LONDON! Day 9: British Museum, Egyptian Display

Okay, it seems like this day will never end and that's because we went to so many different places and I was constantly taking pictures and well, frankly, you asked for it.

We arrived at the British Museum with just 2 1/2 hours before it closed. We also were introduced to Carole, who, like Roz, is just a wonderfully lovely person and we felt like we really were family, never mind all those twice-removed's and second what-nots.

Our fantastic guide book gave us a Who's Who of the British Museum, the really cool and very high profile things that we simply HAD to see or tear our hair out in regret for the rest of our lives. So, with such an immense building and with so little time, we started out. I'm not going to cover everything because, seriously, I have way too many pictures.

#1 The Rosetta Stone. This was the piece in the puzzle that allowed translation of the enigmatic Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone is actually a decree from the Pharaoh. It is the same thing written in three different languages: top portion is hieroglyph as the traditional text, then come Demotic as the basic language of the Egyptian people, followed by Greek as the Egyptians government used it. The code was broken. Now the amazing pictures could be deciphered.

These are some hieroglyphs from the side of a sarcophagus. See how hard that would be to translate?




#2 Upper Half of Ramesses II. You might remember this guy from the part he played in Moses' story. He was the one that heard "Let my people go" and then had to do just that.




#3 Egyptian gods as animal. This is Tawaret, the protectress over childbirth. I read a lot about her in the book The Red Tent.




#4 Mummies. You could spend the entire day in these four rooms and still not see everything. Here are a couple more pictures.

#8 The Goddess Sekhmet. These figures were slightly larger than life and held a personal meaning for Roz so I took lots of pictures.

#9 Fragment from the Sphinx' Beard. I didn't know what this was at first and was wondering why it was so important as to be mentioned in the book...oh, yeah! You can see the Man reflected in the glass, reading to me why this is cool.

#10 False Doors to tomb of Ptahshepses. In Egyptian tombs you will find doors that lead to nowhere. They are there to not only confuse would-be thieves but also symbolically.

Continued on the next post...