MUMBAI, Dec. 13 -- In an ambitious exercise that was four years in the making, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya (CSMVS), formerly the Prince of Wales Museum, will house historical objects that date back several thousand years -- from bronze statues of 14th century BCE China to gold ornaments from Aleppo, Syria, from 100 BCE and the late Harappan period Muzzafarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, to sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome, as part of an exhibition that aims to showcase India's place in ancient world civilisations. Beginning today, visitors to the museum will also get to see world-famous artefacts that they may have only ever caught an image of over their social media feeds or in their school history books, such as the cat mummy from 1st Century Roman-ruled Egypt, the terracotta bull from Mohenjo-daro in present-day Pakistan (26th and 19th Century BCE), a bust of Ptolemy II, the Greek king of Egypt who reigned from 286 to 246 BCE and even a replica of the El Rashid, more popular as the Rosetta Stone, from 196 BCE Egypt. However, the bulk of the artefacts attest to the everyday lives of people who lived across these geographical and durational spans. The exhibition titled Networks of the Past: A Study Gallery of India and the Ancient World, trains its lens to the duration between the Harappan civilisation - which began roughly 5000 years ago - and the Gupta Empire in the 6th century CE. That's a large swathe of time to cover, and indeed, through objects loaned from 15 museums and institutions (both in India and other countries) - as well as the CSMVS's own collection - the exhibition presents a thematic overview of our ancient roots: starting off as agrarian societies to living in the first cities, inventing writing and documentation, building trade networks that helped us exchange much more than goods, and the eventual rise of empires. Over 300 objects from the river civilisations of Harappa-Mohenjodaro, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome and China, as well as from Persia and Greece form part of the exhibition, and will remain in the newly-opened gallery for three years. Some of the most interesting and eye-catching pieces in the exhibition include pieces of jewellery that range from a Gold and Carnelian bracelet from Iran (600-300 BCE) and a set of earrings with Rosettes from Aleppo, Syria (100 BCE to 100 CE) to a Gold and Garnet earring from Turkiye (200-300 BCE) and even a Hair Ornament from Elephanta Island off the coast of Maharashtra (400-500 CE), among others. Other than the continuity in designs - and taste - jewellery can offer a clear indicator of trade between civilizations, and the presence of wealthy buyers even back then. "Ancient jewels are the clearest proof of how closely India, the Near East and the Mediterranean World were connected. Carnelian and garnets travelled out of India, while filigree and granulation moved east from Greece; emeralds mined in Egypt journeyed to India through the Roman trade," said Usha Balakrishnan, jewel historian and author of Silver & Gold: Visions of Arcadia. The exhibition, said Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director, CSMVS, was a departure from familiar curatorial and academic emphasis on Western narratives of the ancient world that centre the Mediterranean. "In this exercise, our curators led the conversation with curators of museums around the world. We wanted to showcase India's role in global currents; its centrality even in our ancient world." The exhibition was funded largely by the Getty's Sharing Collections in India programme, through which the CSMVS has conducted two previous exhibitions. In 2017-18, it presented India and the World: A History in Nine Stories, in collaboration with The British Museum, and in 2023-24, it presented Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome in partnership with the British Museum and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, as well as other Indian museums. This time around, new partners include the Museum Rietberg of Zurich and the Benaki Museum in Athens, as well as other institutions like the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, and the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens. National organisations and museums that have collaborated with the CSMVS to mount this exhibition include the Archaeological Survey of India, the National Museum in New Delhi, the Indian Museum in Kolkata, the Bihar Museum, the Allahabad Museum, and the Government Museums of Lucknow and Mathura. The governments of Maharashtra as well as the Central ministry of Culture have also helped facilitate lending of objects for this exhibition. Manjiri Kamat, a professor at the History department in the University of Mumbai, and a member of the board of trustees at the museum said that the new National Education Policy emphasises experiential learning, and to that end, the museum's educational outreach towards university students and faculty members is a step in ensuring this. It has partnered with the Cambridge Global Humanities Project at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge to develop a University Academic Programme which will be attended by over 20 Indian university faculties and their students. "These are objects from the ancient civilizations, which we will be able to see directly, and not mediated by any expert. That's a very significant way to connect with people from so many ages ago and really see the continuity and links between different civilisations," Kamat said. "We have the evidence, and they have the books. When we show and teach, it becomes much easier to convey the lesson. Recently, I was at one of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campuses, and I asked a simple question: When did the art of writing start in India? There was pin drop silence. [As this museum show will reveal] It started here, in the Indus Valley-Harappan civilisation - they recorded everything faithfully. It's a different matter that we still haven't decoded their script. So when you say, we are civilised because we are literate, this exhibit indicates that our ancestors were highly civilised, and yet, very few people know about this part of our history, and other great river civilisations like Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, China," Mukherjee said. "This exhibition shows us the power of the object," he added....