British Museum (Part 1)

After work on Sunday, I headed out to the British Museum on the tube from Olympic Park.  Wow.  I was only there for about 2 hours, but I could have spent a whole day or more.  As usual, because I have so little time, I take a lot of photos of the plaques so that I can read about what I saw later.

The museum itself is beautiful, founded in 1753, it was the first national public museum in the world.  Admission has always been free!

The building is enormous, and very spacious inside, and contains treasures from around the world.  Some of the collected pieces are themselves enormous, and it boggles the mind as to how some of them were preserved and transported from around the world.

Pharoah Ramses II, Egpyt

I'm not going to comment on every photo, but I just wanted to show a few that illustrate the scale of some of these pieces.

Red Granite Lion, 1400BC, from the Sudan



Guard Lion, 860BC, Assyrian (from the Temple of Ishtar)

Palace Gates (reconstructed), 840BC, Assyrian

Nereid Monument (temple tomb), 390BC, Southwest Turkey

There were lots of classic Greek statues, and a display of the Parthenon Sculptures (which are subject to a dispute with the Greek government). 

Aphrodite, 100AD

Venus, 100AD

Having been to the National Archeological Museum in Athens, I think I was more impressed by their collection, though I loved this piece which seems to be proof of the existence of cellular phones in ancient Greece:

Looks like he's sending an SMS message, and holding his iPad in his left hand!

More from the British Museum, including some of the more interesting pieces with stories, in my next post!