Here are the remains of a child, from the Hawara cemetery, North Africa. It was mummified in Roman times, eighteen hundred years ago. It is a small, human capsule of a kind of sorrow that is still potent after all those years: parents burying their young. Some things will never change, after all.

An airplane takes you across the world to see how others live. A museum tunnels you down the corridors of time. From gallery to gallery, you exchange theatres of prehistory. And they make you think.

Here is a hoard of 'silver' coins, 4,957 in all. It comes to us from Roman times. (They are apparently not that rare, these Roman hoards, over 1,200 hoards found so far in Britain alone... and one massive hoard alone contained over 50,000 coins.) Brian Malin found the pictured hoard in an Oxfordshire field; it had lain there some eighteen hundred years. And it makes you wonder at the story behind this hoard.

Was this an offering to a god in whose realm the lumps of metal had no currency? Was this embezzled tax? -- the blood and sweat of scores of serfs, misappropriated by an early kleptocrat? Was this a quartermaster's safe deposit? -- did his sudden death deny a Roman garrison their weekly wage? Or was this a private store of wealth in an era before the high street bank -- hastily stashed away from bandits before a fatal raid? For what purpose was this hoard stockpiled, before mortality separated its owner from his plans?

And then again, we wonder: what were these coins worth, two millennia ago? How many villages would an army have overrun on these wages? In the hands of civil society, how many man-hours could these coins have bought? How many houses built? Or farmyards ploughed? How many children could they have fed and rescued from an early grave? – And what difference could a single child who grows to adulthood have made to the cause of the human race? Could her descendants have founded a city in eighteen hundred years? Or perhaps established another quaint village in the valley of the Thames, or the Nile, with her descendants sown across the world from Fiji to Canada, still writing the on-going history of the human race?

Perhaps she was doomed to die young anyway, this mummified child, her barren, premature womb swathed in the bandages of an untimely death. You figure. For there in the Ashmolean lies the entire hoard: barren coins coalesced in an earthen jug. Makes you think, doesn't it, that nothing much has changed. (It is still a toss up between the quartermaster and the NHS, between the Ministry of Defence and food. Do we build smarter bombs at a million pounds a puff, or do we succour the hungry and the sick?)

The very night you read these words, thousands like you and I will go to sleep with our modest hoards of gold and shares stashed away in high street vaults. The very night you read these words, thousands of children will die of want. Excess wealth and desperate need still rarely meet on Earth. This remains the nature of things. And every morn that dawns upon this planet, executors will open the vaults of yet another deceased millionaire, or billionaire, to break up yet another modern hoard, much like curators attending the scene of yet another Roman hoard. A museum certainly makes you think, and that's a fact.

Chuma Nwokolo, Jr. 18th July, 2005 email

A Literary Evening at the Ashmolean Museum. 5.30pm, 4/11/2005;
You are invited to an evening with Chuma and friends as they read poetry and sundry pieces inspired by the museum's collections. Email now to book your place.