A great warrior-king fashioned this pot. He formed it himself from the mud of the river bank where he won his greatest victory four thousand years ago. The carvings in the pot, admittedly biased in the victors’ favor, attested to the great battle.

Some unwitting merchant, name lost to time, carted this pot several thousand miles along the Silk Road several decades later, a spoil of war. Some dude from Iran ended up with it.

An Arab used the pot to hide his money in, burying it near an irrigation ditch. A nameless Mongol unearthed it during the sack of Baghdad and carried it off to the Khan.

A little while later the pot ended up in Mozambique, having come to the Swahili by way of India. It worked its way up the interior until it hit Ethiopia, where it languished until someone from Italy decided it would nicely top off his collection.

And then a bomb struck the building it was in and knocked it off the shelf.

That pot. That simple, silent pot. That little pot that had seen so much. It is a pot no more.