A History of the World (104 page)

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Authors: Andrew Marr

BOOK: A History of the World

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10. Dice from Mohenjo-Daro in today’s Pakistan: an ancient river civilization on the Indus which may be the origin of much of today’s Indian culture.

11. Painting from the workers’ village near Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Craftsmen as well as Pharaohs had their own decorated tombs; and we know their gossip too.

12. Siddhartha, who renamed himself the Buddha, was among the most radical thinkers in history; the product of India going through a time of tumultuous change.

13. Erlitou wine cup: the earliest Chinese objects already look like nothing that could have been made in the West.

14. Babylon, with its glorious enameled buildings and hanging gardens, must have awed as well as terrified the Hebrews taken there in captivity.

15. A gold necklace belonging to King Croesus from Lydia: his royal mint produced reliable, pure coinage that spread across Asia, which is why we say ‘rich as Croesus’ today.

16. The Cyrus cylinder: not quite the first international declaration of human rights, but Cyrus the Great was an empire builder of a new kind.

17. Socrates died by drinking poison – a martyr to free speech but also a genuine threat to Athenian democracy. We still have not untangled the challenge he laid down to open societies.

18. Confucius, or Kongzi, was the most influential conservative thinker in world history: his influence on Chinese political culture is as great as that of Ancient Greece on the West’s.

19. The Assyrian capital Persepolis was decorated with vast stone murals, some recording ordinary life, others disgustingly sadistic.

20. A gold coin of Alexander III, ‘Alexander the Great’, who turned himself into a bloody cultural whisk, whirling together Greeks and Asians.

21. By taking the Christian message to non-Jews, including in Rome itself, Paul was the real founder of Christianity as a global religion.

22. The Nazca people of southern Peru were brilliant artists and excellent engineers. But they made one mistake, which proved fatal.

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