Ceremonial ballgame belt

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Neil MacGregor's history of humanity as told through one hundred objects that time has left behind. This week he is looking at objects of leisure and pleasure around the world about 2000 years ago. How were we amusing ourselves back then? Today's object is a large stone belt, a heavyweight ceremonial version of the leather and fibre padding that was used in an ancient ball game in central America. This was a game with a rubber ball that dates back as far as three and a half thousand years ago - the world's oldest known organised sport. Neil offers up the rules of the game and describes how it connected players to the realm of their gods. The historian Michael Whittington considers the ritual aspects of the game while the writer Nick Hornby describes how sport straddles the emotional territory between the sacred and the profane. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. And the The stirring sound of Welsh rugby fans singing hymns at Cardiff Arms Park.
0:33.4	Whether it's Maradonna's infamous,
0:39.4	whether it's Maridona's infamous hand of God, which he claimed scored the goal against England in the
0:44.9	1986 World Cup, or the carrying of the flame from the sanctuary at Olympia in Greece at the start
0:50.5	of each Olympic Games. Competitive sport and religion seem often to be closely and disconcertingly related.
0:58.1	It's a connection that goes very far back. I suspect that few supporters today, singing hymns or cheering for their teams with
1:05.8	fanatical enthusiasm, know that the world's earliest known team sport also had a strong
1:11.0	religious dimension, or that the story begins not in ancient Greece but in
1:15.8	Central America.
1:16.8	It was a team sport in fact it was the first team sport that we know of in world history and it was played with rubber
1:28.7	It looks more like something that would have been invented when every other game had already been thought on first.
1:37.0	This is a sort of gimmicky thing introduced by maybe the Americans in the 1980s rather than the first organized sport.
1:45.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Ceremonial ballgame belt
2:05.0	made of stone
2:07.0	from Mexico
2:09.0	between 100 and 500 AD.
2:14.7	This week I'm exploring the world around 2,000 years ago, looking at what
2:21.9	fuelled our enjoyment and spiced up our daily lives.
2:25.8	Today, from the Woodlands Pipe Smokers of North America that we had in the last programme,
2:30.3	I'm moving south to the playing fields of Central America.
2:35.0	I'm in the Mexican Gallery in front of what looks like a giant stone horseshoe.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.