MY BRITISH MUSEUM

LONDON - DECEMBER 2008

The British Museum is one of my favourite museums in the world. It's huge, its site is fantastic and that's where all the information that accompanies the pictures below was found and borrowed.

It's hard to choose a limited number of pictures to post from the hundreds of pictures I have. But the idea is just to raise your curiosity (for those who have never been there) or stimulate the appetite for a return (for those who are repeated guests...). The result, anyhow, is always rather poor compared with the sumptuousness of the place!!


"OLDEST ITEM DISPLAYED - A stone chopping tool from the Lower Palaeolithic, found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Made nearly two million years ago, stone tools such as this are the first known technological invention. Using another hard stone as a hammer, the maker has knocked flakes off both sides of a basalt (volcanic lava) pebble so that they intersect to form a sharp edge. This could be used to chop branches from trees, cut meat from large animals or smash bones for marrow fat - an essential part of the early human diet. The flakes could also have been used as small knives for light duty tasks. Chopping tools and flakes from the earliest African sites were referred to as Oldowan by the archaeologist Louis Leakey. He found this example on his first expedition to Olduvai in 1931, when he was sponsored by the British Museum"


"KING AMENHOTEP III (1390-1352 BC) commissioned a large number of statues of himself, mostly for his mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile. This head (from around 1350 BC) was found in the Temple of Mut, south-east of Karnak. Royal statues in Egypt were sometimes usurped by later rulers. The normal procedure was simply to re-carve their name over the old one, but in some cases the physical features were also altered. Ramesses II (1279-1213 BC) seems to have altered a number of statues of Amenhotep III, namely changing the characteristic thick lips of the older statuary to thinner ones. The statue wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt"


"RAMESSES II - One of the largest pieces of Egyptian sculpture in the British Museum, weighing 7.25 tons, this fragment of his statue (dating from about 1250 BC) was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite. He is shown wearing the nemes head-dress surmounted by a cobra diadem. It was retrieved from the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes (the 'Ramesseum') by Giovanni Belzoni in 1816"


"THE ROSETTA STONE - The Rosetta Stone, dating from 196 BC, was discovered in 1799 in Egypt. It is one of the most important objects in the British Museum as it holds the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. The front of the Rosetta stone is smooth and crammed with text, inscribed in three different scripts. The top consists of fourteen lines of hieroglyphs. The middle is made up of thirty-two lines of demotic, the everyday language used in ancient Egypt. At the bottom are over fifty lines of tightly compressed Greek writing. The inscriptions are three translations of the same decree, passed by a council of priests that affirms the royal cult of the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. In the early years of the nineteenth century, scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on this stone as the key to deciphering the others"


"LION - Guardian figure from the entrance to the Temple of Ishtar, Nimrud, Northern Iraq, adjoining the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II (who reigned between 883 and 859 BC). This gigantic standing lion, roaring angrily, formed one of a pair. The placing of figures of lions beside the doors of temples or the gates of cities was an ancient custom in Mesopotamia. Actual lions were common in the region and survived there until the nineteenth century. The lion is covered with a dedication in cuneiform, consisting of a prayer by Ashurnasirpal to a version of Ishtar called Sharrat-niphi, followed by a record of some of his achievements"


"WINGED BULL, KHORSABAD - This colossal human-headed winged bull magical figure, discovered by the French archaeologist Paul-Emile Botta between 1842 and 1844, is one of the heaviest objects in the Museum. It once guarded an entrance to the citadel of the Assyrian King Sargon II (721-705 BC) in Northern Iraq. The fifth leg is an artistic convention to enable the figure to be seen either from the side, walking, or from the front, standing. Between the legs of the winged bull there is a long cuneiform inscription listing Sargon's titles, ancestry and achievements"


"DYING LION - A stone panel of around 645 BC, from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh, Northern Iraq, symbolizing the triumph of the Assyrian King over nature.
This panel was part of a series of wall panels that showed a royal hunt. There was a very long tradition of royal lion hunts in Mesopotamia, with similar scenes known from the late fourth millennium BC. The connection between kingship and lions was probably brought to western Europe as a result of the crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, when lions begin to decorate royal coats of arms"


"THE NEREID MONUMENT - Taking its name from the Nereids, sea-nymphs whose statues were placed between the columns of this monumental tomb, it was built for Erbinna, ruler of Lycian Xanthos, south-west Turkey. Although he was not Greek, Erbinna chose to be buried in a tomb that resembles a Greek temple of the Ionic order. The monument is much influenced by the Ionic temples of the Acropolis and its decorative sculpture is a mixture of Greek and Lycian style"


"WEST PARTHENON - RIVER GOD ILISSOS - The central feature of the west pediment of the Parthenon was the colossal statues of Athena and Poseidon in contest for Athens and the land of Attica. The reclining figures in the corners of the triangular composition perhaps represent the rivers of Attica. This figure (about 438-432 BC) is thought to personify the river Ilissos, by comparison with figures on the east pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia; the Greek historian Pausanias names them as the local rivers there"


"WEST PARTHENON - IRIS - The west pediment of the Parthenon showed Athena and Poseidon accompanied by divine messengers, Athena by Hermes, Poseidon by Iris. She is shown as if just alighting on the Acropolis. Her drapery is pressed flat against her body and flutters out at the edges. It was held at the waist by a bronze girdle, now missing. Her wings, also missing, were socketed in to her shoulders at the back, where the joins would not have been seen"


"EAST PARTHENON - DIONYSOS - The central section of the east pediment of the Parthenon showed the birth of Athena. This reclining figure almost certainly represents Dionysos, god of wine. He looked out from the pediment towards the corner and the chariot of Helios, god of the sun, rising at daybreak"


"VENUS - This Roman sculpture (about 100-150 AD) was one of a dozen or so found at Campo Iemini, dug up in spring 1794 by Robert Fagan (1761-1816). Fagan was a a prominent member of the younger generation of British dealers and excavators resident in Rome. The beauty of the statue's well-preserved head was particularly celebrated. The Venus is of the Capitoline type, named after the most famous copy in the Capitoline Museum, to which some at the time of its discovery claimed it was superior"


"LUNCH BREAK - At Do & Co, the Museum restaurant"

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"MOAI - Human figure called Hoa Hakananai'a (hidden or stolen friend) made of basalt, 2.42 metres tall. Images relating to the bird man religion are carved in relief on the figure's back and back of head. Dating from 1000-1200 AD, it was found in the Orongo ceremonial centre in Easter Island. Know nothing about the sculpture head..."

Edited: Thanks to Thérèse I found that the head is a sculpture - Mask II - from the Australian artist Ron Mueck!


"SKULLS - NO PHOTOGRAPHY"


"QUETZALCOATL - This mask (15th-16th century AD) is believed to represent Quetzalcoatl («the feathered serpent») or the rain god Tlaloc. Both deities are associated with serpents. The mask is carved from a single piece of Cedrela odorata wood and covered with turquoise mosaic work. The teeth are made of white conch shell. The design incorporates two serpents, one in pale green turquoise and one in blue, which encircle the eyes and are entwined over the nose and around the mouth. The serpent tails finish at the temples with rattles that are moulded in relief and were originally gilded. Turquoise mosaic plumes hang on both sides of the eye sockets"


"DOUBLE SNAKE MOSAIC - This striking object (an icon of Aztec art) was probably worn on ceremonial occasions as a pectoral (an ornament worn on the chest). It is carved in wood (Cedrela odorata) and covered with turquoise mosaic. The wood is hollowed at the back. Serpent imagery occurs throughout the religious iconography of Mesoamerica. The serpent is associated with several Aztec deities including Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent), Xiuhcoatl (Fire Serpent) and Mixcoatl (Cloud Serpent) or Coatlicue (She of the Serpent Skirt), the mother of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli"


"KUDARA KANNON is a statue of Kannon and made of gilded camphor wood. It is 210 centimetres in height and shouldering the halo. The statue is unique in Japanese art, and regarded as one of the most important works in the ancient Japan. The word Kudara is the Japanese for the Baekje Kingdom. A text from 1698 describes the statue as being rediscovered, but its origin is still unknown. Its name was given in the Meiji period, because its style resembled traditional Korean statues"


"AYZEM-MY - Figure of Kamakura or Muromachi period, 14th-15th century AD, Aizen is one of the five Myō-ō «Kings of Light», personified spells and protectors of the esoteric Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism, whose principal deity, Dainichi Nyōrai, is the Buddha from whom boundless light emanates. Aizen is usually portrayed wearing a lion-skin hat or wearing a shishi head-dress and he sits on a lotus throne. He has six arms, each holding one of his attributes: bow, arrow, vajras (thunderbolts), some missing from this figure"


"JAPANESE ARMOUR SET - This composite suit of Japanese armour brings together items from different periods (Momoyama period, late 16th century - cuirass and sleeves; Edo period, 17th century - helmet; 18th-19th century - remainder). The helmet is in the tradition of earlier pieces which were often given a hideous face-mask with bristling whiskers to strike terror into the enemy. With the arrival of firearms in the sixteenth century new bullet-proof cuirasses were developed in Japan, copied from European models. The example here is signed by Unkai Mitsunao"


"TATE MODERN 2058"