Eileene and I are following the BBC’s <a href=“http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/#/object_q9JuHz3nRguxLZNfV-psIg” target=”_blank”>“The History of the World in a Hundred Objectsâ€</a>. As you might guess, it skims history by way of archaeology, selecting artifacts the host feels are strongly representative of different eras of world history. (At least it’s archaeology so far; I don’t think anything after 1930 or so will showcase buried treasures.)
Peeking ahead at the show list, I note that the pace of skimming slows significantly with the timeline, covering thousands of years at a stretch in the first few episodes, and mere years as we come to the present. Personally, I’d rather it were the other way around. I find the dawn of history more intriguing to study than events I’ve lived through, but it’s a perfectly sensible decision, since great historical movements come ever more frequently as time passes.
By the time the show is half over, I may lose interest; we’ll see. For the time being, however, it’s an enjoyable little show. The historical commentary is never deep—how could it be, covering, say, the rise of the scribal class in ancient Egypt in the space of fifteen minutes?—but it does a terrific job of spreading its attention between the familiar and unfamiliar, and of evoking a moment in time, which is all it was ever meant to do. The episodes are like intellectual popcorn: tasty and fun, rather than substantial. Which is important when I’m already hard at work studying another subject, under the pressure of getting graded.
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