Epistemophilia: BBC pepper pots

I am mourning the fact that BBC Radio 4's History of the World in 100 Objects has come to an end. But I'm still only on object 30-something so at least I'll be catching up for a while.

(also, I have a huge crush on its host and British Museum director Neil McGregor but that's incidental.)

The other night he talked about an object called the Hoxne Pepper Pot (or on the BBC's site, here) This is the most beautiful object so far and it's story is fascinating. Pepper was evidently highly prized and costly in Roman times. The Visigoths were paid off not to sack Rome in 410 with a ton of pepper. It wasn't grown anywhere in the Roman Empire and had to be shipped from India along a lengthy and dangerous trade route over the Indian Ocean and through Egypt. This pot was found by a farmer in Suffolk in 1992 with a metal detector. He was looking for a lost hammer. And instead he found a huge cache of Roman era objects. His hammer, btw, is also now part of the British Museum collection. I don't know why but this makes me laugh.

What I continue to love about this show is how Neil McGregor makes you think about the object as a contemporary from the period would. The family in question appears to have been Christian guessing from the engraving "VIVAS IN DEO" on one of the objects (engraved unicamerally of course as the Latin alphabet was at that time) and Christians in Britain-or at least rich ones-would have been in particular danger. As McGregor said, there were no Swiss banks so what else would you do with your valuables besides bury them? The fact that they obviously never came back for their valuables makes me sad. Did they flee back to Rome? And what did they find there if so? Did they miss their little silver pepper pot with golden lips that would sparkle in candlelight? Not to mention the pepper in it. I guess the return of bland food was another consequence of the fall of the empire.

BTW, the pot is so named because it came from the village of Hoxne (pronouned "Hoksen") in Suffolk. It is part of a group of artifacts called the Hoxne Hoard.