Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire in 334 BC ushered in an age of megalomaniac rulers and great empires. Although there had been empires before, this was the first time regional superpowers emerged in different parts of the globe. In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Alexander became a model for rulers to emulate or reject: Augustus, the first Roman emperor, imitated Alexander by using his own image to represent imperial power to his subjects. In contrast, the Greek rulers of Egypt looked back to Egypt's past in times of political weakness, and in India the Emperor Ashoka rejected oppressive rule altogether, promoting his peaceful philosophy through inscriptions on pillars across the subcontinent. While Ashoka's empire did not last long beyond his lifetime, his ideals survived. The Roman Empire continued for the next 400 years, rivalled in size, population and sophistication only by the Han Dynasty in China, where the state produced luxury goods to win both admiration and obedience.

31.

Coin with Head of Alexander.

Silver coin of Alexander the Great, minted in Lampsakos (Lapseki), Turkey.

MINTED 305281 BC.

Just over 2,000 years ago there were, in Europe and Asia, great empires whose legacies are still strongly felt in the world today the Roman Empire in the West, the empire of Ashoka in India and the Han Dynasty in China. I want to examine how power in such empires is constructed and projected. Military might is just the beginning it's the easy part. How does a ruler stamp his authority on the very minds of his subjects? In this area images are generally more effective than words, and the most effective of all images are those we see so often that we hardly notice them: coins. So the ambitious ruler shapes the currency: the message is on the money, and that message can live on long after the ruler is dead. Although this silver coin shows the image of Alexander the Great, it was struck at least forty years after his death, on the orders of one of his successors, Lysimachus.

The coin is about 3 centimetres (just over an inch) in diameter, slightly larger than a 2p piece. It bears the profile of a young man, with straight nose and strong jaw line, showing Classical good looks and strength. He's gazing keenly into the distance; the tilt of the head is commanding, suggestive of vigorous forward movement. It is an image of a dead leader, but one clearly intended to carry a political message of power and authority now.

You find exactly the same phenomenon in modern China, where the red currency notes carry the portrait of Chairman Mao. It could seem strange that the very lifeblood of what is now a spectacularly successful capitalist economy, its money, carries on it the portrait of a dead Communist revolutionary. Yet the reason is clear. Mao reminds the Chinese people of the heroic achievements of the Communist Party, which is still in power. He stands for the recovery of Chinese unity at home and prestige abroad, and every Chinese government wants to be seen as the inheritor of his authority. This appropriation of the past, this kind of exploitation of a dead leader's image, is nothing new. It has been around for thousands of years, and what's happening today to Mao on the Chinese currency was happening more than 2,000 years ago to Alexander.

Minted around 300 BC, this is one of the earliest coins to carry the image of a leader. Alexander the Great, whose head is represented on the coin, was the most glamorized military ruler of his age possibly of all time. We've got no way of knowing whether this is an accurate likeness of Alexander, but it must be him, because as well as human hair this man has ram's horns. It is the horn symbol, well known throughout the ancient world, that leaves the viewer in no doubt that we are looking at an image of Alexander. The horns are associated with the god Zeus-Ammon a hybrid of the two leading Greek and Egyptian gods, Zeus and Ammon. So this small coin is making two big statements it asserts Alexander's dominion over both Greeks and Egyptians, and it suggests that, in some sense, he is both man and god.

The reverse of the coin shows Athena Nikephoros, and Greek letters spell 'of King Lysimachus'

Alexander the man was the son of Philip II of Macedon, a small kingdom a few hundred miles north of Athens. Philip expected great things of his son, and he employed the great philosopher Aristotle as his tutor. Alexander came to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, with an almost limitless sense of self-belief. His stated goal was to reach the 'ends of the world and the Great Outer sea', and to do this he embarked on a series of wars, first crushing rebellions by Athens and the other Greek cities, then turning east to confront the long-standing enemy of the Greeks Persia. Persia controlled at that point the greatest empire on earth, sprawling from Egypt across the Middle East and central Asia to India and almost to China. The young Alexander campaigned brilliantly for a total of ten years, until he defeated the whole of the Persian Empire. He was clearly a driven man. What drove him on? We asked the leading expert on Alexander, Robin Lane Fox: Alexander was driven by the heroic ideals that befitted a Macedonian king, ruling over Macedonians, the ideals of personal glory, prowess; he was driven by a wish to reach the edge of the world, he was driven by a wish to excel for ever his father, Philip, who was a man of significance but who pales almost to a shadow beside Alexander's global reputation.

Alexander's victories didn't just depend on his armies. They required money and lots of it. Luckily, Philip had conquered the rich gold and silver mines of Thrace, the area that straddles the modern borders of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. That precious metal financed the early campaigns, but this inheritance was later swelled by the colossal wealth Alexander captured in Persia. His imperial conquests were bankrolled by nearly five million kilos of Persian gold.

With irresistible force, huge wealth and enormous charisma, it's no wonder that Alexander became a legend, seeming to be more than mortal, literally superhuman. In one of his early campaigns into Egypt, he visited the oracle of the god Ammon, which named him not just the rightful pharaoh, but a god. He left the oracle with the title 'son of Zeus-Ammon', which explains the characteristic ram's horns in images of him like the one on our coin. He was received by many of the conquered peoples as though he were a living god, but it's not altogether clear whether he actually believed himself to be one. Robin Lane Fox suggests he saw himself more as the son of god: He certainly believed he was the son of Zeus, [that] in some sense, Zeus had entered into his begetting, a story possibly told to him by his mother Olympias herself, though he is, in earthly terms, the son of the great king Philip. He is honoured as a god, spontaneously, by some of the cities in his empire, and he is not displeased to receive honours equal to the gods. But he knows he's mortal.

Alexander conquered an empire of more than two million square miles and founded many cities in his name, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt. Although nearly every large museum in Europe has an image of Alexander in its collection, they are not consistent and there's no way of knowing whether he looked like any of them. It was only after Alexander's death in 323 BC that an agreed, idealized image, constructed for public consumption, came into being and that's the image found on our coin. The reverse of the coin reveals that this is not Alexander's coin at all he's making a posthumous guest appearance in somebody else's political drama.

The other side of the coin shows the goddess Athena Nikephoros, bringer of victory, carrying her spear and shield. She is the divine patroness of Greeks and a goddess of war. But it's not Alexander that she's favouring, because the Greek letters beside her tell us that this is the coin of King Lysimachus. Lysimachus had been one of Alexander's generals and companions. He ruled Thrace from Alexander's death until his own death in 281 BC. Lysimachus didn't mint a coin that showed himself. He decided instead to appropriate the glory and the authority of his predecessor. This is image manipulation almost identity theft on a heroic scale.

Alexander died in his early thirties, and his empire quickly disintegrated into a confusion of shifting territories under competing warlords Lysimachus was just one of them. All of the warlords claimed that they were the true heirs of Alexander, and many of them minted coins with his image on them to prove it. This was a struggle fought out not just on the battlefield but on the currency. It's a textbook early example of a timeless political ploy: harnessing the authority and the glamour of a great leader of the past to boost yourself in the present.

Dead reputations are usually more stable and more manageable than living ones. Since the Second World War, for example, Churchill and de Gaulle have been claimed by British and French political leaders of all hues when it suited the day's agenda. But in democratic societies, this is a high-risk strategy, as the political commentator and broadcaster Andrew Marr points out: The more democratic a culture is, the harder it is to appropriate a previous leader. It's very interesting at the moment to see the revival of Stalin as an admired figure in Putin's Russia, having been knocked down as a bloodthirsty tyrant before. So the possibility of taking a figure from the past is always open, but the more conversational, the more confrontational, more democratic, the more argumentative a political culture is, the harder it is. You can see this in the case of Churchill, because there are still lots and lots of people who know a great deal about what Churchill thought and said. Any mainstream party which tried to say 'we are the party of Churchill' would get into trouble because Churchill changed his mind so much that he can be quoted against you as often as he can be quoted in favour of you.

Dead rulers are still very present, and they're still on the currency. A thoughtful alien handling the banknotes of China and the United States today might well assume that one was ruled by Mao and the other by George Washington. And, in a sense, that's exactly what the Chinese and American leaders want us all to think. Political giants like these lend an aura of stability, legitimacy and above all unquestionable authority to modern regimes struggling with huge problems. Lysimachus's gambit still sets the pace for the world's superpowers.

And it worked for Lysimachus himself up to a point. He's a mere historical footnote in comparison to Alexander; he didn't get an empire, but he did get a kingdom, and he hung on to it. Twenty years after Alexander's death, it was clear that his empire would never be reconstituted, and for the next 300 years the Middle East would be ruled by many cultured but competitive Greek-speaking kings and dynasties. The most famous monument of any of these Greek-speaking states, the Rosetta Stone, features in Chapter 33. But my next object comes from India, where the great emperor Ashoka linked himself to a different kind of authority to strengthen his political position not the authority of a great warrior, but one of the greatest of all religious teachers the Buddha.

32.

Pillar of Ashoka.

Stone fragment of a pillar, erected in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India.

AROUND 238 BC.

Around 2,000 years ago the great powers of Europe and Asia established legacies that are still with us. They laid down the fundamental ideas concerning the right way for a leader to rule, how rulers construct their image and how they project their power. They also showed that a ruler can actually change the way the people think. The Indian leader Ashoka the Great took over a vast empire and, through the strength of his ideas, began a tradition that leads directly to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and still flourishes today a tradition of pluralistic, humane, non-violent statecraft. Those ideas are incorporated in this object. It's a fragment of stone, sandstone to be exact, and it's about the size of a large curved brick not much to look at all, but it opens up the story of one of the great figures of world history. On the stone are two lines of text, inscribed in round, spindly-looking letters once described as 'pin-man script'. These two lines are the remains of a much longer text that was originally carved on a great circular column, about 9 metres (30 feet) high and just under a metre (3 feet) in diameter.

Ashoka had pillars like this put up across the whole of his empire. They were great feats of architecture, which stood by the side of highways or in city centres much as public sculpture does in our city squares today. But these pillars are different from the Classical columns that most of us in Europe are familiar with: they've got no base and they're crowned with a capital in the shape of lotus petals. On top of the most famous of Ashoka's pillars are four lions facing outwards lions that are still one of the emblems of India today. The pillar that our fragment comes from was originally erected in Meerut, a city just north of Delhi, and was destroyed at the palace of a Mughal ruler by an explosion in the early eighteenth century. But many similar pillars have survived, and they range across Ashoka's empire, which covered the great bulk of the subcontinent.

These pillars were a sort of public-address system. Their purpose was to carry, carved on them, proclamations or edicts from Ashoka, which could then be promulgated all over India and beyond. We now know that there are seven major edicts that were carved on pillars, and our fragment is from what's known as the 'sixth pillar edict'; it declares the emperor Ashoka's benevolent policy towards every sect and every class in his empire: I consider how I may bring happiness to the people, not only to relatives of mine or residents of my capital city, but also to those who are far removed from me. I act in the same manner with respect to all. I am concerned similarly with all classes. Moreover, I have honoured all religious sects with various offerings. But I consider it my principal duty to visit the people personally.

There must have been somebody to read these words out to the mostly illiterate citizens, who would probably have received them not only with pleasure but with considerable relief, for Ashoka had not always been so concerned for their welfare. He'd started out not as a gentle and generous philosopher but as a ruthless and brutal youth, following in the military footsteps of his grandfather, Chandragupta, who had risen to the throne following a military campaign that created a huge empire reaching from Kandahar in modern Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. This included the great majority of modern India, and was the largest empire in Indian history.

In 268 BC Ashoka took his place on the throne but not without considerable struggle. Buddhist writings tell us that in order to do so he killed 'ninety-nine of his brothers' presumably metaphorical as well as actual brothers. The same writings create a legend of Ashoka's pre-Buddhist days as filled with self-indulgent frivolity and cruelty. When he became emperor he set out to complete the occupation of the whole subcontinent and attacked the independent state of Kalinga modern-day Orissa on the east coast. It was a savage, brutal assault and one which seems afterwards to have thrown Ashoka into a state of terrible remorse. He changed his whole way of life, embracing the defining concept of Dharma, a virtuous path that guides the follower through a life of selflessness, piety, duty, good conduct and decency. Dharma is applied in many religions, including Sikhism, Jainism and of course Hinduism but Ashoka's idea of Dharma was filtered through the Buddhist faith. He described his remorse and announced his conversion to his people through an edict: The Kalinga country was conquered by the king, Beloved of the Gods, in the eighth year of his reign. 150,000 persons were carried away captive, 100,000 were slain, and many times that number died. Immediately after the Kalingas had been conquered, the king became intensely devoted to the study of Dharma ...

The Beloved of the Gods, conqueror of the Kalingas, is moved to remorse now. For he has felt profound sorrow and regret because the conquest of a people previously unconquered involves slaughter, death and deportation.

From then on Ashoka set out to redeem himself to reach out to his people. To do so, he wrote his edicts not in Sanskrit, the ancient Classical language that would later become the official language of the state, but in the appropriate local dialect couched in everyday speech.

With his conversion Ashoka renounced war as an instrument of state policy and adopted human benevolence as the solution to the world's problems. While he was inspired by the teachings of Buddha and his son was the first Buddhist missionary to Sri Lanka he did not impose Buddhism on his empire. Ashoka's state was in a very particular sense a secular one. The Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen comments: The state has to keep a distance from all religion. Buddhism doesn't become an official religion. All other religions have to be tolerated and treated with respect. So secularism in the Indian form means not 'no religion in government matters', but 'no favouritism of any religion over any other'.

Religious freedom, conquest of self, the need for all citizens and leaders to listen to others and to debate ideas, human rights for all, both men and women, and the importance given to education and health, the ideas Ashoka promulgated in his empire, all remain central in Buddhist thinking. There's still today a kingdom in the Indian sub-continent that is run on Buddhist principles the small Kingdom of Bhutan, sandwiched between northern India and China. Michael Rutland is a Bhutanese citizen and the Hon. Consul of Bhutan to the UK. He also tutored the former king, and I asked him how Ashoka's ideas might play out in a modern Buddhist state. He began by offering me a quotation: 'Throughout my reign I will never rule you as a king. I will protect you as a parent, care for you as a brother and serve you as a son.' That could well have been written by the emperor Ashoka. But it wasn't. It was an excerpt from the coronation speech, in 2008, of the 27-year-old fifth king of Bhutan. The fourth king, the king that I had the great privilege to teach, lived and continues to live in a small log cabin. There is no ostentation to the monarchy. He is probably the only example of an absolute monarch who has voluntarily persuaded his people to take away his powers and has instituted elective democracy. The fourth king also introduced the phrase 'gross national happiness' to be a contrast to the concept of 'gross national product'. Again, as Ashoka would have felt, the happiness and contentment of the people were more important than conquering other lands. The fifth king has very much followed the Buddhist precepts of monarchy.

Ashoka's political and moral philosophy, as he expressed it in his imperial inscriptions, initiated a tradition of religious tolerance, non-violent debate and a commitment to the idea of happiness which has animated Indian political philosophy ever since. But and it's a big but his benevolent empire scarcely outlived him. And that leaves us with the uncomfortable question of whether such high ideals can survive the realities of political power. Nevertheless, this was a ruler who really did change the way that his subjects and their successors thought. Gandhi was an admirer, as was Nehru, and Ashoka's message even finds its way on to the modern currency on all Indian banknotes we see Gandhi facing the four lions of Ashoka's pillar. The architects of Indian independence had him often in mind. But, as Amartya Sen points out, his influence extends far wider, and the whole region sees him as an inspiration and a model: The part of his teaching that the Indians particularly empathized with at the time of independence was his secularism and democracy. But Ashoka is also a big figure in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Thailand, in Sri Lanka; he is a pan-Asian figure.

My next object involves another kind of inscription and another ruler closely linked with a religious system, but in this case the religion is now dead and the ruler is no longer of any consequence indeed he never really was. The inscription is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum and possibly the world.

33.

Rosetta Stone.

Found at el-Rashid, Egypt.

196 BC.

Every day when I walk through the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum there are tour guides speaking every imaginable language addressing groups of visitors, all craning to see this object. It is on every visitor's itinerary, and, with the mummies, it's the most popular object in the British Museum. Why? It's decidedly dull to look at a grey stone about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels at airports. The rough edges show that it's been broken from a larger stone, with the fractures cutting across the text that covers one side. And when you read that text, it's pretty dull too it's mostly bureaucratic jargon about tax concessions. But, as so often in the Museum, appearances are deceptive. This dreary bit of broken granite has played a starring role in three fascinating and different stories: the story of the Greek kings who ruled in Alexandria after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt; the story of the French and British imperial competition across the Middle East after Napoleon invaded Egypt; and the extraordinary but peaceful scholarly contest that led to the most famous decipherment in history the cracking of hieroglyphics.

The Rosetta Stone is a particularly fascinating and special case of power projection. It's associated with a ruler who was not strong but weak, a king who had to bargain for and protect his power by borrowing the invincible strength of the gods or, more precisely, the priests. He was Ptolemy V, a Greek boy-king who came to the throne of Egypt as an orphan in 205 BC, at the age of 6.

Ptolemy V was born into a great dynasty. The first Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great's generals who, around a hundred years earlier, had taken over Egypt following Alexander's death. The Ptolemies didn't trouble to learn Egyptian but made all their officials speak Greek; so Greek became the language of state administration in Egypt for a thousand years. Perhaps their greatest achievement was to make their capital city, Alexandria, into the most brilliant metropolis of the Classical world for centuries it was second only to Rome, and intellectually probably livelier. It was a cosmopolitan magnet for goods, people and ideas. The vast Library of Alexandria was built by the Ptolemies in it, they planned to collect all the world's knowledge. And Ptolemies I and II created the famous Pharos lighthouse, which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Such a lively, diverse city needed strong leadership. When Ptolemy V's father died suddenly, leaving the boy as king, the dynasty and its control of Egypt looked fragile. The boy's mother was killed, the palace was stormed by soldiers and there were revolts throughout the country that delayed the young Ptolemy's coronation for years.

It was in these volatile circumstances that Ptolemy V issued the Rosetta Stone, and others like it. The stone is not unique; there are another seventeen similar inscriptions quite like it that have survived, all in three languages and each proclaiming the greatness of the Ptolemies. They were put up in major temple complexes across Egypt. The Rosetta Stone itself was made in 196 BC, on the first anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V, by then a teenager. It's a decree issued by Egyptian priests, ostensibly to mark the coronation and to declare Ptolemy's new status as a living god divinity went with the job of being a pharaoh. The priests had given him a full Egyptian coronation at the sacred city of Memphis, and this greatly strengthened his position as the rightful ruler of the country. But there was a trade-off. Ptolemy may have become a god, but to get there he had to negotiate some very unheavenly politics with his extremely powerful Egyptian priests. Dr Dorothy Thompson, of Cambridge University, explains: The occasion which resulted in this decree was in some respects a change. There had been previous decrees, and they take much the same form, but in this particular reign a very young king was under attack from many quarters. One of the clauses of the Memphis decree, the Rosetta Stone, is that priests should no longer come every year to Alexandria, the new Greek capital; instead they could meet at Memphis, the old centre of Egypt. This was new, and it may be seen as a concession on the part of the royal household.

The priests were critical in keeping the hearts and minds of the Egyptian masses onside for Ptolemy, and the promise inscribed on the Rosetta Stone was their reward. Not only does the decree allow the priests to remain in Memphis, rather than coming to Alexandria, it also gives them some very attractive tax breaks. No teenager is likely to have thought this up, so somebody behind the throne was thinking strategically on the boy's behalf and, more importantly, on the dynasty's behalf.

The Rosetta Stone is therefore simultaneously an expression of power and of compromise, though to read the whole content is about as thrilling as reading a new EU regulation written in several languages. It is bureaucratic, priestly and dry.

What matters now is not what the stone says but that it says it three times and in three different languages: in Classical Greek, the language of the Greek rulers and the state administration, and then in two forms of ancient Egyptian: the everyday writing of the people (known as Demotic) and the priestly hieroglyphics which had for centuries baffled Europeans. It was the Rosetta Stone that changed all that; it dramatically opened up the entire world of ancient Egypt to scholarship.

By the time of the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphs were no longer in general use. They were used and understood only by priests in temples. Five hundred years later, even this restricted knowledge of how to read and write them had disappeared.

The Rosetta Stone survived unread through 2,000 years of further foreign occupations. After the Greeks came Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Muslim Arabs and Ottoman Turks all had stretches of rule in Egypt. At some point the stone was moved from the temple at Sais in the Nile Delta, where it was first erected, to the town of el-Rashid, now known as Rosetta, about forty miles away.

Then, in 1798, Napoleon arrived. The French invasion was of course primarily military (they wanted to cut the British route to India). But with the French army came scholars. Soldiers rebuilding fortifications in Rosetta dug up the stone and accompanying experts knew immediately that they had found something of great significance.

The French seized the stone as a trophy of war, but it never made it back to Paris. With his fleet destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon himself returned to France, leaving the French army behind. In 1801 the French surrendered to the British and Egyptian generals. The terms of the Treaty of Alexandria included the handing over of antiquities, among them the Rosetta Stone.

The inscription recording the stone's capture from Napoleon's troops Most books will tell you, as I just have, that there are three languages on the Rosetta Stone, but if you look on the broken side you can see a fourth. There, painted in English, you can read: CAPTURED IN EGYPT BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN 1801 (and elsewhere) PRESENTED BY KING GEORGE III. Nothing could make it clearer that while the text on the front of the stone is about the first European empire in Africa, Alexander the Great's, the finding of the stone stands at the beginning of another European adventure: the bitter rivalry between Britain and France for dominance in the Middle East and in Africa, which continued from the time of Napoleon until the Second World War. I asked the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif for her view of this history: This stone makes me think of how often Egypt has been the theatre of other people's battles. It's one of the earliest objects through which you can trace Western colonial interest in Egypt. The French and the British argued over it; nobody seems to have considered that it belonged to neither of them. Egypt's foreign rulers, from the Romans to the Turks to the British, have always made free with Egypt's heritage. Egypt had foreign rulers for 2,000 years, and in 1952 much was made of the fact that Nasser was the first Egyptian ruler since the pharaohs.

The Stone was brought back to the British Museum and immediately put on display in the public domain, freely available for every scholar in the world to see and copies and transcriptions were published worldwide. European scholars set about the task of understanding the mysterious hieroglyphic script. The Greek inscription was the one that every scholar could read and was therefore seen to be the key. But everybody was stuck. A brilliant English polymath, Thomas Young, correctly worked out that a group of hieroglyphs repeated several times on the Rosetta Stone represented the sounds of a royal name that of Ptolemy. It was a crucial first step, but Young hadn't quite cracked the code. A French scholar, Jean-Francois Champollion, then realized that not only the symbols for Ptolemy but all the hieroglyphs were both pictorial and phonetic they recorded the sound of the Egyptian language. For example, on the last line of the hieroglyphic text on the stone, three signs spell out the sounds of the word for 'stone slab', in Egyptian ahaj, and then a fourth sign gives a picture showing the stone as it would originally have looked: a square slab with a rounded top. So sound and picture work together.

The last line of hieroglyphic text revealed that the glyphs were both pictorial and phonetic By 1822, Champollion had finally worked the whole thing out. From then on the world could put words to the great objects the statues and the monuments, the mummies and papyri of ancient Egyptian civilization.

By the time of the Rosetta Stone, Egypt had already been under Greek rule for more than a hundred years, and the Ptolemies' dynasty would rule for another 150. The dynasty ended infamously with the reign of Cleopatra VII the Cleopatra who beguiled and seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. But with the death of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt was conquered by Augustus, and the Egypt of the Ptolemies became part of the Roman Empire.

34.

Chinese Han Lacquer Cup.

Lacquer cup, found near Pyongyang, North Korea.

AD 4.

Throughout history, as any anthropologist will tell you, the simplest way to bind people to you has been to give them a special gift a present only you can give and only they are worthy to receive; a present like this object. I've been considering how the leaders of vast kingdoms and empires built and retained their supremacy, whether by borrowing the image of Alexander the Great, preaching the ideals of the Buddha in India or buying off the priesthood in Egypt. In Han Dynasty China 2,000 years ago the giving of imperial gifts was an activity central to the building of influence, and one which straddled the murky boundary between diplomacy and bribery.

Our cup comes from a turbulent period in the Han Dynasty. At the centre the emperor was under severe threat, while at the edges of the empire he was struggling to keep control. The Han, who had ruled since 202 BC, extended Chinese power as far south as Vietnam, west to the steppes of central Asia and north to Korea, and in each of these places they had set up military colonies. As Han commerce and settlements grew in these outposts, so their governors gained in power, and there was always a risk that these might turn into independent fiefdoms. What the Chinese now call 'splittism' was a worry even then. The governors' loyalty to the emperor needed to be secured. And one of the ways the emperor kept them onside was to give them gifts that carried huge imperial prestige. In the British Museum we have this exquisite lacquer wine cup which was probably given by the Han emperor to one of his military commanders in North Korea around the year 4.

It is very light and more like a small serving bowl than a wine cup a bowl that would hold the equivalent of a very large glass of wine. The bowl is a shallow oval about 17 centimetres (7 inches) long, roughly the size and shape of a large mango. On each of the long sides there are gilded handles which give the cup its name it's known as an ear cup. The core of the cup is wood, and through some of the damage you can just see that wood; but most of it is covered in layer after layer of reddish-brown lacquer. The inside is plain, but the outside has been decorated with gold and bronze inlay pairs of birds face each other, each sporting exaggerated claws against a background of geometric shapes and decorative spirals. The whole effect is of a costly, highly wrought object elegant, stylish, confident. Everything about it speaks of assured taste and controlled opulence. Roel Sterckx, Professor of Chinese History at Cambridge University, knows exactly how much effort would go into making one of these drinking cups: Lacquerware takes an enormous amount of time to make. It's a very labour-intensive and a very tedious process, because the extraction of the sap of the lacquer tree is followed by all sorts of procedures, mixing with pigments, letting it cure, applying successive layers on to a wooden core to finally produce a beautiful piece. It would have involved several sets of artisans.

High-quality lacquer was brilliantly smooth and virtually indestructible. Fine pieces like our cup required thirty or more separate coats, with long drying and hardening times between each one, so it would have taken about a month to make. Hardly surprising, then, that they were inordinately expensive; you could buy more than ten bronze cups for the price of one in lacquer. So lacquer cups were strictly reserved for top management the imperial governors controlling the frontiers of the empire.

The Han Chinese and the Roman empires covered roughly the same amount of land, but China was more populous. A census conducted in China only two years before the cup was made came up with the wonderfully precise figure of a population of 57,671,400 individuals. Roel Sterckx says: One of the things we need to keep in mind is that the Chinese Empire is immense and that it straddles a hugely diverse geographic region. In the case of the Han we're talking about a distance that stretches from North Korea to Vietnam. Contact between people is not always very obvious, so the circulation of goods, the circulation of imperially sanctioned objects, together with texts, is part of that symbolical assertion of what it means to be an empire. You might not see people who are part of the same empire, but you might actually, by witnessing the goods that are produced across the empire, feel or have a sense of belonging to that greater imagined community in many ways.

Fostering that sense of an imagined community was a key imperial strategy and it didn't come cheap. Typically, the emperor paid out a large chunk of state revenue each year to provide allies and vassal states with luxury gifts, including thousands of rolls of silk and hundreds of lacquer cups. So our cup is part of a system it was given either as an imperial gift, or in lieu of a salary, to a senior official at the Han military garrisons near present-day Pyongyang in North Korea. Apart from its sheer monetary value, it was intended to bestow prestige and to suggest a personal link between the commander and the emperor.

At this point in the Han Dynasty's history, however, the affairs of state were not in the hands of the emperor but of the dowager empress, the formidable Grand Empress Dowager Wang, who effectively ran the state for thirty years, as none of the emperors had much time or aptitude for business. She had one emperor son, who spent a good deal of time with his concubine, Flying Swallow (who, it was said, was so light that she could dance on the palm of his hand); one emperor grandson, who was besotted with his male lover; and another grandson, on the throne at the time of our cup, who had acceded at the age of 9 and was to be poisoned with pepper wine at the age of 15, two years after our cup was made. So this lacquer cup lived in interesting times, and its making was almost certainly organized by the Grand Dowager Empress.

The machinery of the state, including the production of luxury goods, was so well structured that it could work perfectly well despite such foibles at the top. This cup is remarkable for the supreme craftsmanship of its making, and even more so because it was subjected to a level of quality control that far exceeds that of most designer luxury objects today.

Chinese characters around the base of the cup tell us who was involved in its manufacture Around the oval base of the cup runs a thin band with sixty-seven Chinese characters on it. In Europe you might expect this kind of band to be a motto or a dedication, perhaps, but here the characters list six craftsmen responsible for the different processes involved in manufacturing the cup making the wooden core, undercoat lacquering, top-coat lacquering, gilding the ear-handles, painting and final polishing. And then this could surely happen only in China it goes on to list the seven product inspectors, whose responsibility was to guarantee quality. Six craftsmen, and seven supervisors this is the stuff of real bureaucracy. The list reads: The wooden core by Yi, lacquering by Li, top-coat lacquering by Dang, gilding of the ear-handles by Gu, painting by Ding, final polishing by Feng, product inspection by Ping, supervisor-foreman Zong. In charge were Government Head Supervisor Zhang, Chief Administrator Liang, his deputy Feng, their subordinate Executive Officer Long and Chief Clerk Bao.

This cup is a powerful document of the link between artisanal production and state administration; bureaucracy as a guarantee of beauty. It's not something familiar to the modern European, but for the journalist and China expert Isabel Hilton it's a continuing tradition in Chinese history: In Han times, the government had a major role in industry, partly to deal with its military expenditure in order to finance the kind of expeditions that it required against the aggressive peoples of the north and the west. The government nationalized some major industries and it regulated major industries for quite a long time, so they were often run by private entrepreneurs or people who had been entrepreneurs, but under state control. There are modern parallels here, because what we've seen in the past few decades is the emergence of a hybrid system in China, from an economy that was completely under state control to a more market-oriented model, but nevertheless very firmly under state direction. If you look at where the capital gets invested, and what the structure of ownership is in Chinese industry, it is still largely state-controlled.

So, exploring this lacquer cup of 2,000 years ago takes us into territory that is disconcertingly familiar private enterprise under Chinese state control, cutting-edge mass production allied to high technology, deft management of relations between the Chinese capital and North Korea, and the skilful deployment of diplomatic gifts. The Chinese still know that the best gifts are always the ones that only the giver can command. In the time of the Han Dynasty, that was silk and lacquer cups. Today, when China wants to establish friendly relations, it still gives the present that nobody else can match it's known as Panda Diplomacy.

35.

Head of Augustus.

Bronze statue, found in Meroe (near Shendi), Sudan.

2725 BC.

Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, is one of the most famous leaders in the history of the world. We have his bronze head here in the Roman galleries in the British Museum. Although tarnished, it radiates charisma and raw power. It is impossible to ignore. The eyes are dramatic and piercing; wherever you stand, they won't look at you. Augustus is looking past you, beyond you, to something much more important: his future.

The curling hair is short and boyish, slightly tousled, but it's a calculated tousle one that clearly took a long time to arrange. This is an image that has been carefully constructed, projecting just the right mix of youth and authority, beauty and strength, will and power. The portrait was very recognizable at the time, and it's proved very enduring.

His head is a bit over life-size and tilted as if he's in conversation, so for a moment you could believe that he's just like you and me but he's not. This is the Roman emperor who ruled at the time Christ was born. The image presents him when he has recently defeated Antony and Cleopatra and has conquered Egypt; he is well on his way now to imperial glory and is firmly embarked on an even greater journey to becoming a god.