The British Museum is one of the world's largest museums dedicated to human history and culture. Its collection of roughly 13 million objects, mostly antiquities, was largely acquired during the peak years of the British Empire, and is extraordinarily comprehensive. When it was founded in 1753, it was envisioned as a repository for more universal subject matter, including literature and natural history, and was opened in a former mansion, a 17th Century building called Montagu House. While Montagu House was large for a house, it didn't take long for it to be overwhelmed by the growth of the museum's collections. Plans for additional space were begun in 1802, but when George IV donated the 65,000-volume King's Library in 1822, it became clear that an expansion was urgently needed. The architect Robert Smirke had been invited to come up with a redesign for the museum in 1820, and his design was put into action starting in 1823. The plan was ambitious and expensive, and was implemented in phases which did not complete until 1846. The first phase was an eastern wing for accommodation of the Library, quickly followed by a western wing, to be used for Egyptian antiquities.

The original plan called for a large rectangular neo-classical building, with a grand courtyard in the middle. The courtyard was soon judged to be wasted space, so most of it was filled with a structure for storage of books and manuscripts, with a large, circular reading room in the center.

As you might expect, this "museum of everything" was pretty unwieldy, and big parts of it eventually ended up as museums of their own. Space for a proposed gallery of paintings was in fact never used for this purpose, as the separate National Gallery was founded in 1824, which made this space available for other things (natural history collections, at first). Then in 1881, a building in South Kensington was completed to house the Natural History collection (this was still considered part of the British Museum until 1962, when it became its own thing). And finally, the British Library was created by Parliament in 1973 to house all the publications, though an actual building for this purpose (in the St. Pancras area) was not completed until 1997. This left the British Museum as a much more specialized institution - but it's still really full of stuff, as you'll see.

The British Museum was actually within an easy walk of our hotel. To get in, we had to go through a checkpoint, but after that we were able to go right in. Admission was free, and photography without flash was OK. The center of things is the Great Court, which was opened up again after all the books were removed. The Reading Room remains as a large cylindrical building which is now used for temporary exhibitions (our visit was between exhibitions). The rest of the Great Court is again open space, but there's now a glass roof covering the whole thing.

The courtyard is a space from which visitors can quickly get to any part of the museum. We chose to first head for the western part of the museum, which turned out to have ancient Egyptian displays. The first display we saw on the way in was the Rosetta Stone. Yes, the actual Rosetta Stone. The stone dates back to 196 B.C., and was found in 1799 by a French soldier during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, near the town of Rosetta (or Rashid), in the Nile delta. The British defeated the French in this campaign, in 1801, and took the stone from them. The stone displays the text of a Ptolemaic decree in three different written languages: hieroglyphics, Demotic script (a character-based version of Egyptian) and Greek. As of 1799, nobody had been able to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, but Greek was well-known. The stone gave researchers a previously-unknown way to understand the inscriptions with which ancient Egyptian tombs, temples and artifacts were covered, and opened up a whole new understanding of ancient Egypt.

Just past the Rosetta Stone was a large room with displays of Egyptian sculpture.

The British Museum has a large collection of Egyptian artifacts, in fact the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world, except for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (currently in the process of transitioning to the new Grand Egyptian Museum, across the river in Giza). In order to impose some order on the following pictures, I'll present them roughly chronologically, divided by recognized periods of Egyptian history. Since Egyptian history goes back more than 5,000 years, it has a lot of recognized periods. A few whose names you might recognize are the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms (the terms are relative - the "New Kingdom" ended more than 3,000 years ago). But there is also a period before the Old Kingdom, "intermediate periods" between the kingdoms and several periods more recent than the New Kingdom. Fortunately our pictures are from only a few of these periods, so this shouldn't be too complicated.

First, here's our only picture of a Middle Kingdom artifact. The Middle Kingdom lasted from 2055 through 1650 B.C. It's not clear exactly where in Egypt this boat model came from (it was purchased from a private collection), but it's typical of objects which were encased in tombs along with the deceased.

This next group of photos is of objects from the New Kingdom, which lasted from 1550 through 1069 B.C. (there was a 100-year Intermediate Period between the Middle and New Kingdoms). This was the period of the most famous pharaohs (Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Ramesses II, Tutankhamun) and many famous tombs and monuments. The beard of the Sphinx was likely an add-on by Thutmose IV (the Sphinx is much older, dating back to the Old Kingdom) that fell off at some point. The New Kingdom is also when the Book of the Dead came into use. There were many versions of the Book of the Dead, which were buried with the deceased and contained information and magic spells to assist them in the underworld.





After the New Kingdom, there was a 400-year intermediate period that lasted until 664 B.C. You'd think a period lasting 400 years would rate a better name than "intermediate", but I'm not an Egyptologist. Anyway, here are a couple of items from the Third Intermediate Period:

This gave way to the Late Period, which lasted until 332 B.C.:

The last period represented in our pictures began with the reign of Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. After Alexander died in Babylon in 323 B.C., his empire started to crumble, and there were disputes over succession in various parts of it, including Egypt. Relatives and friends of Alexander were involved in the Egypt dispute, and the eventual victor was Alexander's friend Ptolemy, who took the title of Pharaoh Ptolemy I. This began the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which would continue until 30 B.C., at which time it would end with the death of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII. This whole period is called the Ptolemaic Kingdom, and here's a picture of a giant bug from this period:

One last picture of Egyptian artifacts shows shabtis from various periods. Shabtis were small figures that were commonly placed in tombs, beginning way back during the Old Kingdom, that were expected to become animated and perform manual labor when the deceased needed them.

Moving on from Egypt, we found rooms of artifacts from ancient Britain and Ireland. One such artifact was a Bronze Age gold cape, which was thoroughly restored by the museum after it was found in Wales in 1833:

Here are more artifacts, some of which go back to Roman days:


There were also some decorative objects from the 18th Century, which seemed as though they would be more at home in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But they were in the British Museum instead, and here are a few of them:


There were also some religious objects from continental Europe, and here are a few of those:


Moving back to the first millennium B.C., here are some objects from Assyria, which was located in present-day Iraq:



From here we moved through some rooms with objects found in modern-day Turkey. First, we found a room holding a reconstructed Nereid Monument from the city of Xanthos. Nereids are sea nymph daughters of the god Nereus, and the construction of the Nereid statues reflects a strong Greek influence (and may have been done by Greek sculptors). The monument was built by the Lykian people, members of a civilization that was virtually unknown until these artifacts were discovered between 1838 and 1844.

Next we found a room with some remains from one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. The Mausoleum was built around 350 B.C. as a tomb for Maussollos, governor of Karia in southwest Asia Minor, which was then part of the Persian Empire. When intact, the Mausoleum was 140 feet high and had a pyramid-shaped roof with a four-horse chariot group (or quadriga) at the top. There was a frieze running around the base depicting a battle between Greeks and Amazons.


The museum also has artifacts from other parts of Asia Minor, from around the same period:

We didn't see too much in the way of Roman artifacts, but we did see this interesting 4th Century drinking vessel, known as the Lycurgus Cup. This is a cup known as a "cage cup", which means that it started as a plain glass cup, but its surface was ground back selectively to leave a surface-level design. In this case, the design depicts the mythical King Lycurgus being ensnared by a vine into which a follower of Dionysus had been transformed (the unfortunate king did not survive the encounter). A couple of things set this cup apart from other cage cups. First, most cage cups were decorated with geometric designs, and this is the best-preserved cage cup known to exist which depicts actual figures. Second, the cup is made of something called "dichroic glass", which appears green when lit from the front, but red when light is shown through it.

This brought us to what is possibly the most famous of the museum's possessions and almost certainly its most controversial, this being the Parthenon Marbles, otherwise known as the Elgin Marbles. The Parthenon, of course, is the large temple to Athena which is found on top of a hill called the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. The Parthenon was built from 447-432 B.C. at the direction of Pericles, the great general and ruler of Athens. There was plenty of space for a temple, as the Persians under Xerxes I had sacked the city and destroyed everything on top of the Acropolis in 480 B.C.

The Parthenon is 228 feet long, 101 feet wide and 45 feet tall, thus presenting a lot of surface area for decoration. And the best sculptors in Athens decorated with great energy. The decorations were of three different types. First, sculptures were created for the pediments, the triangular areas at the top of each end of the temple. Second, sculpted panels called metopes were lined up just under the edge of the roof, with 92 metopes stretching all the way around the temple. And third, there was a frieze which extended around the cella, which was a smaller structure (98 feet by 68 feet) located within the temple.

Over the centuries, the Parthenon became a Christian church, and later, after the conquest of Greece by the Ottoman Turks, the Parthenon became a mosque. In 1687, the Turks were using the Acropolis as a defensive fortification during a war against the Venetian Republic, and they used the Parthenon as a powder magazine. A Venetian artillery round struck the magazine and ignited a blast that killed 300 people, while causing catastrophic damage to the Parthenon. The central part of the building was essentially destroyed, with the loss of the roof and the collapse of three of the four walls of the cella. Venetian soldiers looted some of the sculptures, and over the following century, many additional pieces of the structure were looted by locals for building material.

In 1801, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and British Ambassador to the Sultan of Turkey undertook the task of making drawings and plaster casts of the surviving sculptural elements found on the Acropolis. Later that year, he started removing sculptural elements from the Parthenon wreckage and from other structures on the hill and sending them back to England. By the time he finished, in 1812, he had taken more than half of the surviving structural elements from the Parthenon, including 21 figures from the pediments, 15 metope panels and nearly 250 feet of the cella frieze. In 1816, Lord Elgin ended up selling the marbles to the British government, for about half of what he'd spent to acquire them.

In 1832, Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire and started tracking down antiquities that had been looted and dispersed to various other countries around the world. High on their list were the Elgin Marbles, by this time on display at the British Museum. But the British Museum refused to return the marbles, maintaining that they'd been legitimately acquired, and that they were now an integral part of the museum's collection. They said that the Sultan at the time, Selim III, had been grateful for Britain's opposition to the expansionist activities of Napoleon, and that the marbles weren't of any particular value to him, so he'd signed a decree giving Lord Elgin permission to remove whatever material he wished. But no such decree has ever been found, which is suspicious, considering the Turks were normally meticulous record-keepers.

And this is pretty much how things stand to the present day. The Greeks would very much like to have the marbles back, and even have spaces reserved for them in their recently-built, state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum. The British Museum insists that they (or their distant predecessors, to be more precise) behaved honorably throughout the acquisition of the marbles and the dispute over them, and that if they started returning items in their collection to their countries of origin, they would soon have no collection left. So the Parthenon Marbles continue to reside at the British Museum, in a room called the Duveen Gallery, which was specifically built for them in the 1930's. Here's the gallery, and figures from the Parthenon pediments:



All of the recovered metopes appear to have come from the south side of the temple, and they all depict a battle between Lapiths (a legendary tribe from Thessaly) and centaurs.


The surviving frieze sections depict a thanksgiving procession following a successful battle.

This seemed like a good time to move on to another part of the world, like all the way to the South Pacific and Easter Island.

Well, maybe not that far. Maybe just to Asia, and Burma (present-day Myanmar):

Here are some ceramic figures from different eras of Chinese history:


Here's a sculpture from early 19th Century Tibet:

Moving over to Japan, here's a wooden sculpture of Monju Bosatsu. But it's possible that you don't know who Monju Bosatsu is. I have to admit I had to look this up. Sources tell me that Monju Bosatsu is a Bodhisattva. This didn't really clear things up for me, but it turns out that a Bodhisattva is an enlightened Buddhist being that goes around between rebirth cycles helping people. Monju Bosatsu embodies the Buddha's wisdom, and has a flaming sword that cuts through ignorance. He also rides on a lion that roars with the sound of Buddhist law. Not to upset any Buddhists out there, but Monju Bosatsu sounds a little on the cartoony side. Not that that's necessarily uncool...

Moving back to India, here are a couple of items from the museum's Indian collection. FYI, Shiva and Parvati are Hindu deities that are married to each other.

From the Asian displays, we walked across the central courtyard of the museum to the Enlightenment Gallery. This is in the east wing of the building and is its oldest room, with a room number of 1. It was originally designed to hold the Library of George III, which stayed here (with a couple of temporary moves during the world wars for its protection) until it was moved to the new British Library in 1997. The room is now devoted to the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason), which lasted roughly from 1680 until 1820, when people were energetically trying to figure out the world around them, in the process collecting numerous natural and archaeological specimens and writing scholarly books about them or speculating about them. A number of these objects are on display, along with very brief or frequently nonexistent descriptions.

Adjacent to the Enlightenment Gallery, also in the east wing, is a room in which the Waddesdon Bequest is displayed. This collection was bequeathed to the museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild in 1898, and consists of objects he'd kept in his Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire. There is an impressive amount of metal and ceramic work in the collection.




We finally finished with the British Museum, and though there was still much of interest in London that we hadn't seen, we'd about finished with the city also, as we needed to prepare for travel the next day. We would be flying from a capital city in western Europe, where we were (mostly) familiar with the language, to another capital city, but in eastern Europe, where the language would be quite difficult. We would be embarking on an adventure to the city of Prague.