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It's just over two weeks to go until A History of the World in 100 Objects returns to Radio 4. But looking at my iPod the other day I realised that I only had 28 of the episodes from the first part. So I've finally downloaded the two I was missing: the Paracas textile and the Basse Yutz Flagons.

I listened to the Paracas textile one this morning. It's great. The thing I think I like most about it is summed up by Neil MacGregor near the beginning:

We're learning new things all the time about the Americas at this date but, compared to what we know about Asia, much is still relatively mysterious.

That hooked me straight in. There's something exciting about being told that even the experts don't have all the facts. Maybe it's the vast amount of knowledge at our fingertips these days and the feeling you sometimes get that every inch of history has already been thoroughly scrutinised and pinned down. David described a similar thing at the end of his previous post when talking about the loss of the unknown when travelling.

But here is a civilisation, in fact an entire continent, that remains elusive. And if that wasn't enough for the ten-year-old in me, it turns out that this episode isn't really about weaving and cross-stitching, it's about mummies and ritual sacrifice.

If you haven't heard the programme you can listen again from our object page for the Paracas textile by clicking on the big pink button on the right of the page. Or you can even save a copy of the episode onto your pc by clicking the 'Download' link. You can then listen to it whenever you want.

If, like me, you have missed some of the other episodes, they are all still available for free online. Choose any objects you missed from this list of the 100 British Museum objects and then on the object page click listen again or download.

If you're new to all this, then you can read the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's help pages to find out more about the and .

Fill in the gaps in your knowledge, even if it turns out that, ironically, your listening to someone discussing the gaps in theirs.

• All episodes of A History of the World are free and available to keep as long as you want.

In a previous post I wrote about the serious task of selecting 100 future radio stars from the almost 8 million objects cared for by the British Museum.

Since our curators tackled that one, many hundreds of objects have been added to their original selection right here on this website - by museums and individuals all over the UK - each of them contributing a piece of global history to the project.

So, I thought I'd ask the brains behind A History of the World to pick some objects from the site that appeal to their expert minds. Over the next few weeks, I'll bring you some of their choices - starting today with , British Museum curator of the .

Ben brought you many of the fascinating stories in the first set of programmes, and you'll hear his handiwork in the next set - starting on 17 May - too.

First off he picked out 's Bronze Age boat found beneath the streets of the town in 1992.

It has always been assumed that people in Britain were sailing across the seas in prehistory. From around 6,000 years ago, when the last land that joined Britain to the continent disappeared, they had no option if they wanted to reach the island. As an archaeologist you see plenty of evidence for the trade in objects, technologies and ideas with continental Europe.

It is very rare indeed that you find a boat - let alone one around 3,500 years old that is so well preserved and so sophisticated in its manufacture as the Dover Boat. Made of oak planks, it is held together with wedges and yew withies - not a nail in sight! It is also beautifully displayed in the museum in Dover and in my opinion is one of the best Bronze Age displays in the country.

It's hard to imagine an ancient channel crossing being anything other than tricky, but this really shows that the people of Bronze Age Britain clearly knew a thing of two about engineering. Ben's next choice shows they had an eye for aesthetics too. He describes the Hove amber cup in :

This is one of the most stunningly beautiful prehistoric objects discovered in Britain. Made entirely from amber from the Baltic, it was carved to perfection over 3,500 years ago. It belongs to a range of cups made in exotic and precious materials such as gold, silver and amber in North West Europe.Ìý

And finally, a reminder of just how brave travellers of the past needed to be in the form of Francis Drake's Atlas of the world. Says Ben:

With the current hiatus in space travel, maybe we've forgotten the terrifying yet seductive idea of venturing across a virtually uncharted space and discovering new worlds. This map reminds us it was not so long ago that a European sailing across the Atlantic was heading towards an unknown world - a terra incognita. For all their knowledge and power, these explorers had no idea there were flourishing civilizations on the other side of the ocean.

In our age of guidebooks, mobile GPS and the Internet it's hard for us digital folk to imagine how daunting it must be to set off with little idea of what's beyond the horizon.
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Tomorrow is holding a special event called . The great news is that you can take your objects along to the museum and get help uploading them to the website.

That's what a group from Trinity High School in Manchester did earlier this year for . Take a look at their video that they made about their how they chose their objects to put on the website.



Don't worry if you can't think of anything to take along to though. There are events throughout the day, some of which sound quite intriguing - for example, one invites you to "travel back in time and make Egyptian hair."

Now I wasn't clear what this would involve, so I hit the search engine. As a result I'm even more intrigued because, at Minnesota State University:

Children had unique hairstyles in ancient Egypt. Their hair was shaved off or cut short except for a long lock of hair left on the side of the head, the so-called side-lock of youth.

It may have been all the rage in ancient Egypt but these days that is a pretty bold look for a boy or girl. Is the museum really intending to shave the youth of Manchester? Probably not, but it would make quite a sight.

If Egyptian hair isn't your thing you could make a headdress instead or dress up as a Celt. Or you can pick up a Relic Trail and hunt down the objects the museum has added to this website.Ìý I've been watching quite a few Asian action films lately, so I'd like to see the Samurai armour but there is also Greek pottery, a hoard of gold coins and a Roman altar.

We've now have ten museums in and around the Manchester area that have joined the project, including participants like Bury Art Gallery. I love their cradle of Sir Robert Peel. That is a sturdy piece of children's furniture.

Today is the 350th anniversary of the birth of . Sloane as in the man who founded the British Museum.

It was Sloane and his incredible appetite for collecting objects from the world around him that led to the .

When he died, Sloane left a collection of objects from across the world to the British nation on the condition they be publicly exhibited. Parliament duly obliged and the British Museum Act put this collection into trust. Six years later our doors opened and the Museum has remained, as the law stipulates, free to the world since.

But what made Sloane collect? We might all do it: football stickers (me), cigarette cards (my dad), stamps (anyone?). But not so many of us do it on Sloane's scale.

To name but a few of the things he accumulated:

• 23,000 coins and medals
• 50,000 books, prints and manuscripts
• a herbarium (collection of dried plants)
• 1,125 'things relating to the customs of ancient times'

So, why did he do it? This well-travelled Royal physician, born in Killyleagh, Ireland, had the wealth and opportunity, but where does the inclination come from?

Kim Sloan - no relation - is curator of the at the British Museum which faithfully recreates the eighteenth century period - known as the Enlightenment - in which this institution was founded. She told me a little about what the man himself might have been thinking.

'Sloane travelled to Jamaica in the 1680s as physician to the governor and used the opportunity to collect and catalogue all the plants and animals he had never seen before.

When he returned he continued to collect at every opportunity from others who had travelled outside Europe - he bought, traded and was given curiosities and everyday objects and he built a huge library of books, manuscripts and catalogues to help understand the collection.

He was creating an encyclopaedia of the world through objects and books and hoped that the information he provided would enlighten everyone that visited it.'

In Sloane's time careful, rational observation and thought about the natural and human world was seen as essential. In creating an encyclopaedia of things, Sloane saw a chance to gather the physical evidence from across the world that could be used to better understandÌý it - all of it.

Sloane collected, and indeed the British Museum was founded, so we could all better understand what's going on around us, and out of this spirit the A History of the World project has grown. Just like Sloane, we're using objects to better understand, appreciate and acknowledge the world's cultures.

All this week, the Museum is marking this special occasion with , but there are also in the UK. Personally, I'll be spending a few moments in the Enlightenment gallery. It's a room bristling with the spirit of Sloane and his age, and houses some of the very objects he collected - as well as a number of the stars of A History of the World (the Ritual seat, Moche warrior pot, and Maya maize god statue to name a few).

But if you can't make it to a museum, I hope you'll join me in doffing a metaphorical cap to the man who started this. His was a time quite different to our own, (no Google for instant fact-checking at his finger tips for a start) but his thirst for knowledge - and drinking chocolate, a habit he was among the first to promote - is something I think we can all appreciate.

• The photo shows a bust of Sir Hans Sloane © Trustees of the British Museum

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Did you get out to any museums over Easter? Maybe you found a Relic Trail near you? I think at the final count there were 33 unique Relic Trails in museums across the UK - each one made up of puzzles and challenges involving objects in that museum's collection. If you missed out, lots of the museums are still running the trails, so if you spotted one near you it's not too late to join in.

If you were in Cardiff you may also have caught the event at the National Museum Wales. Eddie Butler was introducing talks about some of the objects from their collection which are on this site, including the Welshpool Gold Cup and the Trenacatus stone. You can still see some of the highlights from his recent series Wales and the History of the World online.

Or maybe some of you managed to get a ticket for the special event at the in Coventry just before Easter? I hear that it was a great success. Though that shouldn't be a surprise as three days later the Herbert was the winner of the award.

The award is judged by families - sent in undercover. I'm not sure if this means that the families don't tell the museum that they are judges or if each family has to walk around pretending that they don't know each other.

But, whatever the level of secrecy involved, I know my nieces would concur with judge Ruby Jowett, aged five, who points out approvingly that "in every gallery there was a basket with pencils in it." High praise indeed.

• Look for more A History of the World and Relic: Guardians of the Museum events in a few weeks time. There are more events planned for weekend of 14-16 May as part of Museums At Night.

It's such a nice round number that 100 has become a measure and milestone for all sorts, from cricket scores to years. It has a certain neatness, but also a significance: it sounds like a lot - 100 birthdays to get a telegram from the queen, 100 men to make up a decent Roman troop.

But when it comes to 100 objects from the British Museum collection, to tell a history of the world, we're not talking a big number. We're talking the tough task of selecting a fraction of the cared for here.

As we get ready to air the next set of programmes - kicking off on May 17 with a Coin bearing the head of Alexander the Great - I thought I'd ask the curatorial team behind the series how they did it.

Barrie Cook, curator in our Coins and Medals department, and one of the brains responsible for A History of the World, told me how it all started:

There were, first of all, the two 'silent' filters: what happens to have survived and what the British Museum has happened to acquire. Then there came the positive criteria, which is where the vision for the series started to form.

We wanted to cover as much of the world as possible, to represent all humanly-inhabited regions across time. We also wanted to cover as full a range of material as possible - stone, ceramic, metal, glass, textile, feathers, wood and so on - and we wanted to represent the great cultures of the world, especially the less familiar ones, such as the Moche of Peru, the Silla period in Korea, the Timurid Empire of central Asia.

Choosing 100 objects to do that (although the hundredth is of course yet to be chosen) took more than two years. A crack team spent hundreds of hours researching, debating and analysing objects to use from across all the Museum's departments.

So what did they choose and why?

With only 100 available slots, some well known parts of the Museum collection could only be represented by a limited number of objects - some listeners might be surprised that there are relatively few Roman or Ancient Egyptian objects for example. There are also some very famous objects in the Museum that haven't been included. Barrie explains:

They had to be things that manifested something important about their societies, things that had a role and use, not ones that just illustrated great events or people - we weren't trying to offer a history of art or decoration, but - to the extent we can - a history of how objects contribute to their societies, indeed how objects make societies work.

In some cases we still don't really know what an object was for exactly - the Mold Cape, the Standard of Ur - but we can grope towards an answer and in doing so illuminate the world it came from.

As Neil MacGregor points out on these very pages, the 100 objects were chosen "because of the stories they can tell" - not just because they're beautiful, famous, or impressive. So, broken bits of crockery have just as much to say as an ornate, richly-decorated work of art.

In the objects they chose, Barrie and the team tell one history of the world - taking in two million years and five continents - but there are, of course, many different ways to do that and they could probably start all over again with a whole new set and tell it in a completely different way.

I don't suppose they have another two years or so spare to do that, but the good news is that right here you can help us tell as many different histories of the world as you like - just add your objects to the website and create your own.

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Easter is upon us and everyone is looking forward to a very long weekend. There are parks and fields to walk in, films to see, and, of course, museums to visit. But, as it's the middle of the school holidays there are also children to keep entertained.

With that in mind we've been working with over thirty museums around the UK to put together special Relic Trails. The trails are based on the C³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ series Relic: Guardians of the Museum.

I finally caught an episode a couple of weeks ago, when I was off sick for a few days. In it, three children visit the British Museum at night and have to solve puzzles set by a tour-guide called Agatha, who also happens to be a ghost.

The tasks involve things like giant 3D puzzles, running across rope-bridges to collect key's and unlock chests, or working out how many leeches you need to cure the pox. If they successfully complete a task they are rewarded with a vision of history, in the one I saw the visions were of Ramesses II, which they have to memorise to challenge the Dark Lord at the end of the show.

It's an energetic mix of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor, and Indiana Jones, all set in the galleries of the British Museum. And the confrontation at the end with the Dark Lord, floating around in mid-air with a death's head mask complete with golden goats' horns, is definitely something that as I kid I would have watched from behind the sofa.

Unfortunately I did as badly as the kids at the questions on Ramesses II. However, I did learn that the Romans used urine in their toothpaste recipes. Though I didn't learn why the Romans used urine in their toothpaste recipes. (I prefer peppermint.)

So, if your children have been watching Relic: Guardians of the Museum, then maybe you should seek out your nearest Relic Trail over the weekend. Each trail is different using objects from that museum's collection and you will be problem-solving and memorising facts just like the children in the show.

There are Relic Trails all over the country and they are free. Just find your nearest one and collect a leaflet at the museum. Good luck - and I hope you don't bump into the Dark Lord floating around in the atrium.

• Relic: Guardians of the Museum continues on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ One on Thursdays at 16:35