OBJECT 8: Model of four cattle (made around 5,500 years ago). Painted clay, found at El Amra, southern Egypt

When the green savannah grass of the Sahara began to dry and wither,

And the giraffe, gazelle and elephant had disappeared forever,

When water was scarce and soil became sand,

And dry arid desert consumed the land,

When the crops in the fields failed without rain,

And hungry hunters wandered the plain,

Searching for food, for something to kill,

They saw herds of cattle were living there still...

Milk and blood, milk and blood

Domesticated cows chewing the cud,

There is meat at hand when times are tough,

When famine strikes and there's not enough.

Horn and skin, horn and skin,

Hides to wear and food within,

Beneath the glare of a remorseless sun,

A vein is cut; the living liquid begins to run,

The cow stands silent, bleeding its sacrifice into the waiting bowl,

As its human master drinks his daily toll.

Milk and blood, horn and skin,

The taming of the world and all within,

The overlord of nature stakes his claim,

The world and its creatures are all fair game.

A grave in the desert - A23,

Body, male, and what else can we see -

Contents: baton of clay in red stripes with imitation mace-head, small red pottery box,

Leg bones of a small animal, pots...

And a stand of four clay cows.

An archaeological find in the Egyptian desert sand,

Four horned clay cows grazing fertile land,

Tiny statuettes moulded from the mud of the Nile,

Four tiny cows standing in file,

Waiting patiently for resurrection when they will bleed and slave,

A symbol of life in the pit of a grave,

Beasts of burden to ease a poor farmer's strife

In the eternal realm of the afterlife.

And where would we be without the cow?

The world would not be what it is now:

Cows in the meadow,

Milk cows in the parlour,

Wild West cowboys creating a drama,

Steak and burgers, burgers and steak,

Beef on the table, potatoes to bake,

Cheese for the board, butter for bread,

And four clay cows wait to be led,

To the celestial pastures by the Nile in the sky;

A Milky Way river that flows on by,

Where the cow will be crowned, Hathor, the eye of Ra,

Worshipped as fertile goddess, wide and far.

Milk and blood, hide and meat,

The model cows still stand so neat,

Painted pottery cattle on a field of clay,

Undisturbed until this day,

Waiting for their master’s voice, with jubilation

To summon them to a destiny of subjugation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00q2p6b

Object 7: Ain Sakhri lovers figurine (made around 11,000 years ago). Stone sculpture, found near Bethlehem

There was a pebble,

There was a pebble the size of a clenched fist,

There was a pebble the size of a clenched fist tumbling downstream,

Tumbling downstream, banging against other stones on its way,

A stone smoothed and rounded against the chattering of other stones,

By the rhythm of the water's soft caress, like the soft caress of a lover.

There was a hand,

There was a human hand,

There was a human hand reaching down into a river,

Reaching down beneath the glistening froth of the bubbling water,

Choosing the pebble, lifting it from its tinkling gravel bed,

A human hand holding a pebble the size a fist,

Fingers feeling the round sensual rhythm of a pebble, caressed by a river's flow.

There was a man,

There was a woman,

There was a man and a woman who loved each other,

They loved each other and loved to feel each other's soft caresses -

A hand,

A hand touching a hand,

Fingers stroking hair, lingering on a thigh,

Fingers dipping and probing in an ecstasy of passion,

A man and a woman making love,

Wrapping their thighs around each other,

A man and a woman gasping in the wonder of the sexual act,

A man and a woman dissolving into each other,

Like a stone dissolving in the patient embrace of a river's subtle song.

There were gazelle,

There were gazelle to be hunted,

Hunted on the lush savannah landscapes,

There were gazelle and there was grain on the stalks,

There were wild grasses, there were lentils and chickpeas and wheat and barley,

There was meat on the fire and bread baking on hot stones,

There was food in the larder and new gods to worship,

To thank for the fecundity of nature,

The blessing of a benevolent earth,

The union of a man and a woman consecrated by the fruitful earth.

There is passion,

There is passion in flesh, in being human, in being alive,

In being alive when the mother goddess has blessed life itself,

When life itself is bursting with vigour and hope,

And a man and woman are making love,

A man and a woman are lost in each other,

Lost in a tender moment, caught in time,

Caught in an eternal embrace,

A tender moment frozen into soft lines of energy,

An emotional time machine carved into a pebble,

Carved into a pebble so that the lover's act will unfold forever in ecstasy,

To remind us all of the power of love,

The power of love carved into a pebble,

A pebble the size of a fist,

A pebble lifted from the bed of a river near Bethlehem, 10,000 years ago,

A stone smoothed and rounded against the chattering of other stones,

By the rhythm of the water's soft caress, like the soft caress of a lover.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/vNEwNR8rSzGPSwSn3yeJwA

Object 6: Bird-shaped pestle (made 4 - 8,000 years ago). Stone, found in Papua New Guinea

A startle of colour stabs through the canopy of the forest below,

A flurry of wingbeats, marvelling the air

As the bright iridescent bird; a sudden shock of feathers and flight

Sets sail above them.

They abandon their digging for a while, kneel and crane their heads upwards

And watch as the bird departs,

Blessing the crop of bitter tubers beneath their feet.

It’s time for farmer families to gather food, to harvest wheat and rice and root,

It’s time to sit around a fire, to kneel before a stone,

It’s time to grind the kernels of the gathered grain, to store them up before the rain,

It’s time to cook, to boil and bake, to share a meal, to give and take,

It’s time to learn how wild things grow, to know their seasons;

When to reap and when to sow.

On upland soil where no trees grow,

Wild grasses wave in the ripple of the wind;

There in bleak summers when rain was scarce and deer and bison refused to show,

When hunger gnawed at vein and bone, and children moaned and cried to feed;

A green verdant blanket of barley, wheat and rye stood ready with their seed.

And in the heat of a jungle, humid with the breath of the earth,

Pestle and mortar are pounding away, the women rock, the women sway

To the rhythm of their daily task:

The bowl of hip, the bowl of stone are scraped and scoured,

The taro pummelled to a paste,

The fire is lit, the bread is baked;

The village family rooted firmly in their village soil

Share the rich baked alchemy of their toil.

And the memory of the bird with wings outstretched,

Blessing the harvest as it ascends with a message

Into the wonder of the bright blue sky,

Is now a memory in a shaft of stone;

A celebration in a practical object,

A magical omen hatched in a human brain.

And with sturdy phallic sureness, its pounding message of plenty,

Its message of rain and fruitful harvests,

Its message of fertile hopefulness

Is transforming Earth’s green gift into food.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/xQBDvzBRSrqVQYQ5ECaZwA

Object 5: Clovis point (made over 13,000 years ago). Stone spearhead found in Arizona

Leaf of stone,

Lethal stone,

Pointed stone,

Slender stone,

Sharp stone,

Stone that can kill...

Spearhead stone.

Hunters are hunting,

Surrounding their prey -

It doesn't stand a chance:

The painful roar of fear scarring the sky

As they hurl death at a bison, a bear or a bellowing mammoth,

Staggering, bewildered to its knees;

A collapsing hulk of muscle and visceral slaughter,

Maiming the air with its plaintive cry;

The last of its kind, weary of the chase,

Weary of the primitive struggle to survive

As a hail of spears pierce its flesh,

The last of a line, weary of being hunted... by men.

People have been on the move,

Walking across plains, walking across mountains, walking across continents.

People have been exploring, searching, finding new lands,

Discovering new places to live and thrive:

There are tribes of people out there in the world now,

Treading the soil of a bright green planet, verdant and fruitful,

Tribes of people trudging their weary journeys,

Curious to explore the limits of their imagination,

Forever crossing new horizons, stepping into new landscapes,

Leaving their footprint behind as they march forward,

Leaving the mark of mankind wherever they go.

Now man has the upper hand, and will have forever more,

Now man has the edge, and need not fear the claw and tooth,

The random savage death, the wild instinctive kill

That tears like a rush of fateful wind through the long savannah grass,

That falls like heavy rain from the twisted canopy of jungle trees;

An animal struggle of muscle and jaw, biting terror into the brain...

Now man decides what may live or die,

Man is master of his destiny:

A human master with a spear in his hand.

  

While the planet was thawing, the tribes had been hunting.

While ice had been melting, the families of men had been walking,

Walking across a bridge of ice into a continent empty of people,

A lonely Eden of newness, brimming with promise,

And every step they took was a discovery,

Every mountain scaled revealed another horizon of possibility,

Every river forded brought them nearer to the heart of a new beginning:

A planet of plenty was shrinking

A planet of ice was becoming a planet of water,

A planet of life was becoming a planet ordered by life...

The life of a hunter, trapped like a fly in amber on an empty continent

As his bridges fade behind him like dreams,

Like dreams dissolving in the salty waters of a careless ocean.

And the bewildered immigrants forget where they came from,

They forget the family they left behind,

And begin to wonder how they came to be here,

Wonder if they fell from the sky like a meteor,

A fiery spark of creation forged in a star,

Forking down from the Heavens to seed the earth?

Wonder if they came from the earth itself,

Burrowing upwards through the mother's womb to the light,

Clawing their way to creation through her soil and loam,

To stand upright upon the very clay that moulded their flesh?

And maybe they even arrived on the back of a great water beetle,

It's iridescent wings beating life into existence:

A melding of air and water, making matter of man.

And the broken shaft of a spear lies abandoned on the ground,

Trodden underfoot by a dying mastodon,

A leaf of stone buried in time,

Waiting for someone to find it so that the story can finally be told

Of how a race of people walked across a bridge of ice

And forgot that it was ever there,

Of how a tribe of hunters made America their home,

And surrounded by a sanctuary of seas,

Knew nothing of another world where other hunters were busy building ships.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/hLAME-wiTyaZU2KQf-P5vA

Object 4: Swimming reindeer (made around 13,000 years ago). Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found at Montastruc, central France

The reindeer are back!

Like a blessing from the earth -

A living cloud of hope,

Thundering across the frozen, treeless plains.

Who has sent them?

Why do they return every season to battle the roaring current of a swollen river?

Why do they annually make that epic journey,

Returning like a mystery in the breath of the keen west wind

With their precious sacrificial gift?

Their skin, their fur, their meat, their bones

Grant us life in a bleak icy continent where every day is a struggle to survive

And the future is a place too uncertain to contemplate.

And yet, they are here again,

Eyes bulging with purpose

As they furiously kick away the tug of the river's undertow

To scramble, bedraggled and shivering on the shore of our homeland hopes.

And that is why I am scraping and chiselling their likeness

Into the tusk of a mammoth;

Their image buried deep in my eyes,

Slowly revealing itself in lines of moving force:

A stag with his doe are swimming through the ivory,

Gasping for air, antlers bent back, legs at full stretch.

That is why I am whittling with my stone knife,

Rubbing paste into the cuts;

Pulsing blood into a solid thing,

So that when they have finished their rutting

And new life bleats its fragile entrance,

Slimy and staggering, beached on a world of ice,

Ready to follow nature's flow back to the source;

We can look at the tusk and see them there, still -

Swimming toward us from the past,

Remembering how they always return.

Because the great lumbering mammoth,

A gigantic bolder of flesh and bone, as big and grand as it is,

Seems to be dwindling away,

And is rare as green grass in a patch of molten snow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/DyfP6g6dRN6WdwdnbIVbPw

Object 3: Olduvai handaxe (made 1.2 - 1.4 million years ago) found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa

Savannah man stands upright,

Bright inquisitive eyes contemplating the horizon -

The line of possibility where the sun dips daily,

Whetting a knife edge of earth,

A sharp keen blade of Savannah plain slicing into the sky

To let in the night

With its mystery of stars and planets;

Its sparkling messengers that march across the black sleep of wonder,

And make you dream of walking across the sky.

And the stars have marched across the memory of men and women long gone:

Each life a step forward, each death a legacy of learning,

Bequeathed to a growing family of people like us...

Our ancestors in Africa have outgrown their home.

The hot Savannah air stirs with the melody of life:

The cicada's relentless chirp,

The morning chorus with its territorial army of birds;

Proclaiming their existence with a song,

The bellowing roar of the killer cats, stalking their prey,

The delicate timpani of dry grass moving a murmur in the warm wind...

And the percussive 'tap, tap, tap' of people making tools.

There in the hand of Savannah man is a teardrop of stone:

An evolution of an idea melded from the family memory of generations long gone:

A practical handaxe, reassuringly perfect:

Two sharp edges that will cut trees, cut meat,

Scrape bark from branches, skin from flesh

To make a second skin to wear when the cold winds blow,

And a sharp point that can drill a hole

So that deft hands can loop sinews through dried skins, stitch and tie,

Explore the industry of imagination

That sparks a fusion of neurons, lights a fuse in the brain,

Plants ideas in the restless mind of a restless man.

And the ideas have a sound: a grunt in the throat, a noise in the mouth

That becomes a word -

Savannah people are speaking... there is language in the land.

Families sit together, chipping at stone, sharing thoughts and ideas,

Talking about food and shelter, talking about how to make the perfect axe,

Wondering what the coming day will bring, what food can be found,

What woman is heavy with child, what man is wild and unruly,

What time of the season will the fruit ripen and be ready to eat,

And what would happen to a man if he were to walk away from here,

Follow that unknown path the great blinding sun takes daily, 

Where vision ends and dreams endure?

And then one day someone picks up an axehead,

Weighs it in his hand; its usefulness is reassuring,

Its secure purpose, a fact -

Here is a tool to travel with; here is a tool that a man will need

On a journey to a place where no other man has ever trod.

And so he walks and they watch, awe struck

As he crosses the horizon's blade and disappears from sight,

Taking the daylight with him.

And as the stars once again sprinkle the night sky with a blessing of dreams,

Someone is thinking, 'When will I go?'

Because once someone has begun a journey, someone else is bound to follow.

And stone is moving, stone is cutting,

Stone is seeding the landscape with the language of stone:

Savannah man has grown up and left home to walk a wilderness of wonders

For a million years...

With a teardrop in his hand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/I3I8quLCR8exvdZeQPONrw

Object 2: Olduvai stone chopping tool (made 1.8 million years ago) found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa

Dead meat
Rank
On the vast Savannah.
Leopard's leftovers,
Spilt gore:
Food for a forager,
Food for the brain,
White ribs of marrow wilting in the bright African sun
Two million years ago.

Stone on the ground,
Stone in the hand,
Stone in the brain of Savannah man;
Curious eyes examining a fist of stone,
Turning it around,
Feeling its weight,
Seeing the possibilities within...

And then the slap of stone on stone:
Two hands, two stones, two eyes
Click an echo of labour at the cliffs of the great Olduvai Gorge...
Two million years ago.

And death is always in the air,
Death is always an instant away:
Hunger gnawing at bones,
The snarl in the long grass, the deep throaty grunt in the dead of night,
Claws flexing in anticipation of a kill.

But the stone is growing an edge as his eyes narrow -
Four strikes, five, turn it around - another chip sharpens a line,
It will do the job, but a spark of thought chips another possibility -
Seven, eight strikes and there in his hand is a tool.

While the leopard and lion sleep in the heat of the day,
Savannah man is kneeling over the torn carcase of their abandoned meal.
Stone cuts flesh from bones; stone severs sinews and butchers meat,
Stone shatters a bloody femur and reveals the nourishing marrow within -
Greedy mouths suck at the sticky substance of life:
Lick the liquid brain food that their tool has revealed,
Devours the rich protein that feeds the mind,
That gives them the imagination to see beyond instinct,
That grows the thought in the rich loam of the cerebellum,
To make tools to give them the edge
In the deep scar of earth one thousand miles long,
Baking in the blaze of an African sun
Two million years ago.

And we are all Africans,
Bonded in the struggle to live,
Bred in the fierce ritual of survival,
Savannah people with the marrow of invention rich in our bones:
Our ancestral DNA, a bequest from someone with a stone in his hand,
Beginning a journey that would lead us... where?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/ykHw5-oqQEGFnvat1gavxA