The British Museum (London, part 4 of 9)

It occurred to me that I need to hurry up and get London entries out of the way this week before I disappear off to Turkey (assuming Iceland doesn't launch part 2 of its nefarious plot to take over Europe by grounding all air traffic again) and then bury myself into dissertation work. So, here we go.

Ta da! I've said this before, but regardless of how awful colonialism was for the colonized places, having an empire nets one a fantastically awesome national museum. And while the archaeologist in me shudders at the thought of all the sites destroyed by looting so that museums can buy all these fantastic objects off the black market/one of the big auction houses (auction house, black market, same thing really), there's no denying that it is really cool to see so much awesomeness in one very large building. I'd rate the BM up there with the MET in NY, but I'd give the edge to the British Museum for having several really notable objects.

Upon entering, you emerge into this gigantic enclosed court. The biggest in Europe if I'm not mistaken. Exhibits are in galleries arranged to on the sides of the Great Court. The big round thing in the middle is the Reading Room. It used to hold the British Library, but the library moved years ago to its own building to accommodate all of its titles. The reading room holds special exhibits sometimes and still holds reading desks and some books, along with some visitor information materials.

The BM's Egyptian and Greek/Roman collections are first rate, and even if you're one of those people that thinks if you've seen one giant marble sculpture of a naked Greek, you've seen them all, there's still a lot of really interesting things that I guarantee you haven't seen at any other museum.

Second semester freshman year I took an honors (I totally spelled that honours at first and had to go back and change it. The Brits are eating away at my American spellings!) course on Lost Languages and Decipherments. In the honors portion, we were supposed to be learning hieroglyphics. The only thing I retained from that was to just assume the inscription reads "An offering which the King gives to Osiris, Lord of Djedu..." followed by a list of what he's offered, especially if it's a funerary monument of any kind. We translated this doorway as a homework assignment. And yes, that is how the inscription starts.

And here is Ramses II, snagged from Thebes in the early 1800s by Giovanni Belzoni, circus strongman turned antiquities hunter hired by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to organize the removal and transport of the statue back to England. Ramses here was the inspiration for Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" and another poem originally of the same title by Horace Smith.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

—Horace Smith

So there's your English lesson for the day!

I thought these guys were really cool. There's two of them, but I couldn't even get one into a picture because they're so big, but take my word for it. They originally flanked an entrance to the citadel at Dur-Sharrukin, modern day Khorsabad, the Assyrian capital under Sargon II. Confession: all Medieval things all the time kind of makes me miss Mesopotamia. There needs to be peace in the Middle East like now so I can go tour.

I think this was actually my favorite part. This is one side of the Nereid Monument, the tomb of Erbinna, the ruler of Lycian Xanthos (in modern Turkey). I wanted to get the people in for a sense of scale.

Ah, the Parthenon Marbles (also called the Elgin Marbles), one of the BM's biggest draws, and one of its biggest controversies. Greece has been petitioning to get them returned practically since Elgin dragged them off the Parthenon in Athens. To make a long story short, they were acquired by Elgin when he supposedly got permission from the Ottoman Turks, who controlled Greece at the time, to do some digging around the Parthenon and to take away sculpture. But as far as anyone knows, he did not have permission to physically remove sculpture from the building itself, which is exactly what he did. And the whole thing is complicated further because the original "firman" obtained from the Turkish government no longer exists; only an Italian translation survives, and the language of that translation seems to indicate Elgin was little more than an antiquities looter. The British Museum has always maintained that the marbles were acquired legally under the laws of the day and have been _preserved_ at the BM in a way they would not have been had they been left on the Parthenon. You might think that argument has a certain validity to it, until you realize that as part of their "preservation" of the marbles, the BM had them "cleaned" by scraping off the top layers to reveal whiter marble underneath, thus removing any traces of paint (yes, they were likely originally painted with bright colors, just like most Greeco-Roman statuary) and a great degree of the detail in the carving. It's debatable whether or not they would have been better off out in the elements on the Parthenon.

There's a brand new shiny museum in Athens built overlooking the Acropolis and designed to showcase the Parthenon sculptures in as realistic a manner as possible (the top floor of the museum is even oriented & sized like the Parthenon) with lots of glass windows to look out over where the marbles originally came from. While they do hold some of the sculpture, they've long been trying to get the bulk of the marbles back from the BM. I almost started laughing out loud when I read the BM's plaque on the marbles. Apparently Elgin's removal of the sculptures has "long been a matter of discussion" and we should all thank him for "saving" the marbles from pollution and weathering and for bringing them down so they can be put in a museum at eye-level so people can see them better than they could hanging up on the Parthenon. That's funny, because obviously LONDON was MUCH less polluted than Athens in the middle of the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. And clearly a Greek museum couldn't hang them up at eye level. That's just crazy talk. Right. Anyway.

The actual display of the marbles is kind of uninspiring. They've been set up at eye-level around the walls of a big open room and with very little description of what they portray or its significance.

Here's possibly the most discussed scene from the friezes. The frieze has often been interpreted as a depiction of the Panathenaic Procession, the most important festival for Athenians and celebrated Athenia, their patron goddess. As part of this festival, a group of virgins would spend months weaving a giant sacred peplos (a sort of ancient Greek dress) and this peplos would be put on a statue of Athena as part of the ritual. This scene is taken to be one of the virginal weavers presenting the peplos to a priest of some kind before it is to be given to Athena. 

The metopes showcase something a bit different- lots of fighting. Humans versus monsters, gods versus monsters, etc. Here a man dukes it out with a centaur.

Another big draw for the BM is the Rosetta Stone. Sorry the picture's only so-so; between the reflective glass and the hoards of people swarming around it trying to take pictures and flashes going off everywhere, it's hard to get a good shot in. The Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs- it contains 3 versions of the same text in Greek, hieroglyphs, and a simplified Egyptian script called Demotic.

And here's Mithras slaughtering the bull. The cult of Mithras was big with the Roman army, so his iconography and "temples" for lack of a better word can be found throughout Europe- pretty much everywhere the army went, so did devotion to Mithras. I've always found his cult interesting because it combines elements and symbols from a number of different god-stories into one somewhat mysterious cult.

This is the helmet from one of the ship burials at Sutton Hoo. Cool cool stuff there. I like that it has eyebrows! Sutton Hoo was the site of a couple of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and included a giant giant ship burial thought to be one of the Anglo-Saxon kings from early medieval England as well as several smaller ship & non-ship burials for other important people.

And I couldn't not sneak in Franks Casket. This little whalebone box has been perplexing people _forever_. An interpretation gaining ground is that it was a riddle box. Each side is carved with a scene and inscriptions in runes and Latin show up on various sides of the box. Each scene is thought to provide a clue of some sort and when combined with each other reveal some sort of secret. The scenes themselves come from Christian traditions, Germanic legend, Roman history and Roman mythology. The combination of languages and iconography makes for one very confusing little box.

So there you have it! The really brief highlights tour of the British Museum. Go there and spend at least an afternoon. It is well worth it. (And admission is free! Always a plus.)