British Museum

---

The British Museum is an amazing place, once you find it! But getting there is very confusing. Hotel front desk staff, just a street away from the museum, were not aware of where exactly the museum was. We spent almost an hour walking round in circles in residential and commercial areas before stumbling into the Museum. Turns out that it was actually within easy walking distance of our hotel, but the dearth of adequate signage combined with the lack of any semblance of a street grid structure makes getting lost in London really easy. Doesn't help that our guide book by Rick Steves only has hand drawn maps that are not to scale. Our primary criticism of an otherwise decent guide book. Once in though, (the museum trustees are proud that entrance is free), there's so much to see, that it's nearly impossible to do justice to any given area on one part of one floor, let alone the entire museum.

The Parthenon sculptures are also known as the Elgin Marbles, since Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman empire, with permission from the ruling Turks, removed them from Athens, Greece and moved them to Britain. An act of Parliament released funds for them to be installed in the British Museum. Controversy over where they should be displayed becomes part of public debate every now and then. Many of these sculptures have parts in various European museums including the Louvre in Paris, The Vatican and The Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, Vienna and Munich.

W.. asked why the Parthenon in Athen was in ruins. He was wondering if it was due to earthquakes. Turns out the Venetians, while installing blinds in Greece, had used the Parthenon as a gun powder storage room, which had exploded and blown the roof off, destroying many sculptures.

The British Museum is loathe to return their part of the collection back to Greece, at the new Acropolis Museum. Why not a swap? Hold onto the Elgin Marbles, but give them part of British heritage, say parts of Stonehenge or the Magna Carta, so that complementary stories can be told about those historic items. More random thoughts eh.

The Rosetta Stone is exhibited. Yes, the real thing. This was the cornerstone in Egyptian Hieroglyph translation. It had the same text in Hieroglyphics at the top, the local Egyptian (common) language in the middle and Greek at the bottom. Perhaps, future archeologists may hold Coke cans in this same regard, considering how Coke cans are translated into myriad languages. So marketing may not be looked at as a pointless pursuit in a historical context, as it seems to be regarded today.

---