Living with Many Gods
Living with the Gods
BBC
4.7 • 616 Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2017
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Neil MacGregor's series on the role and expression of beliefs continues with a focus on societies living with many gods.
In the mid-1840s, a Roman earthenware jar was dug from the earth near Felmingham Hall in Norfolk. Inside, excavators found several belief systems, all mixed up together - for buried in the pot was a jumble of gods, deities of different kinds and origins, that tell us what it meant for people in Roman Britain around the year 250 to be living with many gods.
The great ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh includes a narrative with striking similarities to - but important differences from - the story of Noah in the Bible. Here a council of gods is persuaded to unleash a great flood to wipe out humankind.
Producer Paul Kobrak
The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum, with the assistance of Dr Christopher Harding, University of Edinburgh. Photograph (c) The Trustees of the British Museum.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you conquer or bring somebody else into the empire, |
| 0:04.8 | then their gods become part of your world. |
| 0:08.6 | Hello, I'm Neil McGregor, |
| 0:10.5 | and in this series of podcasts, |
| 0:12.9 | I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs have helped shape societies. |
| 0:18.9 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:23.6 | In the mid-1840s, a Roman earthenware jar |
| 0:27.7 | that looks a bit like a small round cooking pot |
| 0:30.2 | was dug up near Felmingham Hall in Norfolk. |
| 0:33.6 | It's made of reddish-brown clay, an everyday pot, |
| 0:37.2 | one inside which you might expect to find soup or stew. |
| 0:40.8 | But what the 1840s excavators did find inside was a belief system, or rather several belief systems, all mixed up together. |
| 0:49.6 | For buried in the pot was a jumble of gods, deities of different kinds and different origins |
| 0:55.9 | that tell us what it meant for people living in Roman Britain |
| 0:59.1 | around the year 250 to be living with the gods. |
| 1:03.9 | Living with the gods. |
| 1:06.4 | Choosing a title for this series turned out to be extremely difficult, |
| 1:10.1 | because although some societies have many gods, there are others that acknowledge only one, and for whom even the idea of gods, in the plural, is offensive. |
| 1:19.7 | And then there are some communities that share the world around them with spirits, or shifting supernatural beings, which wouldn't match our understanding of a god. |
| 1:29.7 | And a few societies, like Soviet Russia, have tried to live officially with no god at all. |
| 1:35.6 | In every case, the consequences for society are profound, |
| 1:39.2 | and that's what we're going to be looking at in our next few programmes. |
... |
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