Simply put, this is the greatest chronicle of civilization… anywhere. A visit here is like taking a long hike through Encyclopedia Britannica National Park. The vast British Museum wraps around it’s great court (the huge entrance hall where you see Jackie above), with the most popular sections filling the ground floor: Egyptian, Assyrian, and ancient Greek, with the famous frieze sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens.
The Museum’s stately Reading Room – famous as the place where Karl Marx hung out while formulating his ideas on communism and writing Das Kapital – sometimes hosts special exhibits.
From the Great Court, doorways lead to all wings. We started with the Egyptian Gallery. Egypt was one of the world’s first “civilizations” – a group of people with a government, religion, art, free time, and a written language. The Egypt we think of – pyramids, mummies, pharaohs, and guys who talk funny – lasted from 3000 to 1000 BC with hardly any change in the government, religion, or arts.
The first things you’ll see in the Egypt section is the Rosetta Stone. When this rock was unearthed in the Egyptian desert in 1799, it was a sensation in Europe. This black slab, dating from 196 BC, caused a quantum leap in the study of ancient history. Finally, Egyptian writing could be decoded.
The hieroglyphic writing on the upper part of the stone was indecipherable for a thousand years. Did a picture of a bird mean “bird”? Or was it a sound, forming part of a larger word, like “burden”? As it turned out, hieroglyphics are a complex combination of the two, surprisingly more phonetic than symbolic. (For example, the hieroglyph that looks like a mouth or an eye is the letter “R”.)
The Rosetta Stone allowed linguists to break the code. It contains a single inscription repeated in three languages. The bottom third is plain old Greek, while the middle is medieval Egyptian. By comparing the two known languages with the one they didn’t know, translators figured out the hieroglyphics.
Next, we wandered past many statues, including a seven-ton Ramesses, with the traditional features of a pharaoh (goatee, cloth headdress, and cobra diadem on his forehead). When Moses told the king of Egypt, “Let my people go!” this was the stony-faced look he got.
We also saw the Egyptian gods as animals, these include Amun, king of the gods, as a ram, and Horus, the god of the living, as a falcon.
At the end of the hall, we climbed the stairs to mummy land. Mummifying a body is much like following a recipe.
First, disembowel it (but leave the heart inside), then back the cavities with pitch, and try it with natron, a natural form of sodium carbonate (and, perhaps, the active ingredient in Twinkies). Then carefully bandage it head to toe with hundreds of yards of linen strips.
Let it sit 2,000 years, and… voila’! The mummy was placed into a wooden coffin, which was put in a stone coffin, which was placed in a tomb. (The pyramids were supersized tombs for the rich and famous.) The results is that we now have Egyptian bodies that are as well preserved as Larry King. 🙂
Many of the mummies here are from the time of the Roman occupation, when fine memorial portraits painted in wax became popular. X-ray photos in the display cases tell us more about these people.
Don’t miss the animal mummies. Cats were popular pets. They were also considered incarnations of the cat-headed goddess Bastet. Worshipped in life as the sun god’s allies, preserved in death, and memorialized with statues, cats were given the adulation they’ve come to expect ever since.
Long before Saddam Hussein, Iraq was home to other palace-building, iron-fisted rulers – the Assyrians. They conquered their southern neighbors and dominated the Middle East for 300 years (c. 900-600 BC).
Their strength came from a superb army (chariots, mounted cavalry, and siege engines), a policy of terrorism against enemies (“I tied their heads to tree trunks all around the city,” reads a royal inscription), ethnic cleansing and mass deportations of the vanquished, and efficient administration (roads and express postal services. They have been called the “Romans of the East.”
The British Museum’s valuable collection of Assyrian artifacts has become even more priceless since the recent destruction of ancient sites in the Middle East by ISIS terrorists.
Two human-headed winged stone lions guarded an Assyrian palace (11th-8th century BC). With the strength of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the brain of a man, and the beard of an ancient hipster, they protected the king from evil spirits and scared the heck out of foreign ambassadors and left-wing newspaper reporters.
What has five legs and flies? Take a close look. These winged quintupeds, which appear complete from both the front and the side, could guard both directions at once.
Carved into the stone between the bearded lions’ loins, you can see one of civilization’s most impressive achievements – writing. This wedge-shaped (cuneiform) script is the world’s first written language, invented 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians (of southern Iraq) and passed down to their less-civilized descendants, the Assyrians.
The Nimrud Gallery is a mini version of the throne room and royal apartments of King Ashurnasirpal II’s Northwest Palace at Nimrud (9th century BC). It’s filled with royal propaganda reliefs, 30-ton marble bulls, and panels depicting wounded lions (lion-hunting was Assyria’s sport of kings.)
The history of ancient Greece (600 BC-AD 1) could be subtitled “making order out of chaos.” While Assyria was dominating the Middle East, “Greece” – a gaggle of warring tribes roaming the Greek peninsula – was floundering in darkness. But by about 700 BC, these tribes began settling down, experimenting with democracy, forming city-governing city-states, and making ties with other city-states.
During its Golden Age (500-430 BC, Greece set the tone for all of Western civilization to follow. Democracy, theater, literature, mathematics, philosophy, science, gyros, art, and architecture as we know them, were virtually all invented by a single generation of Greeks in a small town of maybe 80,000 citizens.
Our walk through Greek history starts with pottery – from the earliest, with geometric patterns (8th century BC), to painted black silhouettes on the natural orange clay, and then a few crudely done red human figures on black backgrounds.
The highlight is the Parthenon Sculptures – taken from the temple dedicated to Athena, the crowning glory of an enormous urban-renewal plan during Greece’s Golden Age.
While the building itself remains in Athens, many of the Parthenon’s best sculptures are right here in the British Museum – the so-called Elgin Marbles.
They were named for the shrewd British ambassador who had his men hammer, chisel, and saw them off the Parthenon in the early 1800s.
These much-wrangled-over bits of the Parthenon (from abouts 450 BC) are indeed impressive.
The marble panels you see lining the walls of this large hall are part of the frieze that originally ran around the exterior of the Parthenon, under the eaves.
The statues at either end of the hall once filled the Parthenon’s triangular-shaped pediments and showed the birth of Athena.
The relief panels known as metopes tell the story of the struggle between the forces of human civilization and animal-like barbarism.
I am a big-time nerd… Jackie not as much. But both of us were blown away by this incredible Museum. A delightful wander. We also visited the Stonehenge exhibit. But that’s for the next post… 🙂