cap melts. If the whole world is in trouble, can it respond as one? Some of my guests thought that the camera phone and the video conferences made that much more likely. Mary Beard found hope in a darker development of the decade. The pandemic. For me, the kind of uncertainty and the fragility and the perilousness of... human organisation and human life that the pandemic somehow has summed up.

It has been here throughout this decade, starting with the earthquake in Haiti, going through all kinds of things that David's been talking about. Now, through most of my lifetime, real human tragedies, mostly... was seen to exist not where I was. And I think that the combination, really, of environmental anxieties but now global pandemic anxieties has really, really underlined for me the kind of joined-up globalness.

about the fragile, perilous nature of human existence, really. After a decade of fragility, a shared sense that we are all vulnerable would be a major gain. But not everybody agreed that Covid would have a lasting effect on the way we think or behave. There have been epidemics of one sort or another throughout history. I suppose globally it is unique.

It's certainly changed my life in the immediate future in that a lot of the dross and the silly things that I've been doing, dashing here and thither and yon and getting onto aeroplanes and so on, has stopped and that's been a great relief. But I just wonder whether it's going to be permanent. I'm definitely on Sir David's side, actually. I don't think that this pandemic is going to change human behaviour because human beings don't like to reflect on their fragility.

wants to talk about millions of people dying and not being able to do anything about it. So actually, I think we might be going back to everybody's longing for business as usual again, which is sad. Throughout our hour-long discussion,

We kept returning to questions of political upheaval and economic inequality, on how local events have global impacts, perhaps most vividly illustrated by migration, and Hisham Matar. explained why the sufferings of people fleeing from civil war go far beyond the need just to escape bombs and persecution. Civil war, it weighs on your days in ways that are very difficult to describe.

It is horrific, but also it has a slight quality of shame about it. To see your own butcher, your own, it's very unsettling. And psychologically, that, I think, has had...

Such a difficult impact on particularly countries like Syria. But also equally people who are migrating because they can't find their bread or because... the oppressive conditions in their countries are such that they cannot bear them, to risk their lives crossing the sea, is an event that I think is not only so intimately affecting, but it seems...

that it is a continuation of a story. I think this is one of the reasons why it's so powerful on us. It seems to be something that we have done before. And because exactly of what Sir David is talking about. we intimate that it's something that we will be doing much more of in the future. The world is not just for people in the West. So I have a cousin who...

crossed the Sahara Desert to reach Europe. So he did that trek. He did trek across the Sahara and he entered the Jinji and got across to Europe. But I remember hearing his story and I thought about it. If he had been a white man, You know, he would be a great explorer. You know, he would be a Mongo Park or a Davidson. But, you know, he's a Nigerian. It is everybody's right to get up and say, I don't like what I'm seeing around here. I want to move. And it's OK when it's from London to Paris.

or London to Kampala. But if it's the other way around, you know, then it's different. So one of the problems that the migrant has to suffer is the sense that the host is not only reluctant, unwilling. But the host is also suffering from an amnesiac.

They do not remember their own migration, but they also do not remember the role that they played in the complex consequences that have led to either a civil war or... an oppressive situation, you know, goes back, and I don't mean to be harping on about this, but it goes back to this fragmentation of a narrative and why we do need an object, why we do need translation.

That idea that an object can translate an event or issue, that it's perhaps the best way to make an experience graspable to those of us who have not had to live through it was at the front of my mind as I made my way to the British Museum.

to see whether they've been able to collect things that would translate the key issues that had emerged from our discussion. I hear I've broke my squeaky shoes. In the Arctic exhibition at the British Museum, you walk through the icy landscape shared by Scandinavia and Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia. On one side... the dazzling horizonless white of snowy earth and frozen water where the animals live and are hunted. On the other, little huts were the people who hunt them.

keep warm, survive the winter, make food and clothes and tell stories. It's probably the toughest environment on earth and it's changing fast. The exhibits show the skill and ingenuity of Arctic people over centuries, using every available resource, and it explores their relationship to the landscape and, above all, to the weather.

We all know what melting Arctic ice will mean for cities at sea level everywhere. But what will it mean for the people and the animals who for centuries have lived here? Amber Lincoln is the curator of the museum's Arctic collections. People have spent generations on their ancestral homelands. They have heard stories passed down to them, and those stories are...

to landscape features. And those landscape features are named after relatives. They're named after events. So it's kinship, it's relationships with animals, and your knowledge of... traveling over, you know, throughout your homelands. And so when a community such as these Arctic communities have to relocate as a result of climate change, we're really losing quite a bit, you know, culture, history, relationships. Amber showed me a magnificent pair of knee-length boots.

made of felt, fur and seal skin. Knowledge of weather is not only in predicting weather to go out to hunt or to travel with reindeer. Knowledge of weather comes in making garments and you have to have particular weather conditions in order to get, for instance, the beautiful white sole on the top of these boots from Iglulic here. That is sealskin. This white requires very, very dry, very cold temperatures usually takes place in February. So women put the hides out to sort of...

kind of absorb this dry, cold weather, and it gets this very bright, opaque white. It also creates an easier hide to work with. So we could maybe select this pair of boots. as summing up the relationship between a long tradition of using the local resources, sealskin in this case especially, using them in the context of a secure weather pattern.

and inherited skills, all of which are now at risk. And inherited knowledge, right? So that's the knowledge of weather. It's just wonderful. But there was another object that caught my eye.

and which seemed even more eloquent of the current predicament of the Arctic, and indeed of the world. As you come to the end of the exhibition, you come to what to any Scottish eye would be called a cairn. It's a number of large bits of stone getting smaller as they go up, about 12, 14 of them, more or less in the shape of a human being.

and it's called Silent Witness. Silent Messenger is... Yeah, we were so pleased to work with sculptor Pitta Ernik from Nunavut, Canada, originally. It's a wayfaring technique. They've been used in the Arctic for, you know, hundreds... thousands of years but when Pitta was talking and telling us about this important object he says that seeing them always gives him hope and that's because although they sometimes are used for navigation they're also used to

tell people that this is a good harvestable spot so this is a place for good sealing or good fishing or the caribou will come through here and they often have this little window a look through and if you look through it that identifies the spot. And so it's become this symbol of hope and I think it's a nice reminder for all of us as we face these difficult issues. The roots are a statement by a group of women.

about the continuity of their traditions. This sculpture comes from that same understanding of the connection between the landscape, the climate, the animals and the humans who share. that world and how they're confronting its change and possibly its loss, but with a statement that they will endure because they have endured.

The British Museum has been collecting objects from the Arctic for over 250 years. But I was curious to see whether it had been able in the last few months to collect material about an entirely new phenomenon.

the Covid pandemic. The director Hartwig Fischer told me they decided to focus on face masks, the same in shape everywhere in the world, but carrying a truly global variety of messages. Many are still in the plastic bags in which they were frozen on arrival in the museum in order to disinfect them, and some of the stars of the still-growing collection were unwrapped for me by the expert object handler.

Thank you so much. You did that brilliantly. That would be the high point of the programme. You could see at once that these are not just masks, they're statements. Messages of all sorts are carried in the materials and in the design. Smart, fashionable cottons from India and sweshwi fabric from South Africa. Aboriginal patterns from Australia. Tartan masks for Scottish politicians.

and from the South Pacific, masks of traditional bark cloth made by beating out the bark of local trees, a practice that astonished the first Europeans who arrived there back in the 18th century. If you want to know who we think we are in 2020 and who we want to be, then the Covid masks will tell you. Julie Anderson, the curator charged with putting the collection together,

talks about some of the challenges in making a global collection at speed. And she points out a few masks that especially interest her. These masks, they tell a lot of stories. But because we're still experiencing this global situation, I don't think that we're going to know what these stories are until long in the future, when we have a chance to reflect and look back, maybe with a moment.

more objective eye on the situation as it is. One interesting thing comes from Ghana, and they're the Ghanaian coffin dancers, and they've started appearing on masks as well. a series of gentlemen who basically dance with the coffin of the deceased to the grave. It's a very interesting type of funeral ritual, but what has happened now is they are sending a new message.

wear a mask or come dance with us. And they dance on the mask. Yes, they are dancing on the mask. You see four gentlemen, or five gentlemen actually, carrying a coffin and dancing. But what's interesting about this is that to spread that message a little further, there's also this mask over here, which shows the Guinean coffin dancers.

in Minecraft, which is the very famous video game kids are playing. So it's on several levels. Ghanai and Coventage are just wonderful. And now here we have another set of masks, which are about Black Lives Matter. The thing is, the use of face masks can put some people at a great disadvantage because it covers the mouth, potentially it hampers communication, and it makes a person less identifiable.

But conversely, when a mask is covering the mouth, it can be really evocative, particularly when used as a symbol of protest or a symbol of a protest for free speech, a protest for rights. It's interesting to see here what could be the tweets or the message of the... mobile phone carried on the mask and as Julie said that's particularly powerful when the mouth can't speak because it's covered but the words are there and obviously most powerful of all in this group

is the mask with the words, I can't breathe over the mouth. The world came to know those words because of the mobile phone. and because somebody could make a recording on a mobile phone and then disseminate it at once. And that mobile phone phenomenon, which can't of course be collected as a thing in the museum, can be represented. in an object in something like this mask and very powerfully represented because it's moved from being only about the killing of George Floyd to being

as a response to the global pandemic. It carries all those messages together. In spite of face masks, on the day that we were recording this programme, Covid had once again closed the British Museum. But we were given privileged access to the new al-Bukhari galleries, devoted to the world of Islam and the modern Middle East. And there we met curator Venetia Porter.

who showed us how the museum has tried to represent the civil war in Syria, which has run murderously through the entire decade. and is still continuing. We managed to collect actually some very interesting work by Syrian artists that started being produced from... about 2011. One of them is this extraordinary series of posters called The Syrian People Know Their Way, and this was a group of about 15 artists who were a collective.

And they started producing these extraordinary posters, which they would then send around via social media, which would then be downloaded and taken on demonstrations. So social media... didn't play a part only in generating the protest, spreading it and organising demonstrations. It also played a part in propagating the images.

There was a tremendous outpouring of art, as well as people coming out on the streets. There was a great hope for change. And these posters show this feeling of hope. This has got to change. That's how you were able to document the beginning of the Arab Spring in Syria. Have you been able through objects, through works of art to track?

what then went so tragically wrong in Syria. I mean, of course, the big change happened with the big migrations, the departure of people who just felt that they couldn't stay, and then all these terrible stories that we have heard of, and that's why... it was very exciting to be able to acquire these little boats.

by the Syrian artist Isam Korbaj. We're looking at a little flotilla, a little group of seven small boats. Each one of the boats is about 14, 15 centimetres, that's about four or five inches long. And standing up in the middle of each boat is a long line of burnt majestics, several dozen majestics. crammed together in each of these small boats.

He made these little boats out of bicycle mudguards. They're all different colours, some red, some blue, battered. The very quality of the object is so evocative in itself. also has collaborated with the poet Ruth Podell, so that they've taken these boats to many different venues and Ruth Podell will recite her poetry. I'm just going to read a couple of lines which go with this.

And their stories, our stories, steered by the small starlight of cell phones, waves like rings of a tree, rings of the centuries rocking and spilling on the windy sea. These little boats have a very powerful emotional charge. It's impossible, I think, not to be moved, not to worry about whether the majestics are going to fall over, whether the boats are going to founder.

What do you think was the artist's purpose? What did he want it to do to us as we look at these refugees huddled together in an unstable, easily destructible boat? Well, this art is very emotional, and he wanted us to feel that. All these years on, people are inured to it. They read it in the newspapers. They see pictures of migrants in these boats. We've stopped.

feeling it in the same way. There isn't that same shock when the first one's happened. And I think what he wants us to do is just to continue thinking about it. It is striking, isn't it? We began this conversation by talking about the ability of the mobile phone to spread images. But one of the consequences of that has been that the images have lost their power. We see them so much.

What I find surprising and affecting about these little boats is that actually matchsticks in an old mudguard have a greater capacity to engage. my imaginative emotion with the fragility, the vulnerability, with the despair of... the people making that journey. And that's why it's so important for us as a museum and indeed other museums to collect works like this, because they're documents. I believe very strongly these works that we acquire for the museum.

by Syrian artists and others, they are documenting moments in time. It's as though art is also document. But by saying document, it renders it sterile. It doesn't. It's that it has that ability to speak to us in so many different ways. Ruth Perdell's poem about the light of the cell phone guiding the refugee boats...

unexpectedly underlined once again the central role of the mobile phone in every area of our lives now. And the three conversations with curators confirmed Mary Beard's description of the last 10 years as a decade of fragility, where each one of us has had to confront the perilousness of human life and to confront it together. Looking for one outstanding object, I felt it couldn't be the COVID masks.

They're too ubiquitous, too obvious. But they do speak to one of the great facts of the decade, that in the face of the pandemic, the whole world discovered that it must and that it can act together.

And that's demonstrated even in the way that they were collected, with the help and advice of colleagues from all around the world, as Hartwig Fischer explained in another video conference meeting. The way we decided to go about to be able... to collect objects that would allow future generations to present through objects a key event of the past. is to look beyond the UK, look beyond our immediate surrounding and try to cover the anti-globe. So what we decided as soon as we went into this...

As we develop our collection, let's work with colleagues from around the world. We made it a point that at this stage of the biggest global health crisis... of our generation and of the last generations. In order to be able to represent it in the collection, we needed global collaboration to do that. So the face mask collection is a globally curated...

collection showing the global response to the epidemic, to the pandemic. And what I find interesting about all of the areas we've looked at in the museum was that what the museum is collecting is humanity's response to these, in different ways, catastrophic events. the civil wars and the political disturbance in the Middle East, the melting ice in the Arctic and the pandemic. And the way that response is articulated is what the museum can show. And Neil.

And you could also add to this, every major problem we are facing can only be solved in a shared global effort. And yet, at the same time, we see that that one world... is progressively splitting up in subunits that seem to pull up walls against each other. Of course, my conversation with Hartwig was to get his help in identifying what Object 101 should be.

I had narrowed it down to Peter Irnik's Silent Messenger, the stone sculpture about the resilience and hope of the Arctic people, and Issam Courbaj's Convoy of Tiny Fragile Boats. Hartwig of course made a bid for both linked as they are by climate change which will inevitably lead to more migrants fleeing homelands that are for one reason or another no longer habitable.

You cannot separate one from the other. And the fact that you have these two objects in this collection allows us not only to highlight these experiences and phenomena individually. but also to show them in their interdependence, in their interconnectedness. And if I were to be very unpleasant and push you and say you can't have them both? I think it would be the boat. Because the boat...

is taking you to safer shores. It's a passage out of violence, but it also highlights how precarious this passage is. and how vulnerable those who are forced to risk this passage. And the boats are so small, you know, they hardly survive. And I think they become symbols of what people live through, millions of people. each with his own, with her own history, and her own, and his own hopes. I was glad that he ultimately plumped for the Courbarge frotilla, because that would be my choice.

It seems to me to be exactly what Hisham Mata was looking for, an object that can translate for us all an experience beyond words, which is both a unique event and a continuing constant part of human history. An object that will not only inform, but move us. You know, what is so amazing about the boat is that you get what is so specific about the British Museum. It's all about significant objects, and there are actually no rules.

And these objects are significant because they allow you to go from the very concrete to the very universal in one of the same objects time and time again. And I think these boats are just examples of that. They also reflect that most of the objects in the collection are survivors of worlds that have long gone. Issam Courbaj's little convoy of matchstick figures stands for all migrants anywhere, driven by fear and guided by hope. From the moment our ancestors first left Africa,

That has been a central part of our human story. As we look at these hopelessly unseaworthy boats with their frightened, huddled figures, we know that their future ultimately depends on us. on the generosity with which we receive them, the ingenuity with which we respond to the predicament that they're fleeing. And that, surely, is a hopeful note on which to end, especially at Christmas.

A world that has in the last 10 years drawn so much closer together knows that it can solve the greatest challenges, climate change, disease, injustice, war, only by working together with generosity and goodwill. by remembering that we are all in the same fragile boat. Hello, Greg Jenner here, the host of You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for people who don't like history, and for people who do.

On our show, we choose a historical subject, we invite a top historian along and a top comedian, and we have a lovely funny chat for 45 minutes. And we're back for Series 3, coming in the middle of January, where we'll be talking about things such as the Irish Pirate Queen, Gráinne O'Malley, the Roman Empress, Agrippina...

the Younger, the Ancient Babylonians and the Dangerous Borgias. So if that sounds like fun, or if you want to hear our back catalogue of over 30 episodes, get yourselves down to the BBC Sounds podcast app and type in, you're dead to me. Thanks very much. Bye.