Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. I'm holding a face in my hand and it's very definitely a face and not a head. It's made

in polished green stone and it's hollowed out at the back, so in fact it's a miniature mask.

The dark stone is flecked with white snake-like streaks, which gives it its name, Serpentine.

And when you look more closely, you can see that the face has been pierced

and has been ritually scarred.

The people of this mask are the Olmek, who ruled in what's now Mexico for around a thousand years,

from 1400 to 400 BC.

They have been called the mother culture, the Kultura Madre of Central America.

And it was this Olmek mother culture that produced this unsettling face. So far this week the objects in this world history have taken me along the royal roads of the Persian Empire into mythical

battles in Athens and to some heavy drinking in Northern Europe. Each object has shown

how the people who made it defined themselves and the world around them

about two and a half thousand years ago. In Europe and Asia it's striking that that

self-definition was usually in distinction to others, partly by imitation, but usually in opposition.

Today I'm on the continent of the Americas, to be precise, in the lowland rainforests of Southeast Mexico and my object

this olemeck face mask shows me a culture looking only at itself.

To go as far back as the Olmix is to go as far back as the Egyptians

because the culture of Egypt of the pharaohs and the Olmic culture of Mexico are

contemporary. So it's part of our continuity, the great

continuity of the Mexican culture. A history of the world in a hundred

objects. Stone mask from Mexico,

from Mexico,

approximately 2.5, thousand years old.

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