At first sight this astrolabe looks like an outsized old-fashioned pocket watch with an entirely brass face. It sits easily in my hand - in fact it fills it - and it's a gleaming assemblage of interlocking brass-work, with five wafer-thin discs, one...
Little Lewis, I have perceived well thy ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions, and I have also considered thy earnest prayer specially to learn the treatise of the astrolabe. Here is an astrolabe of our horizon, and a little trea...
This week's programmes are about high-status objects, from all over the world, that belonged to the leaders and thinkers of around seven hundred years ago - objects that offer profound insights into the society that made them. We don't know exactly w...
062:EPISODE 62 - Hebrew Astrolabe 希伯来星盘 Hebrew astrolabe (made fourteenth century), probably from Spain I've got the whole world in my hands - in fact, not just the world, but the cosmos. What I'm holding is a portable model of the heaven...
I've now reached the three circular terraces on the top, and at this point the teaching stops, there are no longer any reliefs telling stories, there is simply a series of bell-shaped stupas, and inside each one, a seated Buddha. We are in the world...
It clearly was a very grandiose equivalent to one of those great Gothic European cathedrals, and it would have taken probably 75 to 100 years to construct it, similar to the cathedrals here in Europe. And so it's a great symbol of the Buddhist world,...
The Raffles collection consists of the two heads and some fragments gathered at Borobudur, and a modest number of ancient Hindu and Islamic works of art. But, in addition, he collected objects that for him summed up the Javanese culture of his own da...
Raffles' rediscovery of Borobudur, and his later uncovering of important Hindu monuments on the island - for Java had embraced both Hinduism and Buddhism - led to a fundamental reassessment of Javanese history. Raffles wanted to persuade Europeans th...
As you climb through the different levels, you take the material road to a spiritual enlightenment. On the lowest level, the sculptured reliefs present us with the illusions and disappointments of ordinary life, with all its troubles and shortcomings...
This week we're tracing the great arcs of trade that linked Asia, Europe and Africa around a thousand years ago. My object today is a stone head of the Buddha, from Borobudur. Through it we can plot the huge network of connections across the China Se...