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

from BBC Radio 4. When you might think about rain that falls for 40 days and 40 nights, you might

just be considering the prospect of living through yet another summer in Britain.

But of course what you're really referring to is the biblical story of Noah, his Ark and

the Great Flood, a story that's become so much part of our language that any child in the country can tell you that the animals went in two by two.

But the story of a great flood is itself one that goes back far beyond the Bible to many other societies

and is part of a global collective consciousness. Why? How did a story like Noah's flood

so ancient come into being and for me that leads to the next question

when did the idea of writing down a story at all begin? begin. It's no arc, but the main entrance of the British Museum is at least dry.

And the visitors certainly come in more than two by two.

What's great about museum collections is that they let you stride through

the centuries and across the continents in a single afternoon without even getting wet.

This week I'll be striding across a tightly interconnected world

that stretched from the southern Nile to the Black Sea and from Greece to Iran.

It's a world that flourished about 3,500 years ago, so around 1500 BC.

The objects I'm going to be looking at raise big questions and very big ideas like the origins of mathematics and in this

program the beginnings of literature.

There's a really kind of a hymn to the beauty and the fragility of human culture caught

between the world of the gods and the world of an unforgiving nature.

And without that Jewish break with the world of myth, we would never have had science.

A history of the world in a hundred objects.

Flood tablet, a clay writing tablet from Northern Iraq,

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