每日英语听力

当前播放

木乃伊霍尼杰提(1)

You are about to hear the sound of the past, In fact It's the sound of a ghost, it's a haunting magnetic pulse which is all that's left of a mighty star that we can still hear today, thanks to the Centre for Astrophysics at Jodrell Bank.

The explosion that killed this star was so intense, that it was seen in broad daylight across Europe,

North America and China in the summer of the year 1054; at least that's what the year was called in Europe.

So what was our world up to, when men and women, however they counted the years, were gazing up to the heavens at this dying star, which they could see and we can still hear?

What were they doing, making, thinking? Well, a thousand years ago in America, pyramids are taking shape on the Mississippi river; the world's first bank notes are circulating in China; a magnificent Baghdad is the largest city in the world; in West Africa, Ghana rules a vast empire and, on a chilly island in northern Europe, there's a nasty surprise on the horizon for a king called Harold.

In these programmes, I'm travelling back in time and across the globe, to see how we humans, over two million years, have shaped our world, and been shaped by it.

And I'm going to tell this story exclusively through the 'things' that humans have made . . . all sorts of 'things', carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used, broken and thrown away.

I've chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey -from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card, and in each programme I'm going to be talking about one object from the British Museum's collection.

'When I see it, I immediately think of the mastery of technology and art, the welding of the two . . . '

'I just thought it was beautiful to look at, that it made me feel that it was used, and used again and again . . . '

下载全新《每日英语听力》客户端,查看完整内容
点击播放