Among other things, they allow photography, and they have the cases and lighting set up so that it is actually possible. Among the three of us, we took 146 pictures, now loaded on my computer. I'll share just a few here, and I'm considering creating a separate blog for the rest.
This is the Rosetta Stone.
The displays are top notch. Perfectly lit, well-labeled. Each exhibit was a very nice mix of real things and illustrative--even touchable--reproductions, right beside each other. The next photo is Ellie and me at the Nereid monument exhibit. Some touchable reproductions are on the ground; the real things are elevated.
This is a panel from the frieze on the Parthenon. Notice the holes in the bull's nose and the man's hand. These were anchor points for a chain. The originals had metal ornamentation, long lost.
I had not known that the Parthenon was largely intact as recently as 1687, when the Venetians were at war with the Turks(?) and used the Parthenon to store their gunpowder, with predictable results. The Parthenon went from a functioning, two-thousand year-old (even then!) structure to a ruin in a single blast.The Museum has a daily program of more than a dozen free talks. We took advantage of two: a lovely Iranian lady explained ancient Mesopotamian artifacts to us, and this gentleman walked us through the Enlightenment and several instances of how and when humans went from blaming things on unpredictable gods to actually figuring out how they worked.
This room was a gorgeous traditional two-story-high reading room with glass cases full of curiosities and warm and elegant wood everywhere. It used to be George III's library, and I tried not to let that bother me. Re-reading the entire Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July was not the best mental preparation for this trip.This is a Neolithic British ax.
Neolithic--do you realize how OLD that is?!?!? 5,700 years ago (3,700 BCE), a human carved and used this tool. It fell into a wet place, which is how the wood was so well preserved.In 1939, an excavator explored some odd mounds near Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, and found an Anglo-Saxon royal burial ship. The ship had been buried whole, with a treasure on board. Here is a purse lid of beautiful craftsmanship, which was found with its coins.
These helmets show how the British museum does things right. The first helmet is made of many original pieces, partly filled in. In the same case was another helmet...
...completely reconstructed to show how it probably looked when it was new.In a few cases, the original object was left just as it came out of the ground--still squashed, broken, and mashed into a solid hunk. Right beside it would be a reproduction or a similar object, fully recreated. The Museum did not pull its punches: some of these, such as this Ur helmet, were not for the squeamish.
Enough of that.
We all enjoyed the Mesopotamian talk immensely. Here is the Royal Game of Ur.
It is a board game from 4,600 years ago and involves racing the game pieces around the board. The archeologists know this because they found the rules on a clay tablet. So now the British Museum can sell the same game in the gift shop, though not made of shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli.Much more recently--only 700 years BCE--the Assyrians recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets a story of the Great Flood--the Gilgamesh Epic.
In this story, the god Enlil got so mad at humanity that he sent a rain that flooded the world. The hero Utnapishtim was warned by the god Ea to build an ark, and he took his family and two of all the beasts. He released birds to determine when and where land re-emerged. This story pre-dates the Hebrew story, and it's not even the first telling of the Great Flood story!Arriving at practically modern times, as the story of humanity goes, we also saw some stunning Roman mosaics.
I love the subtlety they could get with little chunky chips of colored stones.Finally, we saw a fabulous Italian vase--the Portland vase--from the first century. A cobalt-blue vase was made first, then a white-glass vase was fired on top. The white glass was then carved away.
The workmanship, up close, was breathtaking.After the museum, our next deliberate stop was to be Charing Cross Road, where I could browse some old books. On the way there, Ellie led us to a place called Neal's Yard.
It is a lively little shopping mall, stuffed with health-related stores and restaurants and new-agey-type things. We browsed a bead store that had some amazing merchandise.London has a program of marking the former residences of famous people with blue medallions. The person must have been dead for 20 years to get a medallion. We saw many, most of whom I did not know. However, notice in the previous picture (near the center, just below the longest hanging ivy) that there is a blue medallion on the wall.
Monty Python died! Who knew?I got my first real sense of place from this walk. The buildings were so full of character. I took both of the following photos without moving my feet.
One tour guide at one of our stops explained that the old-fashioned English pub names (i.e., "the Something-and-something") come from the days when most of the population was illiterate. Signs like this one for the Greenman and French Horn simply depicted the name of the pub.Bookstores no longer dominate the whole of Charing Cross Road--though there were many. Ellie really wanted us to see Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road.
It was delightful--mostly bookstores, with a few antiquities and map stores.Ellie pointed out something I'm not sure I would have noticed otherwise: neither of us have ever seen so many advertisements for books as we saw in London. Right there, among the big posters publicizing new movies, new cars, new communications gadgets, etc, were numerous ads for books!
But back to Cecil Court: I got myself on the mailing list of one bookstore that had an entire section of books on the perennial philosophy along with other serious spiritual books, also along with books on crop circles and faeries.
We wanted to eat dinner in a real pub, and Ellie picked a great one for us.
The menu of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese notes that it was rebuilt in 1667. I absolutely believe that the pub has been there for longer. It was a labyrinth of bars and tiny dining rooms and basements and subbasements.Allegedly, Charles Dickens ate dinner in our booth. A framed letter on the wall was from someone who ate with him. I do not doubt it. Any pub that has been in business that long in that area (the old city) of London has hosted many a luminary, I am sure.
Next: Day Three...
No comments:
Post a Comment