A History of the World in 100 Objects: Silver Plate Showing Shapur II

Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor retells the history of human development from the first stone axe to the credit card, using 100 selected objects from the Museum. Neil examines a dramatic visualisation of power and faith in 4th-century Iran, a silver plate that shows King Shapur II out hunting deer. Neil describes how this apparently secular image reveals the beliefs of the day, when the king was seen as the agent of god and the upholder of the state religion, Zoroastrianism. How might we read this hunting scene as a religious image? And why did the belief system of such a powerful dynasty fail to become a dominant world religion? With contributions from the historian Tom Holland and the Iranian art historian Guitty Azarpay