London Trip 18: What Is The Capital Of Assyria?

If you don't know and get asked by the Bridge Keeper, it is Assur, at least it was until 879 BC, when it was moved to Nimrud, then it was moved to Dūr Šarrukīn and thence to Nineveh, which remained the capital until the Assyrian empire fell to the Babylonians/Medes in 612 BC, so any of those should suffice to let you cross.

The Mespotamian collection is rather impressive at the British Museum.

 Two colossal statues of winged lions with human heads that used to stand at the entrance to the royal palace of King Ashurnasirpal  II (883-859 BC) in Nimrud

The Museum in its Assyrian exhibit has a display containing the world's first known library.  The Library of Ashurbanipal, King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire:

 Clay tablets, with many still in their clay envelopes, as they would have been at the time. The envelope both kept the tablet secure from being read by the unauthorized, and also had a label describing what was on the tablet within. The library contains many tablets works, including an archive  of  royal communications including one demanding that rare tablets to be sent to the library.

Quite cool.

The Assyrians were less famous for being librarians than their fame, if not infamy, for the warfare that led them to expand and control their empire, and their extremely brutal treatment of all who resisted them.

An Assyrian carving showing an attack:

The next carving shows them removing enemy deities from a captured city while they sack it:

This carving shows an arms-bearer of Tiglath-Pileser III

An Assyrian iron helmet from the era is also on display:

The Assyrian exhibit at the British Museum is extensive and quite impressive to see. Just standing beside one of the huge lions gives you quite an appreciation for the grandeur of this long-ago empire that at its height dominated much of the Middle East.

London Trip 17: You Can Do Numerous Successful Commercial Transactions With No Recognition

But, you get caught shipping lousy quality copper, and your name endures forever:

Yes, that's the tablet that has the complaint about Ea Nasir - right there in clay and cuneiform, inscribed in 1750 BC.  Ea Nasir was a merchant that helped put the mess in Mesopotamia.

Located in the British Museum in Room G56, display case 24, if you're looking to go see it in person.

London Trip 16 - The British Museum

We were in line to enter the British Museum.  I, of course, had been there but Mr. B. and Murphy's Law had not been there before.

The Rosetta Stone from the reign of Ptolemy V welcomes visitors:

Lots of people crowded around it so it took awhile to get close enough to see it and try to get a decent picture with all the glare from the display case and lights,

The stone is an amazing piece of history and was the gateway to the translation of Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

We went further into the Egyptian rooms.

The room of Egyptian statues and Stelae never fails to inspire awe.

Statues of Pharaohs:

An impressive sacophagi:

 

A huge sculpture of a Scarab Beetle:

Of course, being Egypt,  there are statues of cats:

A statue of Rameses II:

The Stele of the Hellenistic King Ptolemy IX and Queen Cleopatra III (Note that the famous Cleopatra of Julius Caesar fame is Cleopatra VII). 

The pyramids were already ancient history when this stele was inscribed in 115 BC.

In fact, fewer years separate us from when this stele was written, than the years from the inscription of the stele to the building of the great pyramids. Yes, this stele, ancient as it is, is closer to the age of artificial intelligence than to the age of the pyramids.

It's an amazing room in the British Museum.  And, it was only the first one we visited.

London Day 2 The British Museum

So on Day 2, we got up, had a breakfast at a Bagel shop we had walked by the day before - B Bagel, touted as the best bagels in London. Kids insisted.

Interestingly, the Brits look at you completely blankly if you order a lox and cream cheese bagel, instead, it is called a Spanner over there.  

Actually, they call it a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, but that's about the same thing, really. The Bagels were actually quite good.

Having had coffee and bagels we then marched forth to the British Museum.   Enough of shopping, I demanded that we needed to get some culture in and see the world's greatest museum.  This then led to negotiations over the amount of time to be spent in the museum.  I began at all day, and they started at 10 minutes, and we came to an accord after I was outvoted 3-1 on my demand for an all-day visit, but at least got a couple hours more than 10 minutes.

The British Museum, like most of London, lacks air conditioning, so it got rather warm with all the visitors inside.  Some rooms had floor-mounted fans going, but most did not.

Of course Abby, being a tad woke as a pending University student, decried the British Museum as holding stolen colonial artifacts.

I had the rather perfect meme to retort:

Rather gets the point across eh? The whole "stolen colonized artifacts" argument tends to be rather simplistic and ignorant of history and how the artifacts were discovered by archeologists in the first place and what happened to artifacts not in the British Museum.  I reckon the Bamiyan Buddhas would have concurred.

Especially so, as we saw the Statute of Ramses II from the meme in person:

 

He's quite a bit bigger and even more imposing person, too.

The British museum is a definite must-see if you end up in London.  The collection is amazing.  It's basically Mecca for a student of history.

You can see hundreds of some of the earliest surviving examples of human writing in cuneiform on clay tablets:

And of course, the Rosetta Stone that led to the translation of hieroglyphics (terrible picture but it was surrounded by a mob and one German lady in particular that insisted on standing right in front of it trying to take a pic with her Android phone and being annoyed that she kept getting reflections from the glass):

At the museum you can visit your mummies:

 

You can see the huge Winged Lions that guarded the entrance way to the palace of Ashurbanipal II at Nimrud from 883-859 BC:

Here's some people beside one for scale:

If the Egyptians and Assyrians are too old for you, they have classical Greek and Roman exhibits aplenty.

Hundreds of Greek Vases and urns were on display.

A statute of Pericles of Athens takes one to the History of the Peloponnesian War:

Moving on, the Roman collection was extensive.  Here's a Roman Gladius:

A bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and many more busts of Roman Emperors were all about the exhbit halls:

And of course, Roman coins, such as this Eid Mar ("Ides of March")  Denarius, struck by Brutus, commemorating his assassination of Julius Caesar.

That coin alone is worth over $300,000.  Nicely on display for the world to see and enjoy its fascinating history, which is priceless.

Moving on in time, the helmet from the Sutton Hoo Ship burial site, one of only 4 known helmets to survive from the early Anglo-Saxon Period in England was on display. A reconstruction of the helmet is to the left in the picture.

Everyone likes Vikings, right? (At least you do when they're not raiding, pillaging, and burning your belongings and residences to the ground anyway, eh)?

An exhibit of a Viking sword, axe, and spearhead:

Viking hacksilver, silver bowls, and coins from their trade and pillaging.

In short, you could spend days at the British Museum and not see it all. These pictures are but pittance of the artifacts and displays from those time periods alone, much less the entire contents of the museum with its massive sweep of history.

If you visit London, a tour of the British Museum is an absolute must.