A short visit to the British Museum — Sept. 2017 | Museum Rating — World Class ( 54/60)

I briefly visited the British Museum in Sept 2017 while on a work related trip to England. Considering that I only had a couple of days over a weekend in London to spare before my flight back to India, I intended to spend most of this time sight-seeing and visiting a few of the excellent museums in the city.London museums are a delight, as they are numerous and cover non-overlapping topics of interests and have enough variety to keep a history and art buff like me occupied for days. Also, and this might sound too obvious , the signage being in English helps a lot. I have had the unpleasant experience of visiting museums in France and Germany where the signs are in French and German and that does act as a deterrent to a fully immersive museum experience.

The British Museum was always on my list of must-sees and on a bright un-English-weather-like Sunday morning, I headed out from my hotel in Southwark and took the Northern tube line to the King’s Cross St. Pancras which took about 20 minutes and then a short changeover on the Picadilly Line to the Russell Square Station :

After a short walk, I was in front of the Museum and my immediate reaction was that I had somehow strolled onto the Parthenon in Athens — such was the imposing Neo-Classical facade in front of me :

The view from the Russell street entrance is really magnificent and after a brief security check , I was inside the compound.Luckily, entry is free. I got inside and got a closer look at the Pediment :

My Plan was to only spend about a couple of hours in the museum primarily exploring the important exhibits in Room Four of the Museum which is the Egyptian section and some other sections nearby. I entered the museum from the main entrance underneath the pediment and walked into the Great Court- which is the covered central quadrangle of the museum and which was inaugurated by the Queen in 2000. It has a tessellated glass roof and the effect of the sun shining through on a bright sunny day is quite mesmerizing with the interplay of light reflecting off the white surfaces and the diamond shaped shadows :

After taking a good look around the Great Court, I started my visit in earnest. I began with Room Three which is immediately to the right upon entering from the main entrance. Room Three is what is called the Asahi Simbun Display room and it has fragments of sculpture from the great Stupa of Amaravati ( present day Andhra Pradesh ) built around 200 BC.The audiovisual experience in this room was quite innovative and it describes each part of the sculpture below from the perspective of the people depicted on it. This is something which can be a lesson to Indian museums on how to make history come alive.

After exiting Room Three , I immediately headed towards the Assyrian section in Room Ten which is guarded by these two Lamassus which are the protective deities often depicted as having a human head, the body of a bull or a lion, and bird wings :

The Assyrian section has a collection of large stone sculptures from the royal palace of King Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) at Nimrud.But due to the paucity of time, I had to move quickly through these rooms.In any case, Lamassus look impressive from every angle.

I hurriedly reached Room Four of the museum dedicated to Egyptian sculpture and having visited the Egyptian Section in the Louvre in Paris, one can immediately sense that the British got the better of the French in appropriating the ‘loot’ from ancient Egypt.The British museum’s collection is small but important. For e.g One can see a fragment of this unimportant looking piece of stone — but on closer inspection , one realizes that it is actually a piece of the Sphinx’s beard!

There is also a large bust of Rameses II — the most famous Pharaoh, who is probably the Pharaoh mentioned in the story of Moses .The serene looking bust actually is part of a larger sitting statue from Ramesseum — the memorial temple build for him in Egypt.

But the most famous artifact in Room Four and indeed the major crowd puller to this museum is a certain stone stele discovered in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and which changed the world of History, Archaeology and Egyptology — The Rosetta Stone

As a kid, I used to read a lot of illustrated children’s books on Egyptian history and for a brief period, I wanted to be an Egyptologist — The Pyramids, the Pharaohs and the Hieroglyphics had a strange hold over me and I dreamed of walking in front of the Sphinx and the Pyramids and in Abu Simbel .This visit was the wish of that twelve year old being fulfilled — some dreams do come true! The Rosetta Stone is a stele which has writings from three different scripts — Ancient Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphic at the top.The discovery of this stone eventually led to the deciphering of the Hieroglyphic script, resulting in a quantum leap in the understanding of Ancient Egyptian history. The exhibit is certainly very well preserved — placed inside a clear glass cabinet and on a pedestal for maximum visibility.Behind the stone there is sufficient information about the origins and how the understanding of the Hieroglyphic system slowly developed as a result of its discovery.

Unfortunately, that was all that I had time to see in the museum but I did add visiting the rest of the museum in a subsequent visit to my bucket list.I conclude all my posts about museum visits with a rating out of sixty points but because I only visited a few rooms of the British Museum , I will provide a tentative rating reserving a final rating after a subsequent visit.

British Museum’s Ratings ( Tentative )

1. Historical Importance and Quality of Artifacts — 9 / 10
2. Reasonableness of the Entrance fee — 10 / 10 ( Entrance is free )
3. Accessibility within the city — 8 / 10
4. Accessibility of additional information about the exhibits — 9 / 10
5. Specificity Score ( 1 — extremely narrow subject matter to 10 — General History ) — 9 / 10
6. Museum Store variety — 9 / 10

Overall Score — 54 / 60

Originally published at http://rajatgururaj.wordpress.com on October 18, 2019.