Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.

Neil MacGregor

Categorized in : You World History Long

[The Persian Empire] left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.

Neil MacGregor

god dream people

From the point where our ancestors started making tools, people have been unable to survive without the things they make; in this sense, it is making things that makes us human.

Neil MacGregor

ancestor tools people

For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe.

Neil MacGregor

everyday sound years

For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

Neil MacGregor

icons adventure museums

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

Neil MacGregor

objects narrative

Objects are better than text at conveying narrative

Neil MacGregor

conveying objects narrative

In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.

Neil MacGregor

voice motivation inspiration

In 1600, when Shakespeares audience at the Globe heard Hamlet for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.

Neil MacGregor

cups wine firsts

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose, to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

Neil MacGregor

citizens liberty museums

Both institutions believe it is precisely at moments like this that the museums have to keep speaking.

Neil MacGregor

lifestyle

Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.

Neil MacGregor

beginning universe god book

The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed.

Neil MacGregor

great together time people

As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

Neil MacGregor

beginning misunderstanding habit long

The things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.

Neil MacGregor

survive live quality life

Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.

Neil MacGregor

religions struggle evil life

While there are few records of Viking women participating in battle, they certainly held positions of high status in society as human sorceresses known as 'volvas.'

Neil MacGregor

high women society battle

The spread of Viking bling is a good indication of the spread of its culture.

Neil MacGregor

good indication spread culture

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

Neil MacGregor

change mind history way

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

Neil MacGregor

greeks version single creation

Prometheus - trickster, rebel and hero - links the realm of the gods with the world of humanity, with which he had such close affinity. His act of stealing fire has been viewed as the foundation of all man's technologies.

Neil MacGregor

man humanity fire hero