Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4. This is the sound of a Saturday night out. We're in Scotland and as you can hear people are having a really good time.

Ever since someone discovered how to make alcohol and that's at least 7,000 years ago

we humans have been partying and Celtic Northern Europeans so the story goes

party harder than most and they consume a way Mediterranean Europe thinks about the North and even the

way the North thinks about itself. There's an undoubted bias against the

culture of Northern Europe. It's not seen as ideal in the way that the

culture of the Mediterranean was for many years.

There's been a revolution in our understanding of who the Celts really were.

The revolution makes us aware just how complicated the situation is.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. The Basieurts Flaggons, made of bronze, about 2.500 years old, discovered in northeastern France.

There are no written records from the people of Northern Europe of 2,500 years ago.

They're mentioned briefly and disparagingly by the Greeks, but we've got nothing written from them.

And so the only way we can really get to know these people,

our close neighbours and for some of us, indeed our ancestors, is through the things that they left behind.

Luckily we've got a good deal to go on.

Here I've got a pair of spectacular wine jugs, which are key objects in helping us understand the society of early Northern Europe.

They were found in Lorraine in northeastern France, near the town of Bass Utes, and they're always referred to as the Bass Utes

flagons.

They're bronze, extremely elegant, and highly elaborate.

They're about the size of a large bottle of wine, a magnum, and they hold about the same amount of liquid,

but they're in the shape of large jugs with handle, lid and very pointed spout.

...