London Museum

This Saturday we traveled the ancient world in one afternoon.  We visited the British Museum!

The front face of the museum

This is the Rosetta Stone.  The Rosetta stone was discovered by Frenchman Pierre-Francois Bouchard in the Nile Delta in 1799.  The Rosetta stone contains the words of Egyptian king Ptolemy, written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and translated into Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek.  This stone is what allowed scholars to crack the code to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time, opening up knowledge into the lives of the ancient Egyptian people. 

This is a sample of the figures that adorned the Parthenon, the Greek temple for the goddess Athena. Over the centuries, since the fall of the Greek Empire, the temple has been occupied by many groups.  In the 5th century it was made into a Christian church.  In the 1400s, after the Ottoman conquest, it was converted into a mosque.  The Turks then converted the use of the building from a place of worship to a place of storage, storing grains and food, and eventually gunpowder.  In the late 1600s, the Venetians attacked Athens, igniting the ammunition stored inside, and causing the Parthenon to explode, sending the marble sculptures that decorated the building into piles of rubble around the ruined building.  There they lay until 1806, when Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, brought the surviving statues back to England to be preserved and displayed in the British Museum.

Depiction of the Greek gods, the statues that would have adorned the front of the temple above the 40 foot columns at the entry and just below the peaking roof of the building.  The woman in the center is Karen, our London Walking Tours guide.

More Greek gods, again adorning the temple front.  In the center was the depiction of Athena's birth, coming out of Zeus's head as a full grown woman.  The actual depiction of the birth has been lost, only the gods on either side of the scene remain.

These statues come from Assyria, or what is now modern day northern Iraq.  These statues would have framed the entry way into the King's palace, designed to intimidate the visitors. The head is the head of the king, attached to the body of a large beast with wings.

These wall carvings are also from Assyria.  They show the king fighting Lions, apparently a popular sport in the Assyrian kingdom.  The carvings (not shown in the pictures above) show the priests of the kings wounding the lions by stabbing them before they're even allowed to enter into the arena where the king is waiting in his chariot with his spears and arrows.  Hardly a fair battle for the lions, it seems.

And, finally, the mummies, where we ended our tour.  To mummify a body, the Egyptians had to remove the bowels, lungs, stomach, and brain - any organ that would cause too high of a moisture content in the embalmed body, for moisture was the cause of decay and the enemy of mummification.  They would, however, leave in the heart.  The belief was that after death, the individual would travel to the afterlife.  It was a long arduous three day's journey.  After arriving, they would be met by a judge of sorts, who would ask them to produce their heart (good thing the embalmers left it with the body!).  The heart would be placed on one side of a scale, and the feather of truth would be placed on the other side of the scale.  If the heart weighted the same as the feather, the individual had lived a good life and would be allowed to enter heaven.  If the heart was lighter than the feather, the person had lived a very good life, and, of course, the doors to heaven were wide open for him, as well.  If, however, the heart weighted more than the feather, the person had lived a very poor life and would be cast off to hell.  According to Karen, our guide, we still reference this ancient Egyptian belief today when we speak of being lighthearted or heavy hearted.

The best pizza ever Friday night!  It was a lot like Setebello's pizza in Salt Lake, if you have been there.  So delicious, you can just see DJs excitement :-p

And, finally, a little taste of home.  Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and green beans for Sunday dinner.  So delicious, love our relaxing Sundays!