London Trip ~ 07.10.22
Last week, we ventured up to London to visit the British Museum. It was a long-awaited, haphazardly planned trip but fun nevertheless. We’re both quite nerdy and love a good museum, especially a history museum. The British Museum is home to around two million years of history and so many artefacts. It has so much to see that we only managed to cover one floor of exhibitions. So here’s a quick rundown of what we saw.
We started off in the section on Ancient Egypt, wanting to make sure we saw the sarcophagus and mummies. It was a very busy exhibition, filled with school children on trips, it was also pretty dark and felt like it was getting darker which was strange, but it was definitely interesting.
We moved through the exhibit and onto a more general North African history. In this part, there was an exhibition that attracted a lot of attention and the glee of some of the school children. It was of the Gebelein Man, a young man who had been partially mummified by the desert he was buried in. The Gebelein Man is well preserved, enough that there is still hair on his head and definition in his skin. It’s a very strange thing to see a dead body, one that is more than a skeleton. There’s a morbid fascination and yet, something that we never really noticed as children, that behind the glass was once a human being. We had a bit of a strange discussion about finding out you were related to a man who was on display in a museum for the world to see.
After Nothern Africa, we entered the beginning of the Greek and Roman exhibition. It seemed to be miles of vases and busts missing their noses. There were some stories we already knew, some that delighted us and others that baffled us. It’s a shame that a lot of classical and Hellenistic sculptures have lost all of their colours as that would have made the endless marble collection so much more appealing.
We moved on to Saxon and Celtic Britain which included partial exhibitions from historical sites across the UK, some we had been to, others we hadn’t. There was a small section on Vikings and then a slightly bigger area dedicated to Ancient Islam.
To finish off the top floor, we wandered through the rooms on Modern Europe, which mostly contained jewellery and coins from the Victorian era. There were so many brooches made of every precious material you could possibly imagine including coral and coins that depicted every major event that occurred during Victoria’s reign.
Last, but not least, we ventured down to the ground floor to look at the Elgin Marbles. The friezes that used to decorate the Parthenon are many in number and strolling down the hall they are housed in makes it clear that the Parthenon was enormous. Finding out that the British Museum only has half of the Elgin Marbles made the size of the Parthenon unfathomable.
These friezes are extremely controversial. Stolen from the Greeks by the Lord Elgin of the time and refused to be handed back to their rightful owners. We had the discussion and came up with what are probably too idealist solutions. However, we did note that the least the British Museum could do was elaborate on where and how the items were acquired (essentially be honest about how many items were stolen or dug up in large-scale grave robberies).
Overall, the British Museum is a fascinating visit with so much to learn. We did find our brains were a bit numb at the end and wouldn’t have been able to cope with even one more piece of information! We plan to go back at some point as it is a fun but cheap day out in London.
