The universe hasn't started yet. Vishnu, the god who preserves it, sleeps on the coils of a serpent named Ananta, floating on the ocean that exists before anything else. The goddess Lakshmi presses his feet to wake him. A lotus rises from his navel. Inside sits Brahma, who will build the world.

A picture of a sound. Painted in Bikaner, Rajasthan, in 1605. Indian painters gave every melodic mode in music a scene, a season, and an hour of the day when it could be played. This one is Desvarati Ragini. A woman on a bed. Birds. Waiting.

The fire started in a furnace under the House of Lords, burning bundles of old wooden tally sticks. By evening on 16 October 1834, Parliament was gone. The Thames was at low tide. Fire crews couldn't pump water up the bank, and steamers towing engines ran aground.

Three inches across. A Frankish woman wore this under her chin to pin her veil shut, around the year 800. Gold hammered from behind into raised ridges, then finished with filigree, hair-thin gold wire soldered on by hand. The shape is the odd part.

Under three inches tall and a quarter inch thick. Jadeite, harder than steel, carved by people who had no metal tools.

4 3/4 inches tall, and made to work forever. Egyptians believed the dead could be called to manual labor in the afterlife. Wealthy burials could include as many as 401 shabtis: one worker for every day, plus overseers.

A throne 33 inches tall. Carved and gilded in Paris in 1822 for a boy who would briefly rule as Henri V, the last of the direct Bourbon line, in 1830.

This is the face of a Persian boy. Carved in Japan, over 1,300 years ago. Paulownia wood, lacquered and painted. The mask covers the entire head, with cut openings for eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Nobody knows who carved it.

Every bead on this stool was sewn on by hand. Glass beads, cotton, plant fiber, indigo dye. Made by Bamileke artisans in the Bandjoun Kingdom, Cameroon, sometime in the 1800s. The leopard pattern isn't decoration. It marked the stool as royal property.

Someone owned property here 9,000 years ago, and needed the world to know it. This chlorite stamp seal has a carved face just over an inch wide, worn on a cord through a pierced hole, pressed into wet clay to mark what belonged to someone. Writing was still 3,000 years away.

Molten glass, trailed onto the surface in threads, then combed by hand while it's still hot enough to move. Wait too long and it hardens mid-stroke, pattern ruined. This zigzag finish is called Phänomen. A Bohemian glassworks patented the process in 1898.

Four inches tall. Made sometime between 200 BCE and 100 CE. This bronze face has been making people uncomfortable for over two thousand years. The Greeks called these figures grotesques. They were everywhere: hung above doorways, attached to furniture, worn as pendants.

A limestone statue of a couple, Yuny and his wife Renenutet. She sits beside him, one arm looped around his back. She holds a menat, a beaded necklace shaken like a rattle in temple rituals for the goddess Hathor. Still carrying its original paint.

Five inches tall, carved from travertine, a milky white stone that forms in hot springs and caves. Aztecs centuries later called this material tecali. Olmec artists rarely shaped it into a container. This bowl, made somewhere between 1200 and 300 BCE in Guerrero, Mexico, is one of the exceptions.

Two deer graze on stylized plants near the widest part of this jug. Behind them, two animals close in with bared teeth and long hanging tongues. Look at their heads. They have horns. Lions don't have horns. The deer don't seem to notice either way.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was 66 when Spain's king summoned him to Madrid. He left Venice and never went back. This oval sketch, from the 1760s, is his study for the ceiling: putti and women spiraling upward, an allegory of the Spanish monarchy's glory.

A human face glares out between two bronze wings, cast around 900 years ago in the Meuse valley, in what's now Belgium and the southern Netherlands. Copper alloy, barely bigger than a fist: 2.75 x 4.4 x 3.1 inches. Its job was simple. Hold up a candlestick.

Her head is shaved bald except for a few long, looped locks. That haircut is the only clue to her age. Archaeologists read it as adolescent, a teenage girl caught mid-prayer, cast in bronze on Crete around 1600 BCE.

A tile from Nanjing's Porcelain Pagoda, a nine-story tower built starting in 1412. This one shows an apsara, a flying dancer from Buddhist art, glazed green and ochre. Travelers called it one of the wonders of the world. Rebels destroyed it in 1856. Almost nothing survived.

A man lies back. A woman faces away, squatting over him. The scene is molded into the discus of a Roman oil lamp, cast sometime between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD. Diameter: 6.6 centimeters. It burned real oil, in someone's real house.

A polished, glassy shine covers this face. The crown above it stays rough on purpose, Egyptian sculptors roughened stone so paint would grip it. This crown was once solid blue with a yellow browband. The paint is gone. The texture built to hold it isn't.

Fifty-five inches tall. Cotton, burlap, glass beads, twine, leather, and wood, shaped into an elephant's head with huge fan ears. In Cameroon's Grassfields, elephants signaled power and leadership. Worn at funerals and coronations.

Gold dust doesn't sit still on a scale. Since the 1600s, Akan traders in Ghana's Asante kingdom weighed it with small cast weights like this one, an antelope just 2 inches long. The royal court kept elaborate sets. Ordinary traders carried about a dozen each.

This bowl is shaped like a boat. Inside, plovers fly over seaweed in black and gray, pink glaze cracking through. Flip it: birds hunt through grass. No people anywhere. Rusu moyo: absence implied. Seifū Yohei III, Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers, 1893–97. Cleveland Museum of Art.

King Tarquin wanted to expand Rome's cavalry. The augur Attius Navius said he could not do it without favorable omens, so Tarquin decided to test him. The king silently imagined an impossible task, then asked Navius whether it could be done. Navius read the birds and said yes.

On this cup, drinkers cross-dress on purpose: women's cloaks, turbans, earrings, dancing to double pipes. Scholars call these Anakreontic scenes, after the poet Anakreon. Unknown, Attic Red-Figure Cup, about 480 B.C.. J. Paul Getty Museum. Text: J. Paul Getty Museum, CC BY 4.0.

One marble block, four evangelist symbols: man, lion, ox, eagle, cut for a Pisa pulpit. It weighs 133 pounds. Paint still clings to it. Giovanni Pisano, Pilaster (Tetramorph) from the Parapet of a Pulpit with Symbol of the Evangelists, ca. 1302–10. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This chair is held together by nothing. No glue, no nails, no screws. Just wood locked into wood. Made in Jiangsu province sometime between the 1600s and 1700s, out of huanghuali, a rosewood so dense it barely floats in water.

Its eyes are hollow. Its mouth is a gap. No ears, no way to wear it. Jadeite is harder than steel, worked with cord, water, sand, no metal tools. Jade sat 400 miles away, in Guatemala. Nobody knows how it got here. Olmec artist, Face, 900–400 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Mughal nobleman in the 1600s didn't carry a powder horn. He wore one. This one is carved from a single block of white jade, just under 5 inches long, made to hold gunpowder for a matchlock musket. Polished like jewelry first. Weapon second.