Mold Gold Cape

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor retells the history of human development from the first stone axe to the credit card, using 100 selected objects from the Museum. Neil MacGregor continues to explore the world of around 3,600 years ago through some of the most powerful objects that remain - discovered in modern day Iraq, Crete, Egypt and now Wales. In 1833 a group of workmen were looking for stones in a field near the village of Mold in North Wales when they unearthed a burial site with a skeleton covered by a crushed sheet of pure gold. Neil tells the story of what has become known at the British Museum as the Mold Gold Cape and tries to envisage the society that made it. Nothing like the contemporary courts of the pharaohs of Egypt and the palaces of the Minoans in Crete seem to have existed in Britain at that time, but he imagines a people with surprisingly sophisticated skills and social structures.

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. For the local workmen it must have seemed as if the old Welsh
0:20.0	legends were true. They'd been sent to quarry stone in a field known as
0:24.8	Brenner Ethlutlan which translates as the fairies or the Goblins Hill. CITES of a ghostly boy clad in gold, a glittering apparition in the moonlight, had been reported frequently enough for travelers to avoid the hill after dark.
0:46.5	As the workman dug into a large mound,
0:49.9	they uncovered a stone-lined grave.
0:54.0	In it were hundreds of amber beads, several bronze fragments,
0:59.0	and the remains of a skeleton.
1:02.0	And wrapped around the skeleton was a mysterious crushed object,
1:06.0	a large and finely decorated broken sheet of pure gold.
1:11.0	It is in the true sense of the word unique because there is no other object like it.
1:17.0	When you look at this object, you in one way react by amazement about how beautiful and intriguing it is and then you also
1:25.3	react to it in terms of wondering about who it was made for what does it mean
1:30.6	that that kind of unique special objects were created?
1:35.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Finally worked gold object from North Wales,
1:59.0	over three and a half thousand years old.
2:03.0	old.
2:05.0	Undared by thoughts of ghosts or goblins
2:10.0	undeterred by thoughts of ghosts or goblins and exhilarated by the dazzling wealth of their find,
2:15.8	the workman eagerly shared out chunks of the gold sheet,
2:19.0	with a farmer taking the largest pieces.
2:21.6	It would have been easier for the story to end there.
	...

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.