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It's such a nice round number that 100 has become a measure and milestone for all sorts, from cricket scores to years. It has a certain neatness, but also a significance: it sounds like a lot - 100 birthdays to get a telegram from the queen, 100 men to make up a decent Roman troop.

But when it comes to 100 objects from the British Museum collection, to tell a history of the world, we're not talking a big number. We're talking the tough task of selecting a fraction of the cared for here.

As we get ready to air the next set of programmes - kicking off on May 17 with a Coin bearing the head of Alexander the Great - I thought I'd ask the curatorial team behind the series how they did it.

Barrie Cook, curator in our Coins and Medals department, and one of the brains responsible for A History of the World, told me how it all started:

There were, first of all, the two 'silent' filters: what happens to have survived and what the British Museum has happened to acquire. Then there came the positive criteria, which is where the vision for the series started to form.

We wanted to cover as much of the world as possible, to represent all humanly-inhabited regions across time. We also wanted to cover as full a range of material as possible - stone, ceramic, metal, glass, textile, feathers, wood and so on - and we wanted to represent the great cultures of the world, especially the less familiar ones, such as the Moche of Peru, the Silla period in Korea, the Timurid Empire of central Asia.

Choosing 100 objects to do that (although the hundredth is of course yet to be chosen) took more than two years. A crack team spent hundreds of hours researching, debating and analysing objects to use from across all the Museum's departments.

So what did they choose and why?

With only 100 available slots, some well known parts of the Museum collection could only be represented by a limited number of objects - some listeners might be surprised that there are relatively few Roman or Ancient Egyptian objects for example. There are also some very famous objects in the Museum that haven't been included. Barrie explains:

They had to be things that manifested something important about their societies, things that had a role and use, not ones that just illustrated great events or people - we weren't trying to offer a history of art or decoration, but - to the extent we can - a history of how objects contribute to their societies, indeed how objects make societies work.

In some cases we still don't really know what an object was for exactly - the Mold Cape, the Standard of Ur - but we can grope towards an answer and in doing so illuminate the world it came from.

As Neil MacGregor points out on these very pages, the 100 objects were chosen "because of the stories they can tell" - not just because they're beautiful, famous, or impressive. So, broken bits of crockery have just as much to say as an ornate, richly-decorated work of art.

In the objects they chose, Barrie and the team tell one history of the world - taking in two million years and five continents - but there are, of course, many different ways to do that and they could probably start all over again with a whole new set and tell it in a completely different way.

I don't suppose they have another two years or so spare to do that, but the good news is that right here you can help us tell as many different histories of the world as you like - just add your objects to the website and create your own.

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