Preface: How culture works -- Introduction: Inside the Chauvet Cave, 35,000 BCE -- Queen Nefertiti and her faceless god -- Plato burns his tragedy and invents a history -- King Ashoka sends a message to the future -- A south Asian goddess in Pompeii -- A Buddhist pilgrim in search of ancient traces -- The Pillow Book and some perils of cultural diplomacy -- When Baghdad became a storehouse of wisdom -- The Queen of Ethiopia welcomes the raiders of the ark -- One Christian mystic and the three revivals of Europe -- The Aztec capital faces its European enemies and admirers -- A Portuguese sailor writes a global epic -- Enlightenment in Saint-Domingue and in a Parisian salon -- George Eliot promotes the science of the past -- A Japanese wave takes the world by storm -- The drama of Nigerian independence -- Epilogue: Will there be a library in 2114 CE?