From our lifetime of reading and learning, we may wonder what great artifacts of history have survived the ages. The annals of human experience are filled with objects that figured prominently or obliquely in manifold triumphs and calamities, and we may imagine a vast catalog of these objects spread around the earth, reposing in locations anywhere from obscure mountain hideaways to great metropolitan museums, testifying to natural disasters, wars, feats of heroism, tragedies, explorations, crimes, inventions, artistic creations, religious ceremonies, affairs of state, weddings, celebrations, and uncounted other events of record. We may be curious about whether objects ranging from the biblical Noah’s Ark and Ark of the Covenant to later items such as the three caravels in which Christopher Columbus and his men sailed to the New World in 1492 and James Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny still exist, and if so, where they are today.
My own insatiable desire to seek out these treasures—and the stories behind them—led me to write my first book on the subject, Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein’s Brain. I continue in this volume with a new collection of stories based on actual objects that exist today, which I hope will intrigue and inspire you, as they have me, to contemplate their role in shaping civilization and what they ultimately tell us about ourselves.
It is not difficult to wax romantic about artifacts. They are the props of history, portals to the past that afford the beholder a glimpse back in time. They offer edifying excursions that reveal as much as the eye—and imagination—is willing to see. Not only do they evoke insight into a particular era or event, but they carry the imprint of the individuals associated with them.
For many, artifacts associated with legendary figures of the past offer the greatest thrill. If you see or touch an object that was beheld by Newton, Washington, Lincoln, or Darwin, for example, you have formed a common bond with that icon of human history. Observe the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, and you and Napoleon, centuries apart, have both examined the same object, and perhaps experienced the same awe.
It is terrifically interesting to research existing artifacts and discover their underlying history, which is not always apparent at first. It is like reaching into the drawers of history and rummaging through them. Sifting through a plethora of historical riches, I have pulled out a number of items that fascinated me, and which I thought readers would likewise find absorbing.
Why do we have such an avid interest in history? Clearly, history enables us to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors so we are not condemned to repeat them, and understanding the themes that animated past eras illuminates the present. But perhaps there is something more.
History is important, I believe, for identity and perspective. Not having knowledge of our roots would be like going through life with amnesia; history provides us with the emotional context of where we came from and how we came to be who we are. History also gives us the intellectual perspective to guide our own journey through life. It lets us know where we’re going in relation to where our predecessors have been. Without that identity and perspective, we are aimless wanderers.
Not only is the future carved out of the past, but we ourselves are the direct result of history. Each of us is a product of the deeds, machinations, habits, policies, discoveries, humanitarian efforts, religious commitments, and much more, of all past peoples from peasants and slaves to nobles and kings, all trying to establish themselves securely in their worlds.
In our human ancestral chain, if but one link, just one person, had been different—no matter how far back—we might never have been born! Now, that is truly amazing, considering the countless factors that drew our ancestors together to meet and mate exactly as they did to produce the genetic sequence that led eventually to ourselves. You—every one of us—came into this world against truly incalculable odds: not just those of one individual sperm among 300 million winning the competition for a single egg in your unique conception, but of billions upon trillions of events and actions and decisions of the past that in precise concert resulted in the remarkable occasion of your birth. In one sense, your being here to read these words is vanishingly, stupefyingly unlikely. Paradoxically, in another and far deeper sense, it is inevitable.
I hope this book will be a voyage of discovery for the reader. Some of the artifacts may be familiar, but there is always more to learn about them, always the opportunity to move beyond the familiar and be surprised by history. Perhaps some readers may be inspired to undertake their own quests after objects of special interest. But one shouldn’t be disappointed to find that some objects that played a major role in an important event of history do not survive. Alas, Columbus’s 1492 fleet—the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María—and James Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny no longer exist; and despite some claims to the contrary, to the best of scholars’ knowledge, neither do Noah’s Ark or the Ark of the Covenant.
So feast your mind on the tales of the trials and victories of humankind that yielded the artifacts we may see, touch, and savor for their rich historical value today. From the Magna Carta to the Emancipation Proclamation, from John Harrison’s fourth marine timekeeper to ENIAC, from a horse’s hoof to a tablecloth fragment, a pigtail to a smoking stand, they are all part of the stuff of history—the stuff of which you yourself are made.