By Neil MacGregor
From the popular director of the British Museum, a kaleidoscopic heritage of humanity instructed via issues we have now made.
When did humans first begin to put on jewellery or play tune? while have been cows domesticated and why will we feed their milk to our kids? the place have been the 1st towns and what made them be successful? Who invented math-or got here up with money?
The background of humanity is a historical past of invention and innovation, as we now have continuously created new goods to take advantage of, to respect, or to depart our mark at the global. during this unique and thought-provoking booklet, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has chosen one hundred man-made artifacts, each one of which supplies us an intimate glimpse of an unforeseen turning aspect in human civilization. A background of the area in a hundred Objects stretches again million years and covers the globe. From the first actual hand awl to the ever present credits card, each one merchandise has a narrative to inform; jointly they relate the bigger background of mankind-revealing who we're via taking a look at what now we have made.
Handsomely designed, with greater than a hundred and fifty colour pictures in the course of the textual content, A historical past of the realm in a hundred Objects is a stunning studying e-book and makes a superb present for a person drawn to historical past.
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Example text
But self-government does not necessarily imply independence. 9 But at the same time the concept of autonomia changed its meaning: it no longer implied full independence, but simply self-government. On the other hand, autonomia became a much more conspicuous concept in the relations between city-states after the King’s Peace in 386 bc and in the relations between city-states and monarchies in the Hellenistic Age. Autonomia was with ever greater frequency bound up with polis. In the Hellenistic kingdoms all poleis were actually subordinate to the ruling monarch, but in 50 Chapter 6 di·erent degrees.
Fifty years ago Moses Finley—and many in his wake—believed that there was no trace of the Classical polis in the Homeric poems. 18 Nowadays everybody accepts that polis in the sense of city-state is to be found in the poems,19 and there can be no doubt at all that a public that listened, in the sixth century bc, to 42 Chapter 5 a recitation of the Odyssey would instinctively have seen the polis of the Phaiakians as a Greek colony founded by Nausithoos (Od. 7–10, 262–72); and the description in the Iliad of the two poleis on the shield of Achilleus (Il.
12 And in the western part of the Roman Empire many cities sickened or completely disappeared as a result of the early medieval migrations. In the eastern half, by contrast, there were poleis that still had the characteristics of city-states in the fifth century ad, and even into the sixth. 14 Corresponding to the nature of pagan religions, every polis had its own religious festivals and its own pantheon of gods: but now the pagan gods were abolished by a religion that did not permit local variations.
