Photos.

British Museum

This trip was actually a few weekends ago, so imagine that I posted this earlier. It's going to take me a little while to get this site up to date.
It was really hard to take pictures at the British Museum because the lighting isn't great, there are people everywhere, most things are behind glass, and also my camera battery ran out part way through. So there are just a few pictures here of random things that I liked for one reason or another.

The Rosetta stone. I think this is one of the coolest artifacts ever. Notice that it is now nicely displayed behind glass instead of on the floor with a rope around it, which is where it was a few years ago, when it was fairly easy to surreptitiously touch it (not that I would do such a thing).

An ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, completely covered in hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are such a pretty form of writing.

Pigs from the 6th century BC in Cyprus. See, people have liked pigs for a long time. True, the sign said that they weren't actually sure whether these were supposed to be pigs or anteaters, but my vote is for pigs.


Claudius and Livia. My two favourite ancient Romans, thanks to Robert Graves, and the BBC.

Money counting boards with coins from the 18th century in Japan on the left, and the 19th in India on the right. I just liked how these looked, and how on old money you can really see how the patterns were stamped into the metal, and how each piece is slightly different.

A three-headed warrior statue from ancient Cyprus. I really liked their faces. And they made me think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

One of the statues from Easter island. All through our trip to the museum, I kept thinking about the old style of "archaeology" and how a lot of these artifacts were collected. You came into a site, hacked all the whole statues and mosaics and decoration out in big chunks and brought them home to show off. So much stuff was just carelessly taken. I looked at this huge Easter island guy and thought about how much effort it would have been to move him, and how crazy it was that he should have been moved. Thankfully, it doesn't work that way anymore.

posted by Sian at 3:35 PM