London: The British Museum

 The Great Court, which is inside The British Museum, was once an outside courtyard.  It is the largest covered public space in Europe.

We found these two right outside the museum and decided to take them inside with us.

 

In summer 1799, when the Rosetta Stone was found by Napoleon Bonaparte's army, nobody had known how to read hieroglyphs or Demotic for over a thousand years.  Jean-François Champollion realized that the hieroglyphic signs were not simple picture-writing, but also stood for sounds, just as English letters do, and that they wrote the ancient Egyptian language.  

The Rosetta Stone was found when Napoleon invaded Egypt.  By 1801, the British defeated the French, who were forced to give up the antiquities their scholars had collected to the British.

 

This statue is from Easter Island.  It was one of hundreds of similar statues which were carved some time between AD 1000 and AD 1600.

 

These are the "Elgin Marbles" from the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.    Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire brought back the Marbles between 1801 and 1805.  They have been on display at the British Museum since 1817 free of charge.



This panel is thought to have inspired these lines of Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn:

 

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 

Since the 1980s Greek governments have argued for the permanent removal to Athens of all the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum.  There is a new Acropolis Museum in Athens where much of the remaining panels and sculptures are displayed.  

Plaster copy from the Palace of Darius at Persepolis, Iran

The Lewis chessmen are the most famous chessmen in the world.  They were bought by the Museum from and Edinburgh dealer in 1831 for 80 guineas.  They were found in a sand dune on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, but were probably made in Norway.

 

Some of the pieces show a special type of Scandinavian warrior.  These are "berserkers" who worked themselves up into a terrible fighting frenzy before battle.  The berserkers are biting their shields.

We just visited a few galleries and could visit many more times without seeing most of the museum.