纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（2）（在线收听）

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 land mass or a history of India, and put the oceans in the foreground instead, then we get a completely different perspective on our past. This week we've been looking at the ways in which ideas, beliefs, religions and people travelled along the great trade routes across Europe and Asia between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. Today we're not on land, but on the high seas - sailing around the Indian Ocean. In the last programme we were at its eastern edge, in Indonesia; today I'm on the opposite shore, in Africa.

Africa and Indonesia are nearly five thousand miles apart, and yet they can reach each other easily, just as they can also reach the Middle East, India and China - thanks to the ocean winds. In stark contrast to the Atlantic, where the winds make crossing extremely difficult, the winds of the Indian Ocean 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're going to be able to come back. Merchant sailors have been criss-crossing these seas for thousands of years and, as always, they carried not just cargoes of goods, but plants and animals, people, languages and religions. The shores of the Indian Ocean, however diverse and however far apart, nonetheless belong to one great community. And we can glimpse the extent and the complexity of this community in our broken bits of pot.