Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

If you

want to test the old cliche

that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal,

then the Internet Automated Translation Services

will give you lots of happy ammunition.

I fed into it the sentence which is the theme for this week's programs.

This week, I typed, we're spinning the globe, looking at some of the world's religions around 700 years ago and at how different

cultures used objects to bring gods and humans nearer to each other. Once this sentence

had been translated from English into French, then from

French into Greek and then from Greek back to English, it read,

This week we turn Ball that looks at certain of religions of world this then. This there at about 700 years and the way which different cultures has adopted objects

to bring more almost gods and humans from each other.

It's an amusingly crude exercise, but when it comes to translating complex ideas from a lost

culture with no written language, we can't be confident

of doing much better as we work our way through layers of later interpretation by people

with quite different ways of thinking. To get anywhere near an original understanding of this program's object, we have to go through a filter of two later cultures with two different

languages and even then we're not quite sure of where we stand. It's an object

that's always intrigued me and I'm less and less sure that I understand it. It's the statue of a woman from what is now northern Mexico, but which around 1400 was the land of the Huashtec people.

It's absolutely essential that she should be female.

One of the aspects of human experience that all myths and all religions address is sex.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. sculpture of quashhetek goddess, a stone statue made in Mexico by the Spaniards in the 1520s. We hear much less about the people

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