In the long history of Egypt, Kushite rule was a brief interlude of not even 150 years. Yet it reminds us that the border between what is now Egypt and Sudan is a constant faultline, both geographic and political, that has frequently divided the peoples of the Nile Valley and frequently been fought over. We'll see that faultline again later in this history (Chapters 35 and 94), because both the Roman and the British empires bloodily revisited this contested boundary between Egypt and Kush. Geography has determined that this will always be a frontier, because it's here that the first cataract breaks up the Nile into small, rocky channels that are very hard to navigate, making contact between north and south highly problematic. For Africans, the Nile has never been just an Egyptian river, and it's claimed as fiercely by the Sudanese now as it was in the time of Taharqo. The Sudanese-born political commentator Zeinab Badawi sees this as the cause of friction between two peoples who are really very similar: I wouldn't say that there are any huge ideological differences between the Sudanese and the Egyptian governments, and there is a huge affinity between the people. The biggest source of friction and potential tension between Egypt and Sudan has been in the Nile, and how the waters of the Nile are used. The feeling that a lot of northern Sudanese might have is that the Nile runs much more through Sudan than it does through Egypt. Sudan is the biggest country in Africa. It's the tenth biggest in the world, the size of western Europe. It is the land of the Nile, and maybe there is a kind of brotherly resentment by the northern Sudanese that the Egyptians have in a sense claimed the Nile as their own, whereas the Sudanese in a sense feel they are the proper custodians of the Nile, because, after all, most of its journey is through the territory of Sudan.

This perhaps makes it clear why the union of Egypt and Sudan just under 3,000 years ago was easier to achieve in the sculpted form of Taharqo's sphinx than in the unstable world of practical politics. Recovering the story of Kush has been one of the great achievements of recent archaeology, showing how an energetic people on the edge of a great empire were able to conquer it and appropriate its traditions. A similar story was taking place somewhere else at almost exactly the same time in China, where our next object comes from.

23.

Chinese Zhou Ritual Vessel.

Bronze gui, found in western China.

11001000 BC.

How often do you dine with the dead? It may seem a strange question, but if you're Chinese it may not be quite so surprising, because many Chinese, even now, believe that deceased family members watch over them from the other side of death and can help or hinder their fortunes. When somebody dies they are equipped for burial with all kinds of practical bits and pieces: a toothbrush, money, food, water or possibly today a credit card and a computer. The Chinese afterlife often sounds depressingly (perhaps reassuringly) like our own. But there is one great difference: in China the dead are paid huge respect. A well-equipped send-off is just the beginning. Ritual feasting holding banquets with and for the ancestors has been for centuries a part of Chinese life. Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, a renowned expert on ancient Chinese bronzes, goes as far as to say: The primary and most ancient religion in China consists of preparing ceremonial meals for the dead. The first dynasties of China, the Shang [c. 15001050 BC] and the Zhou [c. 1050221 BC], made large numbers of fine bronze containers for food, alcohol and water, and used them in a big ceremony, sometimes once a week, maybe once every ten days. Their belief is that if food, wine or alcohol is properly prepared, it will be received by the dead and nourish them, and those dead, the ancestors, will look after their descendants in return for this nourishment. The bronze vessels which we see were prized possessions for use in life. They were not made primarily for burial, but when a major figure of the elite died, it was believed that he would carry on offering ceremonies of food and wine to his ancestors in the afterlife and indeed entertain them at banquets.

This spectacular bronze vessel, made about 3,000 years ago, is called a gui. Gui often carry inscriptions which are now a key source for Chinese history, and this bronze is just such a document. It would have been one of a set of vessels of different sizes, rather like a set of saucepans in a smart modern kitchen, and although we don't know how many companions it might once have had, each vessel would have had a clearly defined role in the preparation and serving of food at the regular banquets that were organized for the dead. This one is about the shape and size of a large punch bowl, about a foot (27 centimetres) across, with two large curved handles. There is an elaborate, flower-like decoration on bands at the top and bottom, but its most striking features are undoubtedly its handles, each of which is a large beast, with tusks, horns and huge square ears caught in the act of swallowing a bird whose beak is just emerging from its jaws. Bronze vessels like this were among the most iconic objects of ancient China, and making them was an extraordinarily complicated business. First the ores that contain copper and tin had to be smelted to make the bronze itself, then the molten bronze had to be cast a technology in which China led the world. This gui was not made as a single object but as separate pieces cast in different moulds which were then joined together to make one complex and intricate work of art. The result is a vessel which at that date could have been made nowhere else in the world. The sheer skill, the effort and expense involved in making bronze vessels like these made them immediately objects of the highest value and status, fit therefore for the most solemn rituals.

In domestic ceremonies, families offered food and drink to their watchful dead; but on a grander scale governments offered them to the mighty gods. If the gui addressed the ancestors and the world of the past, it also emphatically asserted authority in the present at a troubled transitional moment for China, when the link between heavenly and earthly authorities was supremely important.

The Shang Dynasty, which came to power in about 1500 BC, had seen the growth of China's first large cities. Their last capital, at Anyang on the Yellow River in north China, covered an area of 30 square kilometres (10 square miles) and had a population of 120,000 at the time it must have been one of the largest cities in the world. Life in Shang cities was highly regulated, with twelve-month calendars, decimal measurement, conscription and centralized taxes. As centres of wealth, the cities were also places of outstanding artistic production, in ceramics, jade and, above all, bronze. But then, about 3,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, existing societies collapsed and were replaced by new powers.

The Shang, which had been in power for around 500 years, was toppled by a new dynasty, the Zhou, who came from the west, from the steppes of central Asia. Like the Kushites of Sudan who conquered Egypt at roughly the same time, the Zhou were a people from the edge who challenged and overthrew the old-established, prosperous centre. They ultimately took over the entire Shang kingdom and, again like the Kushites, appropriated not just the state they had conquered but its history, imagery and rituals too. They continued to support artistic production of many different kinds, and they continued the ritual central to Chinese political authority of elaborate feasting with the dead using vessels like our gui. This was in part a public assertion that the gods endorsed the new regime.

The inscription inside the gui commemorates the Zhou's suppression of a Shang rebellion If you look inside the gui there is a surprise, which makes it into an instrument of power as well as an object of ritual. At the bottom, where it would have normally been hidden by food when in use, there is an inscription in Chinese characters, not unlike those still used today, which tells us that this particular bowl was made for a Zhou warrior, one of the invaders who overthrew the Shang Dynasty. At this date, any formal writing is prestigious, but writing in bronze carries a very particular authority. The inscription tells us of a significant battle in the Zhou's ultimate triumph over the Shang: The King, having subdued the Shang country, charged the Marquis K'ang to convert it into a border territory to be the Wei state. Since Mei Situ Yi had been associated in effecting this change, he made in honour of his late father this sacral vessel.

So the man who commissioned the gui, Mei Situ Yi, did so in order to honour his dead father and at the same time, as a loyal Zhou, commemorated the quashing of a Shang rebellion in about 1050 BC by the Zhou king's brother, the Marquis K'ang. As writing on bamboo or wood has perished, bronze inscriptions of this kind are now our principal historical source, and through them we can reconstruct the continued tussling between the Shang and the Zhou.

It is not at all clear why the smaller and much less technically sophisticated Zhou were able to defeat the powerful and well-organized Shang state. They seem to have had a striking ability to absorb and to shape allies into a coherent attacking force, but above all they were buoyed up by their faith in themselves as a chosen people. In first capturing and then ruling the Shang kingdom they saw themselves as so many conquerors do as enacting the will of the gods; so they fought with the confidence born of knowing that they were the rightful inheritors of the land. But and this was new they articulated this belief in the form of a controlling concept that was to become a central idea in Chinese political history.

The Zhou were the first to formalize the idea of the 'Mandate of Heaven', the Chinese notion that heaven blesses and sustains the authority of a just ruler. An impious and incompetent ruler would displease the gods, who would withdraw their mandate from him. Accordingly it followed that the defeated Shang must have lost the Mandate of Heaven, which had passed to the virtuous, victorious Zhou. From this time on, the Mandate of Heaven became a permanent feature of Chinese political life, underpinning the authority of rulers or justifying their removal. Dr Wang Tao, an archaeologist at the University of London, describes it this way: The mandate transformed the Zhou, because it allowed them to rule other people. The killing of a king or senior member of the family was the most terrible crime possible, but any crime against authority could be justified by the excuse of 'the Mandate of Heaven'. The concept equates in its totemic quality to the Western idea of democracy. In China if you offended the gods, or the people, you would see omens in the skies thunder, rain, earthquakes. Every time that China had an earthquake, its political rulers were scared, because they interpreted it as a reaction to some kind of offence against the Mandate of Heaven.

Gui like this have been found over a wide swathe of China, because the Zhou conquest continued to expand until it covered nearly twice the area of the old Shang kingdom. It was a cumbersome state, with fluctuating levels of territorial control. Nonetheless, the Zhou Dynasty lasted for as long as the Roman Empire, indeed longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history.

And as well as the Mandate of Heaven, the Zhou bequeathed one other enduring concept to China. Three thousand years ago they gave to their lands the name of 'Zhongguo': the 'Middle Kingdom'. The Chinese have thought of themselves as the Middle Kingdom, placed in the very centre of the world, ever since.

24.

Paracas Textile.

Textile fragments, from the Paracas peninsula, Peru.

300200 BC.

Looking at clothes is a key part of any serious look at history. But, as we all know to our cost, clothes don't last they wear out, they fall apart and what survives gets eaten by the moths. Compared with stone, pottery or metal, clothes are pretty well non-starters in a history of the world told through 'things'. So regrettably, but not surprisingly, it's only now, well over a million years into our story, that we're coming to clothes and to all that they can tell us about economics and power structures, climate and customs, and how the living view the dead. Nor is it surprising that, given their vulnerability, the textiles we are looking at are fragments.

The South America of 500 BC, like the Middle East, was undergoing change. The South Americans' artefacts, however, were on the whole much less durable than a sphinx; there, it was textiles that played a central part in the complex public ceremonies. We're learning new things all the time about the Americas at this date, but, as there are no written sources, much is still very mysterious, compared, for example, with what we know about Asia, belonging to a world of behaviour and belief that we still struggle to interpret from fragmentary evidence like these pieces of cloth, well over 2,000 years old.

In the British Museum these textiles are usually kept in specially controlled conditions, and never exposed to ordinary light and humidity for long. The first thing that strikes you about them is their extraordinary condition. They're each about 10 centimetres (3 or 4 inches) long, and they're embroidered in stem-stitch using wool, from either llamas or alpacas, we're not sure which both animals are native to the Andes and were soon domesticated. The figures have been very carefully cut out from a larger garment a mantle or a cape, perhaps. They are strange beings, not entirely human in form, which seem to have talons instead of hands, and claws for feet.

At first glance you might find these figures rather charming, as they appear to be flying through the air with their long pigtails or top knots trailing behind them ... but when you look more closely, they are disconcerting, because you can see that they are wielding daggers and clasping severed heads. Perhaps the most striking thing about them, though, is the intricacy of the sewing and the surviving brilliance of the colours, with their blues and pinks, yellows and greens, all sitting very carefully judged next to one another.

These jewel-like scraps of cloth were found on the Paracas peninsula, about 240 kilometres (150 miles) south of modern Lima. In the narrow coastal strip between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific, the people of Paracas produced some of the most colourful, complex and distinctive textiles that we know. These early Peruvians seem to have put all their artistic energies into textiles. Embroidered cloth was for them roughly what bronze was for the Chinese at the same date: the most revered material in their culture, and the clearest sign of status and authority. These particular pieces of cloth have come down to us because they were buried in the dry desert conditions of the Paracas peninsula. Textiles from ancient Egypt have survived from the same period, in similar dry climates thousands of miles away. Like the Egyptians, the Peruvians mummified their dead. And in Peru, as in Egypt, textiles were intended not just for wearing in daily life but also for clothing the mummies: that was the purpose of the Paracas textiles.

The Canadian weaver and textile specialist Mary Frame has been studying these Peruvian masterpieces for over thirty years, and she finds in these funeral cloths an extraordinary organization at work: Some of the wrapping cloths in these mummy bundles were immense one was 87 feet long. It would have been a social enactment, a happening, to lay out the yarns to make these cloths. You can have up to 500 figures on a single textile, and they are organized in very set patterns of colour repetition and symmetry. The social levels were reflected in cloth to a tremendous degree. Everything about textiles was controlled what kind of fibre, colours, materials could be used and by what groups. There has always been a tendency to do that in a stratified society to use something major, like textiles, to visibly reflect the levels in the society.

There was no writing that we know of at this time in Peru, so these textiles must have been a vital part of this society's visual language. The colours must have been electrifying against the everyday palette of yellow and beige hues that dominated the landscape of the sandy Paracas peninsula. They were certainly very difficult colours to achieve. The bright red tones were extracted from the roots of plants, while the deep purples came from molluscs gathered on the shore. The background cloth would have been cotton, spun and dyed before being woven on a loom. Figures were outlined first, and then the details like clothes and facial features were filled in in different colours with exquisite precision, presumably by young people, as you need perfect eyesight for stitching like this.

Production would have required coordinating large numbers of differently skilled labourers the people who reared the animals for the wool or who grew the cotton, those who gathered the dyes, and then the many who actually worked on the textiles themselves. A society that could organize all this, and devote so much energy and resource to materials for burial, must have been both prosperous and very highly structured.

Making the mummy bundles, in other words preparing the Paracas elite for burial, involved an elaborate ritual. The naked corpse was first bound with cords to fix it in a seated position. Wrapped pieces of cotton or occasionally gold were put in the mouth, and grander corpses had a golden mask strapped to the lower half of their face. After this the body was wrapped in a large embroidered textile our fragments must come from one of these and the encased body was then seated upright in a big shallow basket containing offerings of shell necklaces, animal skins, bird feathers from the Amazonian jungle and food, including maize and peanuts. Then body, offerings and basket, all together, were wrapped in layers of plain cotton cloth to form one giant conical mummy bundle, sometimes up to 1.5 metres (5 feet) wide.

It's impossible to know exactly what our embroidered figures represent. Apparently floating in the air, with bared teeth and clawed hands, it is easy to imagine that they are not human but creatures from the spirit world. But as they hold daggers and severed heads, perhaps we are in the realm of ritual sacrifice. What is this killing for? And why would you embroider it on a textile? We're clearly in the presence of a very complex structure of belief and myth, and the stakes are as high as they can be. For these are embroideries about life and death. Mary Frame explains: The severed heads, the wounds, the strange posture, seem to be depicting a whole set of stages of transformation between the human into the mythic ancestor. Blood and fertility seem to be themes that are intertwined with this. These textiles are really directed like a supplication for success with crops. Peruvian land is very marginal it's terrifically arid down there; the people had an intense focus on rituals that would ensure continual success. Water is necessary for plant growth blood is conceived of as being even more potent.

When the first Europeans arrived in Central and South America 1,800 years later, they found societies structured around blood sacrifices to ensure the continuing cycle of sunshine and rain, seasons and crops. So these four little embroideries give us a certain amount of information, and can form the basis of a great deal of speculation, about how the people of the Paracas lived, died and believed. But, quite apart from that, they are great imaginative achievements, masterpieces of needlework.

It's certain that American societies at this date, even advanced ones like the Paracas, were much smaller in scale than the contemporary states that we've been looking at in the Middle East and China. It was to be many centuries yet before empires like the Incas would emerge.

But these textiles and embroideries of the Paracas, produced more than 2,000 years ago, are now considered among the greatest in the world. These textiles are seen as part of the fabric of the nation, and in contemporary Peru there is a determined effort to revitalize these traditional weaving and sewing practices in order to connect modern Peruvians directly to their ancient, indigenous, and entirely non-European past.

25.

Gold Coin of Croesus.

Gold coin, minted in Turkey.

AROUND 550 BC.

'As rich as Croesus'. It's a phrase that echoes down the centuries and is still used in advertisements for get-rich-quick investment wheezes. But how many of those who use it ever pause to think about the original King Croesus, who, until a twist at the end of his life, was indeed fabulously rich and, as far as we know, very happy with it?

Croesus was a king in what's now western Turkey. His kingdom, Lydia, was among the new powers that emerged across the Middle East about 3,000 years ago, and these are some of the original gold coins that made Lydia and Croesus so rich. They are examples of a new type of object that would ultimately become a power in its own right coinage.

We've all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things that it's easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years states ran complex economies and international trading networks without a coin to hand. The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold. But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged, coinage began to make an appearance. Fascinatingly, it happened independently in two different parts of the world at almost the same time. The Chinese began using miniature spades and knives in very much the same way that we would now use coins, and virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean world the Lydians started making actual coins as we would still recognize them round shapes in precious metals.

These early Lydian coins come in many different sizes, from about the scale of a modern British 1p piece right down to something hardly bigger than a lentil. Lydian coins are not all the same shape. The largest one here is a kind of figure-of-eight shape an oblong, slightly squeezed in the middle and on it are a lion and a bull facing each other as if in combat, and about to crash together head-on.

These coins were minted under Croesus around 550 BC. It's said that Croesus found his gold in the river that once belonged to the legendary Midas he of 'the golden touch' and it's certain that the region was rich in gold, which would have been extremely useful in the great trading metropolis of Lydia's capital city, Sardis, in north-west Turkey.

In small societies there isn't really a great need for money. You can generally trust your friends and neighbours to return any labour, food or goods in kind. The need for money, as we understand it, grows when you are dealing with strangers you may never see again and can't necessarily trust that is, when you're trading in a cosmopolitan city like Sardis.

Before the first Lydian coins, payments were made mostly in precious metal effectively just lumps of gold and silver. It didn't really matter what shape the metal was, just how much it weighed and how pure it was. But there is a difficulty. In their natural state, gold and silver are often found mixed with each other and, indeed, mixed with other less valuable metals. Checking a metal's purity was a tedious task, likely to hold up every business transaction. Even once the Lydians and their neighbours had invented coinage, about a hundred years before Croesus, this problem of purity still remained. They used the naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, not the pure forms of the metals. How could you know exactly what a particular coin was made of and therefore what it was worth?

The Lydians eventually solved this problem, speeded up the market and, in the process, became hugely rich. They realized that the answer was for the state to mint coins of pure gold and pure silver, of consistent weights that would have absolutely reliable value. If the state guaranteed it, this would be a currency that you could trust completely and, without any checking, spend or accept without a qualm. How did the Lydians manage to pull this off? Dr Paul Craddock, an expert in historical metals, explains: The Lydians hit on the idea of the state, or the king, issuing standard weights and standard purity. The stamps on them are the guarantee of the weight and the purity. If you're guaranteeing the purity, then it is absolutely necessary that you have the ability not just to add elements to the gold but also to take them out. To some degree, taking out elements like lead and copper is not too bad; but unfortunately the main element that came with the gold out of the ground was silver, and this had not been done before. Silver is reasonably resistant to chemical attack, and gold is very resistant to chemical attack. They took either a very fine powder of the gold straight from the mines, or else got bigger pieces of old gold hammered out into very thin sheets and put these in a pot along with common salt, sodium chloride. They then heated that in a furnace to about 800 degrees centigrade, and ultimately they were left with pretty pure gold.

So the Lydians learnt how to make pure gold coins. No less importantly, they then employed craftsmen to stamp on them symbols indicating their weight, and thus their value. These first coins have no writing on them dates and inscriptions on coins were to come much later but archaeological evidence allows us to date our coins to around 550 BC, the middle of Croesus's reign.

The stamp used to indicate weight on his coins was a lion, and as the size and therefore the value of the coin decreased, ever smaller parts of the lion's anatomy were used. So, for example, the smallest coin shows only a lion's paw. This new Lydian method of minting moved the responsibility for checking the purity and weight of the coins from the businessman to the ruler a switch that made the city of Sardis an easy, swift and extremely attractive place to do business in. Because people could trust Croesus's coins, they used them far beyond the boundaries of Lydia itself, giving him a new kind of influence financial power. Trust is of course a key component of any coinage you've got to be able to rely on the stated value of the coin, and on the guarantee that it implies. It was Croesus who gave the world its first reliable currency. The gold standard starts here. The consequence was great wealth.

It was thanks to that wealth that Croesus was able to build the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus the rebuilt version of which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But did Croesus's money bring him happiness? We're told that he was warned by a wise Athenian statesman that no man, however rich and powerful, could be considered happy until he knew his end. Everything would depend on whether he died happy.

Lydia was powerful and prosperous, but it was threatened from the east by the rapidly expanding power of the Persians. Croesus responded to this threat by seeking advice from the famed Oracle at Delphi. He was told that, in the coming conflict, 'a great empire would be destroyed' the archetypal Delphic utterance that could be interpreted either way. It was his own empire, Lydia, that was conquered, and Croesus was captured by the great Persian king Cyrus. In fact, his end wasn't so bad. Cyrus shrewdly appointed Croesus as an adviser I like to think as his financial adviser and the victorious Persians quickly adopted the Lydian model, spreading Croesus's coins along the trade routes of the Mediterranean and Asia, and then minting their own coins in pure gold and pure silver at Croesus's mint in Sardis. It echoes the way the Kushites absorbed Egyptian culture when they conquered their northern neighbour.

It's probably not a coincidence that coinage was invented at pretty much the same time in China and in Turkey. Both developments were responses to the fundamental changes seen across the world around 3,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. These military, political and economic upheavals brought us not only modern coinage, but something else that's resonated till the present day new ideas about how people and their rulers saw themselves. In short, the beginning of modern political thinking, the world of Confucius and Classical Athens. The next stage of that journey starts with the empire that toppled Croesus the Persians.

PART SIX.

The World in the Age of Confucius.

500300 BC.

Across the world different civilizations were evolving models for the government of society that would remain influential for thousands of years. While Socrates taught the people of Athens how to disagree, Confucius was propounding his political philosophy of harmony in China and the Persians found a way for different peoples to coexist under their vast empire. In Central America the Olmecs created the sophisticated calendars, religion and art that would characterize Central American civilizations for over a thousand years. In northern Europe there were no towns or cities, states or empires, no writing or coinage, but the objects that were made there nevertheless show that these civilizations had a sophisticated vision of themselves and their place in the wider world.

26.

Oxus Chariot Model.

Gold model, found near the Oxus river, on the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

500300 BC.

In the fifth century BC, societies across the world were beginning to articulate very clear ideas about themselves and about others. They were inventing and defining what we would now call statecraft. This is the era of what some have called the 'empires of the mind'. The world superpower of 2,500 years ago was Persia, an empire that was run on a rather different principle from previous empires. As Dr Michael Axworthy, the Director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Exeter, has put it, up to that time they had generally been based on naked might being right; the Persian Empire was based on the principle of the iron fist in the velvet glove.

I want to explore that empire in this tiny golden chariot, pulled by four golden horses. It's easy to imagine a chariot like this racing along the great Persian imperial roads. There are two figures in it: the driver, who stands holding the reins, and the much larger and clearly very important passenger, who sits on a bench at his side. He is probably meant to be a senior administrator, visiting the distant province that he rules on behalf of the king of Persia.

The model was indeed found in a very distant province, on the far eastern edge of the empire, near the borders of modern Tajikistan and Afghanistan. It's part of a huge hoard of gold and silver objects, known as the Oxus treasure, that for more than a hundred years have formed one of the great collections at the British Museum.

This exquisite chariot sits quite comfortably on the palm of the hand, where it looks like an expensive toy for a privileged child. We can't, however, be certain that it was in fact a toy; it could have been made as an offering to the gods, either asking them for a favour or thanking them for one. But whatever it meant then, this chariot today allows us today to conjure up an empire.

What kind of an empire was it? About 70 miles north of Shiraz, in Iran, the low camel-coloured hills open out into a flat windy plain. In this featureless landscape is a huge stone plinth, rising in six gigantic steps to what looks like a gabled hermit's cell. It dominates the entire landscape. It is the tomb of Cyrus, the first Persian emperor, the man who 2,500 years ago built the largest empire that the world had then seen, and changed the world or at least the Middle East for ever.

Centred on modern Iran, the vast Persian Empire ran from Turkey and Egypt in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. To control an empire like this required land transport on a quite unprecedented scale; the Persian Empire is the first great 'road' empire of history.

The Persian Empire was more a collection of kingdoms than what we might immediately think of as an empire. Cyrus called himself the Shahanshah the King of Kings making clear that this was a confederation of allied states, each with its own ruler but all under firm Persian control. It was a model that allowed a great deal of local autonomy and all sorts of diversity very different from the later Roman model. The historian and writer Tom Holland elaborates: Persian occupation could be compared to a light morning mist settling over the contours of their empire you were aware of it, but it was never obtrusive.

The Roman approach was to encourage those they had conquered to identify with their conquerors, so that ultimately everyone within the borders of the Roman Empire came to consider themselves to be Romans. Persians went for a very different approach. So as long as you paid your taxes, and you didn't revolt, then you'd pretty much be left alone. That said, however, you do not conquer a vast empire without spilling an immense amount of blood, and there was no question that if you dared to stand up to the Persian kings then you would be obliterated.

They obliterated troublesome people by sending armies along those wonderfully straight and fast imperial roads. But inside the empire bloodshed was generally avoided, thanks to a huge and hugely effective administrative machine. The King of Kings ultimately controlled everything, but at the local level he was represented by a governor a satrap who would keep a close eye on what was going on in the subordinate kingdoms. He would enforce law and order, levy taxes and raise armies.

The tomb of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia.

Which brings us back to our golden toy, because the passenger in our chariot must be a satrap on tour. He sports a stylishly patterned overcoat he's obviously spent a great deal of money on it and his headdress leaves you in no doubt that this is a man who is used to being in charge. His chariot is made for serious travel: the large-spoked wheels are as high as the horses themselves, and are clearly designed for long distances.

You can tell a lot about a state from its transport system, and our chariot tells us a great deal about imperial Persia. Public order was so secure that people could travel long distances without armed guards. And they could travel fast. With its horses specially bred for strength and speed, and with its large, steadying wheels, this chariot was the Ferrari or Porsche of its time. Broad dirt roads were kept wheel-worthy in all weathers, and there were frequent staging posts. Commands from the centre could be transmitted at speed across the whole territory, thanks to an entirely reliable royal postal service that used horsemen, runners and express messengers. Foreign visitors were deeply impressed, among them the Greek historian Herodotus: There is nothing in the world which travels faster than these Persian couriers ... it is said that men and horses are stationed along the road, equal in number to the number of days the journey takes a man and a horse for each day. Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stage in the quickest possible time neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness.

But our chariot doesn't just tell us about travel and communications; it sums up the acceptance of diversity that was at the heart of the Persian imperial system. Although found on the eastern frontier near Afghanistan, it must have been made in central Persia because of the technique of its metalworking. The driver and his passenger wear the costume of the Medes, an ancient people who lived in the north-west of what is now Iran, while on the front of the chariot, prominently displayed, is the head of the Egyptian god Bes. Bes, a dwarf with bow legs, is perhaps not your most likely candidate for a divine protector, but he looked after children and people in trouble, and he was a good god to have guarding your chariot on long journeys. I suppose he's the equivalent of a modern-day St Christopher or talisman dangling from the car mirror.

But what is an Egyptian god doing protecting a Persian on the frontiers of Afghanistan? It's a perfect demonstration of the Persian Empire's striking capacity for tolerating different religions and indeed, on occasion, adopting them from the people that they conquered. This unusually inclusive empire was also perfectly happy to use foreign languages for official proclamations. Here is Herodotus again: No race is so ready to adopt foreign ways as the Persian; for instance, they wear the Median costume as they think it handsomer than their own, and their soldiers wear the Egyptian corselet.

The multi-faith, multicultural approach that's summed up in our little chariot, when combined with well-organized military power, created a flexible imperial system that lasted for more than 200 years. It enabled the king to present to his subjects the image of a tolerant, accommodating empire, whatever the specific facts on the ground might have been. So, when Cyrus invaded Babylon, near modern Baghdad, in 539 BC, he could issue a grandiloquently generous decree in Babylonian presenting himself as the defender of the peoples that he had just conquered. He restored the cults of different gods and allowed the people taken prisoner by the Babylonians to return to their homelands. In his own words: When my soldiers in great numbers peacefully entered Babylon ... I did not allow anyone to terrorize the people ... I kept in view the needs of the people and all their sanctuaries to promote their well-being ... I freed all slaves.

The most famous beneficiaries of Cyrus's shrewd political judgement after the conquest of Babylon were the Jews. Taken prisoner a generation before by Nebuchadnezzar, they were now allowed to return home to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple. It was an act of generosity that they never forgot. In the Hebrew scriptures Cyrus is hailed as a divinely inspired benefactor and hero. In 1917, when the British government declared that it would establish in Palestine a national home to which Jews could once again return, images of Cyrus were displayed alongside photographs of George V throughout eastern Europe. Not many political gambits are still paying dividends 2,500 years later.