We eat plants, or we do so at second hand, by eating the eaters of plants. Â Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn’t live for a day without plants. Just in case anyone fancies a taster, or to give you a flavour of the things described, my favourite objects were:

I have approached this book from many angles. I started by listening to the charming BBC broadcast. Fascinated by the different voices of the interviewees just as much as by the objects themselves, I fell in love with the concept of travelling the world, historically and geographically, on a quest to discover the diversity of man-made objects and look at them from different perspectives to tell their story in the wider context of human development. Just hearing the voices of Seamus Heaney, Amartya Sen, Wangari Maathai and many more - reflecting on the meaning of certain objects within the symbolical landscapes of their societies - made the radio show a delight. From 1975 to 1981, MacGregor taught History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading. He left to assume the editorship of The Burlington Magazine. He oversaw the transfer of the magazine from the Thomson Corporation to an independent and charitable status. In the Introduction the author says that this book could have been as well called A History of Objects Through Many Different Worlds. I agree. Each object sings a solitary tune: sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and sometimes even creepy. Put together, they create a beautiful symphony – the song of humanity, separated by time and space, over a million different worlds. This book opened my ears to that music.During a stay in London, I decided to follow the path of the objects in the British Museum as well, and having learned more about the way they entered the famous museum made them all the more precious. There are some peculiar things about our copy of this book. Its owner has underlined and marked a few passages, some with a graphite pencil and some with a type of marker called a highlighter (which left a bright streak of color without obscuring the text). This was a common practice at the time: readers marked passages that they liked or that they needed to memorize or use in some way, since otherwise it could be difficult to find it among such a mountain of text (all of which, you will recall, is composed of the same handful of symbols in various combinations, which took years of training to decode). Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.

In the British Museum I usually feel nearly overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. I am ashamed of my country's heritage of colonisation and our seemingly unclouded sense of entitlement to enjoy the world's riches, and at the same time I am utterly seduced by this booty and plunder, and I'm shedding these useless White Tears and doing nothing to dismantle the master's house as it were. Reading this is perhaps too soothing at times, and I tried not to be soothed, and to keep seeing as many layers as possible. The rationale of the 100 Objects project attracted me as soon as I heard of it. MacGregor states at the outset that part of the idea was to tell the stories of ordinary people rather than only elites. I'm aware of this as a trend through my Mum's work advocating for more female and vernacular stories in heritage, and this is one of the things I appreciate about the BM. There are lots of rich and royal things in here but an attempt at widening the view is detectable. I have always struggled to absorb histories; I can take in a narrative thread but I find it extremely hard to synthesise parallel stories into big pictures, and I was pleased to find that the focus on objects helped me to take in a lot more than usual.

Table of Contents

Though the book acts as an enthusiastic and informative guide to the ways in which objects can tell us stories about ourselves and our past, it remains aware of the issues with museums and the destructive process of collecting that filled them. It engages with the debate, offering no answers, but posing questions that the reader can consider, and manages to balance a celebration of the artefacts and their cultures without negating the controversial aspect of their current home. If you read about the Oxus Gold Chariot and didn't think know the tradition of respect for religious diversity in Zoroastrian Iran persisted into the Muslim era, this chapter is for you. Shah Abbas, a contemporary of Elizabeth I, eager to develop trade relationships, had a very multicultural court at Isfahan, and this standard, made for a Shi'a ceremony but with skills and materials from distant lands, shows what a cosmopolitan place Iran was through the period.

It did encourage me to write a small piece in the same style for an object from the Broken Empire (the world my books are set in), which later helped me secure a gig writing for a multi-player Xbox game where a portion of the world building is delivered through the history of discovered objects. The Paracas textiles, dating to 200-300 BC in Peru, which I think are not usually on view to the public because of their fragility. They are intricately sewn flying half-human figures that appear quite whimsical until you realize that they carry in one hand a curved blade and in the other a severed head. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. It is so informative , original in its perspective and also tells us about how more recent generations sometimes altered artefacts to show their appreciation of the object, and these have therefore layers of history to them.Another book that was bought for me as a present. The collection of objects featured is taken from the British Museum, although there’s enough in that establishment to allow the author to avoid Anglo or Eurocentrism, which he is careful to do. It is mentioned that sometimes only objects can tell about the people, since there was no writing, or the written texts were on a material that couldn't stand the wear of time (the climate, the place, the robbers and so on). One of the objects I have as a museum souvenir (the Rosetta Stone) - a paperweight. I liked what was chosen as the last object: a solar-powered lamp (and charger). This choosing was well-explained and shows optimism for the future. Another thing was that I slowly realised how much connections between people can determine where objects end up, what objects end up looking like, how much both objects and ideas can influence, and how much humanity can desire the connection (and how important it can be for a city to exist, to be full of life). We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn't live for a day without plants. Our past is all about plants, our present is all tied up with plants; and without plants there is no future.