British Museum, catching up and London weather

Day 15, Saturday 25 August

The British Museum

The current motto for the Museum is ‘A museum of the world, for the world’ but some would argue that it is a collection of spoils from the period of British colonisation and exploitation. It is a collection which attracts a lot of visitors and while every effort is made to justify the moving of relics to the museum it is hard at times to accept the damage to sites that must have resulted from the collecting.

We rocked up for opening at 10am and already there were crowds at the popular exhibits. Most people were fine with sharing space and looking at things but some of the tour groups get very annoying with their rush to photograph anything the tour guide says is important and rush off to the next important thing. We had decided we wanted to see the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon statuary and the special horse exhibition and anything else would be a bonus. There is so much to see here that you could spend days and not see all the displays.

The Rosetta Stone

The English did not need to rip the Rosetta Stone off a temple, they managed to get it as some compo from the defeat of Napoleon, whose troops had found it. It is one of the most visited exhibits at the museum and it is an impressive bit of stone. Finely carved it is very easy to see the two Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and the classical Greek. It was the key to unlocking the mysteries of hieroglyphics.

The Rosetta stone

Parthenon Sculptures

The English would say that Lord Elgin did the Greeks a great favour in convincing the Ottoman rulers of Greece at the time to let him remove a lot of the statuary from the Parthenon and move it to England. He didn't move a little bit, he moved most of it. The extent of the collection in the museum is staggering. Our guess is that today on our visit to the British Museum we saw more of the Parthenon statuary than we are ever likely to see in Greece.

The room holding the material from the Parthenon

The exhibition provides a lot of information and uses multimedia to reconstruct some of the friezes from drawings and pieces that are in other museums which gives you a good idea of how impressive the original Parthenon must have been. The figures in most of the full relief statuary in the museum are  already headless because they had already been trophied by earlier invaders.

It is easy to understand why the Greek government wants their treasures returned but it is difficult to see that the Brits will every want to give it back.

Two statues from the East pediment, minus heads of course because they were the easy bits for earlier souvenir hunters to break off rather than taking the whole figure that was going to weight a few tonnes.

One of the metopes from the outside of the Parthenon that is in better condition. In this one a centaur tramples a falling lapith. Tough buggers those centaurs.

A section of frieze from the inner wall that has also survived well. More horsemen riding in rows around the Parthenon

Mesopotamia and Assyria

Rooms and rooms of wall sculptures from various palaces as well as huge figures from temples that have been removed by numerous British archeological expeditions tell stories about ancient courts and societies. The material is so expressive and beautifully carved that you can spend hours just looking at the detail in the carvings. We didn't have the luxury of the time but it was great to enjoy them in the time we had.

The horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot

This was a special exhibition at the museum and covered the history of the horse and its influence from their domestication around 3,500 BCE to the present day. We were not allowed to take any pics but the exhibition used lots of drawings, paintings and objects to tell the story of the working horse and also of  the Thoroughbred, which was selectively bred from Arabians for speed and is now raced at world-famous courses such as Royal Ascot.

The whole modern British Throughbred industry is able to be traced back to three Arabian stallions, which when bred with native mares, produced the Thoroughbred breed. I was impressed and I hope you are too!

Catching up with Deanna

We managed to catch up with Deanna Vener, a former workmate at ESA in the afternoon. Deanna has been travelling in Europe for about a year and is currently teaching English at courses in the town of Reading. She was travelling with a group of students to Covent Garden so we met at the market. As we sat down for a coffee the heavens opened and we had a great electrical and rain storm. Deanna was restricted in her time and there were no seats inside so we just sat it out under the coffee shop umbrellas and Deanna's umbrella.

It was great to be able to catch up and share the travel stories. Deanna is hoping to make it back to Sicily soon to start teaching English there.

Coffee with Deanna in the rainstorm under two layers of umbrella.

It does rain here

The whole city received the storm today and we were surprised at the number of people who were not prepared for it. Surely it rains like this a lot!

Neal Street in the pouring rain.