Thursday 14 March 2013

The history of the world in 100 objects

source. The British Museum

How do we know about our past selves? About 8000 years BC we started to develop clay tokens to enumerate good. This can be said was the first gesture of the symbolic function stem out of our minds as a tool to record and manipulate the complexity of the world on which we were living. The tokens would then evolve into enumerating systems and later into what we know now as writing systems. From that point on we have what we know as history.

Writing is a tool that come from our minds and is meant to be use to shape the intangible realm of -again- the mind. But what happened with the tools we create to shape our environment or even our selves, or those object on which we project our intangible inner existence into the material world? all those stories, all those  evidences are embodied as solid reflections of our selves in different developmental stages and tainted with variant comprehensions of our meanings and perspectives.

This is the stories that a join project between the BBC and the British Museum have to tell delivered in various formats:
As Web site: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_the_world.aspx
As radio show, now as a podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/
As an interactive web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/?timeregion=7
And as a book: http://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/invt/cmc44134/?__utma=1.432636122.1363320116.1363320116.1363322472.2&__utmb=1.5.9.1363322644495&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1363320116.1.1.utmcsr=uclue.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/&__utmv=-&__utmk=132295566



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