British Museum

Yesterday (Saturday) we decided to go to London. We debated which of many things to visit, and decided on the British Museum. The train ride to Paddington Station took about an hour, followed by a few stops of the tube, one stop at Starbucks, and then to the Museum. We mentioned before when we visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that, while we appreciate antiquities such as Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artwork, we don’t usually head to that section of the museum first. We know that there are people who love these ancient cultures—we had lunch today with Naomi Koltun-Fromm for example, and this is her field of study—but generally speaking, when we go to a museum, we prefer European art. But we can confidently recommend that if you ever get a chance, you should definitely plan to go to the British Museum. Plan at least one long day. (The museum is free, too.) About two hours into our visit, Deb said to Phil, “You’ll have to be the one to write this blog”. There is no way to describe this in a few words, but I will do my best. It is genuinely astonishing.

The Museum is huge, and the ground floor is basically laid out chronologically—first the Egyptians, then the Assyrians, followed by the Greeks and then the Romans. The first exhibit you see in the first room is the Rosetta Stone—not a copy, but the original stone tablet unearthed by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt that allowed people to translate hieroglyphics and opened the door for studying ancient cultures. The objects here were collected, purchased, or “acquired” (OK—looted) by archeologists, diplomats, and adventurers over the past three centuries. Many of the statues and monuments are enormous, towering high above our heads, and the number and size are overwhelming. We still have no idea which Pharaoh’s dynasty was which, but we have a tremendous new appreciation for ancient Egypt.

Head of Ramesses II circa 1270 bc

And then you go into the second of rooms—still on the ground floor of a building with six more floors. These are the Assyrian exhibits. From our Bible lessons, we knew that the Assyrians were the people who conquered Israel in about 700 BC—Ninevah, of Jonah and the great fish fame, was their capital city. But we knew little else about this culture. And right there in front of us were the gates of the palace for Sennacherib, the king who conquered Israel. The lions flanking the gates were massive, and the gates themselves were at least 35 feet tall.



The more we read and observed, the more we realized that Ninevah was a beautiful and impressive city, and that the culture flourished for hundreds of years before dying out. Then it was on to the Greek rooms, and here were sculptures and walls from the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens. These were sent back to England by Lord Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (which then included Greece) in about 1800, so these have become known as the Elgin marbles. (Insert your own joke here about losing your marbles.)

And on and on. We can’t possibly begin to describe the exhibits, room after room, object after impressive object. We saw dozens of mummies, objects from Captain Cook’s voyages, from the HMS Bounty (from the famous mutiny), from the ancient peoples of Europe. We learned more about the history of Europe in an hour at the museum that we could have learned in any number of hours of lectures in a classroom, and in a more interesting way. We saw a burial ship from Sutton Hoo in eastern England, dating to Saxon times or about 650 AD. (It was the Saxon equivalent of the guys who are buried in their favorite Cadillacs—some traditions are older than you think). We saw artifacts of the Vikings, the Celts, the Huns, the Mayans, the Incans, and even from post WWII America. The guidebook offers 15 different museum tours, based on different themes. We did most of two of them, with a few side trips. We saw more than our brains could hold, and we saw only a fraction of what was there. You really need to go yourself.

Naomi and Phil lunching at Kings Arms Pub