A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [151]
When I reached the three circular terraces on the top, I found that the teaching stops. There are no longer any reliefs telling stories, simply bell-shaped stupas with a seated Buddha inside each one. We have left behind and below us the illusory world of representation and reality; this is the world of formlessness. At the very summit of Borobudur, there is a huge bell-shaped stupa. Inside it there is nothing, the void – the ultimate goal of this spiritual journey.
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Kilwa Pot Sherds
Ceramic fragments, found on a beach at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania
AD 900–1400
It’s amazing what a few broken pots and plates can tell us. This chapter is about pottery – but it is not about the high ceramic art which usually survives only in treasuries or in ancient graves; it is about the crockery of everyday life, which as we all know usually survives only in fragments. It is striking that when a plate or a vase is whole it is alarmingly fragile; once it is smashed the pieces of pottery are almost indestructible. Broken bits of pot have told us more than almost anything else about the daily life of the distant past.
Pictured here is a handful of fragments that survived for about a thousand years on a beach in East Africa. An alert beachcomber picked them up in 1948 and presented them to the British Museum in 1974, realizing that these broken oddments, of no financial value at all, would open up not just life in East Africa a thousand years ago, but the whole world of the Indian Ocean.
For much of history, history itself has been landlocked. Most of us tend to think in terms of towns and cities, mountains and rivers, continents and countries. But if we stop thinking about, say, the Asian landmass or a history of India and instead put the oceans in the foreground, we have a completely different perspective on our past. I’ve been looking in recent chapters at the ways in which ideas, beliefs, religions and people travelled along the great trade routes across Europe and Asia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries; but the trade routes also crossed the high seas, sailing around the Indian Ocean. Africa and Indonesia are nearly 5,000 miles apart, yet they can communicate with each other easily, just as they can communicate with the Middle East, India and China, thanks to the Indian Ocean winds, which obligingly blow north-easterly for one half of the year and south-westerly for the other. This means that traders can sail long distances knowing they will be able to come back. Merchant sailors have been criss-crossing these seas for thousands of years and they carried not just cargoes of goods, but plants and animals, people, languages and religions. It is no accident that the people of Madagascar speak an Indonesian language. The shores of the Indian Ocean, however diverse and however far apart, belong to one great community, a community whose extent and complexity can be glimpsed in our broken bits of pot.
The handful that I’ve picked out can tell us a great deal. The largest piece is about the size of a postcard, the smallest roughly half the size of a credit card. The pieces fall into three distinct groups. There are a couple of smooth, pale green pieces that look very like expensive modern china; there are other small pieces with blue patterning; and there is a third group of unglazed natural clay decorated in quite high relief. The pots of which these fragments were once part come from widely different parts of the world, but between 600 and 900 years ago they were thrown away in one place – on the same beach in East Africa. They were found at the bottom of a low crumbling cliff at Kilwa Kisiwani island.
Today Kilwa is a quiet Tanzanian island with a few small fishing villages, but around