The Original 100 Objects

Neil MacGregor reflects on creating the landmark series that changed how people think about history. Then, revisit the Rosetta Stone, the artifact that unlocked ancient Egypt.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 0:35Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation.

• 1:19Roman Mars?

  Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects, hosted by Neil McGregor, premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim. It was a groundbreaking series

• 2:02Roman Mars?

  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 100 objects that told the history of the United States. So that's when they reached out to me, lifelong American, Roman Mars. With our 100-Object series, we knew we wanted to get out of the museum and focus on objects that were overlooked,

• 2:46Roman Mars?

  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 counsel of the original 100-objects host, Neil McGregor.

• 3:09Roman Mars?

  Here's our conversation.

• 3:15Roman Mars?

  What I was hoping you could do to begin with is take me back to January 2010. A History of the World in 100 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?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not, 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 interested me, having come from the National Gallery, so a paintings collection, to a museum, the ambition of which was to show really the history of humanity through things, not an art museum, but to try to explore what it meant to put objects from all over the world into one building.

• 4:16Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:28Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And of all the things in the building, how did you choose the 100?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Well, this was the greatest fun.

• 4:36Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And 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 100 objects. Well, the BBC decided that there would be five programs a week, and there needed to be a theme

• 5:03Roman Mars?

  For each week.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  For each week. And we wanted to go effectively from 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 would take, let's say, 1,000 BCE and look at a theme, let's say, power. And how do different societies represent power at 1,000 BCE?

• 5:34Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  But what it meant internally was that for every week, I would sit down with a curator from the Chinese collection, the Indian collection, the Egyptian collection, the Americas collection. And we would have to think what objects might speak to each other. Of course, for academics in a particular discipline, 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?

• 6:11Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:44Roman Mars?

  Yeah. Were there heated arguments? Was there table pounding when people were deciding which artifacts to...

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Curators don't normally pound the table.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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 exciting. And because what we were looking at was not the history of the world, but our history, a very peculiar one. 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?

• 7:35Roman Mars?

  Yeah. 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 100 coins.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  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 is 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. That limits you immediately to that small bit of humanity that wrote. And it also limits you normally to the people that were in control. Because they were the ones that wrote the history. And they ensured it survived. So part of our project

• 8:30Speaker 01

  was to have a history told by the people that had never been able to tell their story through the things they're made. And that, I think, is really important. How do you give a voice to the voiceless of the past?

• 8:43Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 9:02Roman Mars?

  So around the same time in 2010, I launched my show called 99% Invisible, 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 there's 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?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Well, at one level, it is totally counterintuitive, isn't it? That we're talking about things, the materiality of things, how they're made, the skill with which they're made, and yet you can't see it. This is where I think the BBC Radio, they know how to do this. 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 reproduced in front of you. It's why I think we're nearly always disappointed when we see a film of

• 10:10Speaker 01

  a book, because in reading the book, we've imagined the character or 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.

• 10:36Roman Mars?

  I find that if you lead with the story of an object, you fall in love with it in a different way, whereas like 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 the sort of the import of it, what it meant, all the story of how it was created and, you know, even the mundane way which it existed.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  That's right, because what we were really trying to tell was 100 biographies of an object. And of course, 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 that nobody, when the people carved the Rosetta Stone, this is a tax decree, this is a bit of tax law. And it's so boring, beyond, beyond boring. Nobody carving that tax law in the three languages for administrative purposes had any idea what it would one day come to mean. And there is something wonderful about that in an object, that the

• 11:40Speaker 01

  object can play a role that nobody could have guessed. It makes their biographies much more engaging, much more alive, I think, than than our own dull little predictable lives.

• 11:52Roman Mars?

  Totally. So when you wrote and conceived of the series and produced it, you know, you were the head director of this august institution, the British Museum, has people hold it in great esteem. 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'm inviting into my home to tell me a story about a cool thing.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think everybody's discovered that if you speak a lot on the radio, people feel they know you. And you must have the same thing, that very disconcerting experience of actually being recognized in a lift by your voice.

• 12:32Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Is, is, the first time it happens, it's very, very peculiar. And one of the things that I think is interesting about it is that it allowed us to reaffirm that the public collections in Britain, as in the United States, are not the collections of the state, but the collections of the people.

• 12:54Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I mean, when the British Museum is created in the 1750s, 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.

• 13:13Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Their things. I mean, everything I was talking about belonged to the people listening to it.

• 13:19Roman Mars?

  Why did you choose to examine the 100 objects chronologically? And what problems did that cause? Or what solutions did it provide?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  I think it has to be chronological, because one of the things that happens across human history is 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 stone scraping hand axe is what lets us, as humans, live anywhere in the world. But then, once you're 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 very dangerous dependency. So that was one strand. And one of the key meta narratives, I think, of any museum is the

• 14:14Speaker 01

  growing connectedness of the world, the fact that you can't tell a single story, to use Chimamanda Adichie's phrase. The, the story of the world is an interconnected story. So if you like, why we wanted to do it 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 this, somebody was writing this

• 14:57Speaker 01

  for the United States, but the idea of a national history is unthinkable without situating that nation.

• 15:05Roman Mars?

  Absolutely.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  In the global context.

• 15:07Roman Mars?

  We are in agreement, for sure. But, but it does present this problem is like, the beginning set of objects are all objects that are prehistorical. 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 it 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 like?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I disagree, I disagree. It narrows down the more we know about.

• 15:35Roman Mars?

  I guess that's true.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I mean, the whole point of, seems to be 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. And if you're right, the whole venture was really Gulliver's Travels. You go off around the world, you find these astonishing things, wild things. But the point of Gulliver's Travels is not that the people in Broodinglag are huge and Lillbrook tiny. The point is that when you come back to England, you realize we're pretty peculiar. We're the odd ones.

• 16:15Roman Mars?

  Interesting.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And it's to denormalize, to remove yourself as the norm, is the precondition of tolerance. And that's what Gulliver was about, is what the British Museum is about, and it's what the series was meant to be about.

• 16:28Roman Mars?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I love that approach. One of the things that I marvelled at in the series is you're touching everything. You're always describing it as a firsthand experience. And for one reason you do that is 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.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  It does. The, the difficult thing about that, which I found very hard to know how to manage, is where the object has, for the people who made it, and possibly for people today as well, its own kind of sacred existence, its 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

• 17:28Speaker 01

  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?

• 17:49Roman Mars?

  Interesting, interesting. So one of the things 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?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was very thrilling. We had been waiting to get to an object made by somebody where we could speak to the maker. The very first object, which was one and a half million years ago, one of the stone chopping tools, obviously, but we had David Attenborough instead.

• 18:24Roman Mars?

  Yeah, well, that's pretty good.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Almost, almost do, to say that's what's going on, what, how this fits into the animal-human differentiation. 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, in Egypt, the poems of, 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 was one, Gay Rights another. We wanted to, of course, to present what it was like to make the objects,

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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, the prints, and then what it would mean to him to have the prints used, looked at, and spread the campaign, advance the campaign for gay rights internationally. So, but it was, as you say, it was a real turning point. Yeah. To be able to, to, to speak to the maker for the first time.

• 19:40Roman Mars?

  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, and how did people react to it?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  We had enormous 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 that would be hopeful. So we eventually came down to two objects. One was a football shirt.

• 20:17Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Football shirt of a West African, of what was Drogba, Francophone West African, who was the great star of Chelsea.

• 20:27Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And Chelsea was owned by a Russian oligarch.

• 20:32Roman Mars?

  Perfect.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Bridgerton. 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.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Because the mobile phone seemed to us to be the equivalent of the hand axe, the chopping tool.

• 21:05Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Because in large areas of Africa and Asia, the electric currents, cables to areas could be controlled by political bosses.

• 21:55Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And areas could either be not cabled or have cables removed, whatever. The solar power, at a stroke, removes that power.

• 22:05Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Removes that political control. So it seemed to us to be in many, many ways, an emblem of liberation, an emblem of the growing technologies which change our lives and then we become dependent on them. It's also about talking. And of course, many people listen to BBC on their mobile phone. So it was also a nod to patron.

• 22:33Roman Mars?

  Absolutely. Radio is the most important thing.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  BBC.

• 22:39Roman Mars?

  Of course, you know where your bread is buttered. That makes sense.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:43Roman Mars?

  But it was also the solar powered lamp, which also like extended the day. And just like, it's all about this sort of individualized freedom and the ability of this technology frees you for all kinds of things.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  That's what we wanted to, again, finish on, how these technologies do unquestionably make life better.

• 23:00Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  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 lung problems.

• 23:15Roman Mars?

  Absolutely.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And health difficulties.

• 23:16Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  So i- in every way, it's potentially a good thing. And we wanted to end on a good hundred things.

• 23:25Roman Mars?

  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 it did inside of the UK. What do you think of the legacy of the show?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Well, we've been as 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.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And that takes you back to the dignity of the maker and the user.

• 24:02Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:13Roman Mars?

  Yes.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Why would it figure?

• 24:15Roman Mars?

  Absolutely.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Because that's not the kind of history you would do. So it opens the way to other histories told by other people.

• 24:23Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And it's, that's why A history versus the.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  A, exactly. And that was very important. One of the slightly, it's 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.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  So that's maybe in translation, the and are mean different things in different languages.

• 24:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 24:53Roman Mars?

  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've alluded to already. You 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?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  It is difficult, of course. And it's where the, it's quite useful to be able to say, well, the BBC only gave us thirteen and a half minutes for this.

• 25:22Roman Mars?

  So you can point to the controversy, you don't have to fully adjudicate it.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. But it's a very real one. And it's, it's very central to museum experience. And that's one of the differences clearly between the series we were doing, your series. And we were talking very much about objects in a museum to be presented to the public. But in a museum, the question, for instance, should some objects be shown at all?

• 25:45Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Am I not to be allowed to pursue certain lines of inquiry because it might offend your beliefs?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  That's a huge question.

• 26:16Roman Mars?

  It is, yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  The 18th century was very brisk about this.

• 26:20Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  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 were 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, or we might choose not to take it at all today in relation to other beliefs outside the European experience particularly. It's a, I think, a very big philosophical question.

• 26:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't know the answer.

• 27:00Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  But it's a question that comes again and again, particularly, of course, in areas of the natural world and of, and of human history.

• 27:08Roman Mars?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because even like, putting a date on a Clovis, the spear point of Clovis, spear point, people don't want to hear a date associated with it.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:19Roman Mars?

  They don't, they don't want to hear, you know, that people arrived.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  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 peopled from North East Asia.

• 27:36Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  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 offending the other is a very serious question.

• 27:56Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  We decided simply to allude to it, but not to explore it, but to present what we believe the thing tells us.

• 28:08Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's a very, I don't know whether that was the right decision.

• 28:13Roman Mars?

  Well, I don't know what other decision you could quite make, honestly. Like, I don't, I don't know.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Because you have two irreconcilable understandings of the relationship between the people in the place and the story of the world.

• 28:29Roman Mars?

  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. If a Clovis point is there, that meant, you know, 80% of the megafauna was gone.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  It's death to the mammoth.

• 28:46Roman Mars?

  You know, it's all, you know, interesting and important stuff, but it's, they are at odds. And so you just have to do your best to present the signs of it, I assure.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I think that's as, as much as one can do in this kind of format.

• 28:58Roman Mars?

  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 from the 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 it open and we're trying to solicit responses from, from people. So what is the type of thing that you think, from your experience in the first 100 object series, is important to include?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  You're talking about the history from.

• 29:34Roman Mars?

  It's kind of 1776.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Sort of 1776, yes.

• 29:37Roman Mars?

  You know, it could be things that lead into it.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  I think what would be interesting as an outsider, we all know the things that came, were from the Europeans settling into America. But the things that came from, for instance, tobacco.

• 29:51Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  I mean, what, I mean, there is something that America gave the world that changed the world.

• 29:57Roman Mars?

  Absolutely.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And the smoking tobacco appears almost to have begun in, in the territory of the United States. What object you would choose, I don't know, but that's something that's completely changed the world.

• 30:08Roman Mars?

  That's, that's a good point.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And certainly in my childhood, in the 50s and 60s, I mean, you couldn't be a credible teenager.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Without a cigarette. And it could be a French one, but it could just easy be a lucky strike or whatever. But even the French ones were of course, American derived.

• 30:29Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So that 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 sexual, we had objects that told those stories and the coins for votes for women, Hockley's prints, whatever. Blue jeans and cigarettes mean something the same.

• 30:53Roman Mars?

  It does.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  In the twist, but what are they about and how did that happen? I mean, that seems to me something that's where the history of the US is the history of the world. I hope some of your objects will be chosen really to make that point.

• 31:07Roman Mars?

  That's right. I mean, you've heard a couple of the early episodes. One of the ones that's that's sort of like the cigarettes and blue jeans, but maybe like not quite as known is this 60 degree threaded screw, which is an object that has very little outward significance to people, but really dominated and changed the world.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I found that completely fascinating because it's a totally different way of using an object from what we were doing. I mean, you were taking an object, but I mean, almost any screw would have done.

• 31:34Roman Mars?

  Any screw.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  No particular screw and using it to plot how the US dislodged the UK.

• 31:44Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  As the industrial determinant of the world.

• 31:47Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And that huge shift in economic, political, military power can all be read through the discussions about how to standardize globally, the thread on the screw.

• 32:00Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I knew nothing about it at all, at all at all. And it was completely fascinating. And of course, it's not at all surprising, once it's spelt out, like all these things.

• 32:11Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  The minute you're told, you can understand, of course, that's what would have happened. It was brilliant.

• 32:17Roman Mars?

  Oh, thank you.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 32:19Roman Mars?

  So do you have any advice for me as I'm embarking on this? Like, is there a moment that I should be aware of? Is it like object number 68 where you're just like, where it's?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly the object at which you will wonder.

• 32:32Roman Mars?

  Why am I doing this?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Can I bear to go on? Am I ever going to get to the end? Is anybody still listening?

• 32:42Roman Mars?

  I'll actually watch out for that moment.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And the answer is yes.

• 32:46Roman Mars?

  Well.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  You will and they are, and we need it. So thank you.

• 32:52Roman Mars?

  Neil McGregor, thank you so much for talking with me and it's such a good time.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 33:05Roman Mars?

  Sonos is a sound system engineered to make you feel. Sound is part of the design of a home, right alongside the furniture and the lighting and the art. Sonos can give ordinary rituals a little more personality. Making coffee can feel like opening credits. Dinner prep can feel like a cooking show, or for me, I like to make it sound like a mosh pit and tidying up can at least have a better soundtrack. Because Sonos works as a system, the mood can move with you from the kitchen to the living room to wherever the day happens next. It's not about making every moment louder. It's about making more moments feel like yours. Whatever you want to feel, Sonos can help set the scene. Every night I play the ambient sleep music channel on the Sonos in my bedroom and it helps me relax. It helps me sleep better.

• 33:50Roman Mars?

  The Sonos is on almost 24 hours a day when I'm not recording. Love the sound, feel the system. Visit sonos.com to build your system.

• 34:04Roman Mars?

  Support for this episode comes from Amazon Business. When it comes to your business, procurement shouldn't be a guessing game. Whether you're running a small business or managing a large organization, Amazon Business offers smart purchasing experiences designed to meet your unique needs. Smart tech, smarter decisions. Streamline your buying process, save time and money and gain valuable insights. Amazon Business empowers you and your team to buy with confidence. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com.

• 34:35Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine made bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, being outsider.

• 35:10Roman Mars?

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• 35:45Roman Mars?

  And now here's an episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects. Enjoy.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Every day I walk through the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery at the British Museum and every day there are tour guides speaking every imaginable language, addressing groups of visitors who are craving 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.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  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 conquered 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 hieroglyphics.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  In the Memphis decree, we find a Greek view of the world in Egyptian terms.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  I think it's quite weird why you would put this sort of a statement, which is basically a statement of tax exemption on such a heavy stone. I mean, 760 kilograms. Why did they do that?

• 37:32Speaker 04

  A History of the World in 100 Objects.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  The Rosetta Stone erected in 196 B.C. Founded at Al Rashid, Egypt.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  This is a week of objects connected to shifting empires and legendary rulers from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Augustus. Over 2,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean and the Middle East to India and China, these leaders found different ways of physically projecting their power and their authority. Today's program is particularly fascinating though, 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 Ptolemy V, a Greek boy king who came to the throne as an orphan in 205 B.C. at the age of six.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Ptolemy V was born into a great dynasty. The first Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great's generals, who around 100 years earlier had taken over Egypt following Alexander's death. The Ptolemies didn't trouble to learn Egyptian. They simply made all their officials 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 Ptolemies. In it, they planned to collect all the world's knowledge and Ptolemies I and II created

• 39:32Speaker 01

  the famous Pharos Lighthouse, which became one of the seven wonders of the world. Such a lively, diverse city needed strong leadership. When Ptolemy V's father died suddenly, leaving the boy as king, the dynasty and its control of Egypt looked fragile. The boy's mother was killed, the palace was torn by soldiers and there were revolts throughout the country, which delayed the young Ptolemy's coronation for years. It was in these volatile circumstances that Ptolemy V issued the Rosetta Stone and others like it. The stone is not unique. There were another 17 similar inscriptions quite like it, all in three languages and all proclaiming the greatness of the Ptolemies.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  These were put up in major temple complexes across Egypt.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  The Rosetta Stone was made in 196 B.C. on the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V by then a teenager. It's a decree issued by Egyptian priests ostensibly to mark the coronation and to declare Ptolemy's new status as a living god. Divinity went with the job of being a pharaoh. The priests had given Ptolemy 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. Ptolemy may have become a god, but to get there, he'd had to negotiate some very un-heavenly politics with his extremely powerful Egyptian priests. Dorothy Thompson, emeritus professor at Cambridge University, explains.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  The occasion which resulted in this decree was, in some respects, a change. There had been previous decrees, and they take much the same form. But in this particular reign, the reign of a very young king, whose kingdom was under attack for many quarters, one of the clauses of the Memphis decree, the Rosetta Stone, is that priests should no longer come every year to Alexandria. Alexandria was the new Greek capital. Instead, they could meet at Memphis, the old centre of Egypt. This was new, and it may be seen perhaps as a concession on the part of the royal

• 41:57Speaker 02

  household.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  The priests were critical in keeping the hearts and minds of the Egyptian masses on side for Ptolemy, 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 dynasty's 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.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  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 and in 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 demotic, and the priestly hieroglyphics, which had 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.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  By the time of the Rosetta Stone, 196 B.C., hieroglyphs were no longer in general use. They were used and understood only by the priests in the temples. Five hundred 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 stretches of 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,

• 44:02Speaker 01

  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. Pursued 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.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Most books will tell you that there are three languages on the Rosetta Stone, but if you look on the broken side, you can see that in fact there are four, because there, stencilled 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 Great's, the finding of the stone stands at the beginning of another European adventure: the bitter rivalry between Britain and France

• 45:29Speaker 01

  for dominance in the Middle East and in Africa, which continued from Napoleon until the Second World War. We asked the Egyptian writer Adafo Suef for her view of this history.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  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, but no one seems to have considered that it belonged to neither of them. But Egypt's foreign rulers, from the Romans to the Turks 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 Nasser was the first Egyptian ruler since the pharaohs.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  And I guess we've had two more since, although with varying results.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  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 therefore seen 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 Rosetta Stone, wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  It was a crucial first step, but Young hadn't quite cracked the code. 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. 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, "ahai," 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. By 1822, Champollion had finally worked the whole thing out.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  From now on, the world could put words to the great objects: the statues and the monuments, the mummies and the papyri of ancient Egyptian civilization. By the time of the Rosetta Stone, Egypt had already been under Greek rule for over 100 years, and the Ptolemy'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, whose image I'll be talking about later this week, and the Egypt of the Ptolemies became part of the Roman Empire.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  In the next programme, I'll be in Rome's great contemporary, China, looking at how the Han dynasty operated a superstate and expanded their frontiers while keeping close control over every aspect of society. All this through a lacquer cup.

• 48:56Roman Mars?

  Listen to the full 100 Objects series on Fridays right here in the 99% Invisible 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 podcasts. This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges. Onboard, savour menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne

• 49:41Roman Mars?

  selected by Smollet. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel My Bed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.

• 50:04Speaker 05

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• 50:18Speaker 06

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  Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or colour changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-8334-NURTEC or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.