History of the World in 100 Objects on show at National Museum, Canberra

This exhibition is full of fascinating things, but can it truly be considered a history of the world?

Assyrian relief (700–695BC) from Iraq; bronze head of Augustus (27-25BC).

Museums and art galleries can have strikingly different ways of exhibiting artefacts. In practice the two approaches almost always overlap to some extent, but in their pure form we could characterise them as respectively didactic and aesthetic. The gallery typically shows its works as simply as possible, while the museum displays things surrounded by labels, reconstructions and often annoyingly loud audio and video that make ­silent examination impossible.

The divergence in exhibition style is in turn explained by the difference between art and other human artefacts. Once again the distinction is not absolute, but broadly art makes meaning: we can look at a picture from centuries ago and understand many of the ideas conveyed; museums, on the other hand, collect a wide range of objects that were not made as ­vehicles of meaning and which cannot speak for themselves in the same way.

Such a distinction is implicit in The History of the World in 100 Objects, based on the British Museum exhibition — 43 of the original objects have been included, the others replaced by similar but less rare or fragile examples — which was in turn based on a successful series of radio broadcasts in 2010 by Neil McGregor, the museum’s former director (2002-15).

The exhibition’s origins explain why few of the pieces are what we would usually consider works of art, let alone masterpieces, and why even the rare pictures or sculptures are primarily treated as documents of the past rather than as works that speak to us unaided. The head of Augustus, for example, is a notable object, but not a great work of art; it is a fragment remaining from a huge network of propaganda images of the emperor, and one that in this case was preserved thanks to the ignominy of capture and burial by semi-barbarians on the fringes of the empire.

But even the head of Augustus can speak for itself to a certain extent, because it uses a language with which we are all familiar. On the other hand, cuneiform tablets are illegible to all but a handful of specialists, so it is vital to have help in reading them if we are to do more than contemplate them as evidence of the invention of writing about 5000 years ago. Most interesting is a tablet of the Gilgamesh epic with a narrative of the flood myth that antedates the account in Genesis; when this text was published in 1872, it naturally upset those who still took the biblical myth for literal truth.

Among objects with great potential interest but little or no ability to speak for themselves are the gold coins of Croesus, whose name is still proverbial for wealth. They are rudimentary compared with the beautiful coins the Greeks minted over the next couple of centuries, but they are among the first examples of metal currency. And Croesus is the subject of a remarkable collection of stories recorded by Herodotus and repeated as moral exempla for centuries afterwards.

From the same period is a fine Assyrian relief showing two soldiers in the royal guard. Here there is a useful (and fortunately quiet) video explaining the difference between the costume and armaments of the two soldiers: the relief becomes evidence not only of the power of the monarchy but of the nature of a multi-ethnic empire. The Assyrians were succeeded by the neo-Babylonians, in turn conquered by Cyrus, and the Persians would adopt the imperial iconography of these precursor states, as we can see in the ruins of Persepolis.

The exhibition is more or less chronological, following the development of human technology, religious beliefs and social structures from the Stone Age to the present, from hunter-gatherers to the beginning of agriculture, the first cities, the growth of empires, the opening of the world to networks of travel and exchange, and so on. An effort has evidently been made to include all the peoples of the world: an Aboriginal woven bag is included early in the show, reminding us of the many other artefacts that must once have existed in the remote ages that have left only imperishable remains such as flint axes and spear points.

One of the most fascinating very ancient objects is a limestone fertility goddess figure from the Aegean region but predating the much more refined Cycladic sculpture by some two millennia. The carving is rough, but it was done with stone tools, long predating the working of metals. The most carefully, if not obsessively, carved part of the figure is the vulva, leaving us in no doubt of its symbolic and magical purpose.

Much later, from the beginnings of civilised life, comes perhaps the most beautiful object in the exhibition, the magnificent bull-headed lyre from Ur, found by Leonard Woolley in his excavations in the 1920s. The wooden structure of the lyre had of course rotted after some 5000 years, but Woolley was able to reconstruct it by pouring plaster of Paris into the cavity it had left behind. The decorative elements once mounted on the wooden structure were found loose or crushed, but they could be restored, and the restoration was confirmed by surviving images of such lyres in use in Sumerian times.

Religious images are among the most interesting works in the exhibition, most prominently an impressive sculpture of Mithras, an eastern god of ancient but obscure origins, slaying a bull. Mithras is hardly represented at all except in this standard action and posture, with the accompanying animals — the dog lapping up the blood that pours from the wound, as well as the snake and scorpion.

What it all means remains unclear, although the sacrifice of bulls has a long history, and in the east was connected with ecstatic rites intended to ensure fertility. Here the cult seems to be connected to personal salvation, and a number of underground Mithras temples were subsequently overbuilt by Christian churches, as for example at San Clemente in Rome.

Far less conspicuous and more reticent, but equally intriguing, are two tiny gold figures of Zoroastrian priests, their mouths covered so their breath will not sully the holy fire of their religion. Most immediately accessible is the fine Buddha from the Greco-Indian culture of Gandhara, where Buddha was first represented in human form, just as Christ was further to the west, under the influence of Hellenistic anthropomorphism. And whereas the Mithras figure is a symbol of esoteric belief, the Buddha invites ­direct connection with the viewer, modelling the calm and detachment that Buddhist belief enjoins.

The exhibition is thus full of individually fascinating things, but we do have to wonder whether it can truly be considered a history of the world in any coherent sense. Any selection of 100 objects to tell the story of mankind would of necessity be a personal choice and it would be unreasonable to demand it be either comprehensive or definitive. But there are both inclusions and omissions in this case that may seem idiosyncratic.

On the inclusion side, there are perhaps a few things that are there because we don’t want to leave anyone out, a criterion that is at least partly justifiable if the aim is to give a history of the world. But there seems to be a rather heavy representation of the Central and South American civilisations, which, for all their impressive monuments, remained in a morally somewhat delayed state of development, regularly practising human sacrifice and obsessed with gloomy superstitions until they were overwhelmed by predatory Spanish invaders.

On the omissions side, we don’t seem to have anything that adequately represents the intellectual revolution of Greece in the archaic and classical periods, nor indeed that directly acknowledges the importance of the invention of printing in the 15th century, which led to a knowledge revolution comparable to, and even more profound in its consequences than, that of the internet age.

As we reach the modern period, the story becomes understandably harder to tell in a balanced or objective fashion, and yet clearly American election badges, a Hockney print from the year before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, an Afghan rug from the time of the insurgency against Russian occupation and other items represent increasingly arbitrary, even if individually interesting, choices.

There are a couple of more fundamental problems with turning what was originally a radio broadcast series into an exhibition. The first concerns the question of focus. The beauty of the original series was to take a single object out of the crowd of a museum display, where so many things jostle for our attention, and to allow us to consider this item in isolation, exploring the world to which it once belonged. One hundred disparate objects are more confusing to look at than when these items were at least surrounded by things similar in period or kind.

The other question concerns time. The original broadcasts were 15 minutes each, and it was a great credit to McGregor to be able to say so much about complex matters in so short a time. But even with such concision, the 100 objects represented 1500 minutes or 25 hours of broadcast time. Here, if one spends two hours in the exhibition, which is a minimum, that only represents 1.2 minutes or 72 seconds per item. But the good news is that the original series is available on the British Museum website, where readers can not only see the original choice of works, but listen at leisure to all of McGregor’s commentaries as podcasts.

A History of the World in 100 Objects

National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Until January 29.