We construct a period regulator for motivic cohomology of an algebraic scheme over a subfield of the complex numbers. For the field of algebraic numbers we formulate a period conjecture for motivic cohomology by saying that this period regulator is surjective. Showing that a suitable Betti--de Rham realization of 1-motives is fully faithful we can verify this period conjecture in several cases. The divisibility properties of motivic cohomology imply that our conjecture is a neat generalization of the classical Grothendieck period conjecture for algebraic cycles on smooth and proper schemes. These divisibility properties are treated in an appendix by B. Kahn (extending previous work of Bloch and Colliot-Thel`ene--Raskind).
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