Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. Don't worry. That was not a priceless piece of porcelain for the British

Museum's collection. It was a chiptailed mug from the staff kitchen. I just wanted to remind you of that terrible moment

when one of your favourite plates, pots or vases plunges to the floor and is destroyed beyond the help of glue forever.

This program is about pottery, but it's not about the high ceramic art which usually survives

only in treasuries or in ancient graves.

It's about the crockery of everyday life, which as we all know usually survives only in fragments.

It's a paradox that while a plate or a vase is whole, it's alarmingly fragile, but once it's

smashed, the pieces of pottery are almost indestructible, and broken bits of pot have told us more than almost anything else about the daily life of the distant past.

I've got a handful of fragments with me now which have survived for about a

thousand years on a beach in East Africa. An alert beachcomer picked them up and presented them to the

British Museum, knowing that these broken oddments of no financial value at all

would open up not just life in East Africa a thousand years ago, but the whole world of the Indian Ocean.

This is the history of the first evidence for international trade that existed between East Africa and the rest of the world.

Knowing about India, knowing about China, knowing about all these places. That was really important.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Kilwah pot sherd.

Ceramic fragments from the 10th to 14th century found on a beach in Tanzania. For much of history, history itself has been landlocked. Most of us tend to think in terms of towns and cities, mountains and rivers, continents and

countries, but if we stop thinking about say the Asian landmass or a history of

India and put the oceans in the foreground instead, then we get a completely different perspective

on our past.

This week we've been looking at the ways in which ideas, beliefs, religions and people

travelled along the great trade routes across Europe and Asia

between the 9th and the 13th centuries. Today we're not on land but on the high seas, sailing

...