The great transport scheme (love the use of "scheme" here to mean any kind of "plan") of London. First half hour is free. Time your riding between these bike sites and you can ride a long time for nothing.
Some of the wonderful facades of flats along Great Russell Street where the British Museum is.
Maybe the greatest of all the museums in the world. In the 18th and 19th centuries especially the Brits scooped up natural and historical treasures from all of the world, which they mostly ruled anyway.
The modern and spectacular courtyard.
The Rosetta Stone. Always a mob in front of it. Unearthed during Napoleon's occupation of Egypt, it made possible the translation of hieroglyphics. Kids today probably think Rosetta Stone is just the name of the computer language program they see advertised on TV.
The ancient Egyptians did like large monumental sculpture.
Hieroglyphics on a coffin. I think it says, "I am somebody really important, and I expect to be immortal and live in a museum where lots of tourists will come every day and look at me."
Persian wall panel. Shows a bunch of warriors in boats. They look seriously overloaded and probably sank right after this. (Probably need to click and enlarge to see the details.)
Guardians of ancient Middle eastern city gates. How did the Brits manage to cart all this stuff back to London?
Ancient Hellenistic gold jewelry. Pretty impressive work. Loved looking at it and realizing that the earrings work just like their modern descendants 2500 years later.
Pop on that chunk of gold and head to the feast.
Great emphassis on realism in Greek sculpture.
The Parthenon Room with the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures and friezes from the Parthenon in Athens. They and their setting are amazing to see. The plaster casts in the Parthenonreplica in Nashville were made directly from these originals.
A piece of a panel showing a sacrificial procession--inspiration for the line in Keats' "Ode on A Grecian Urn" in which he describes a similar procession: "A heifer lowing at the skies. . . . "
Here's for Jamie and me. We both read the 2009 Tracy Chevalier historical novel Remarkable Creatures. It's about an uneducated woman named Mary Anning who became one of the most famous fossil hunters at the time science was just beginning to understand what fossils were. As the novel mentions, one of them was sold to the British Museum. I was wandering in the Enlightenment Room, and there it was! My own little fossil discovery.
Mary's find.
An 18th century orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. It could demonstrate the relative motions of the known planets and moons and their relation to the sun.
Celtic treasure hords. They get dug up in burial mounds in England. These "grave goods" of gold and silver went into the ground with the bodies.
A torc, two pounds of solid gold.
A guy who fell in a bog a very long time ago and got himself preserved.
Roman jewelry from the time about 2000 years ago when Britain was a Roman province. There are many Roman ruins throughout England.
The most famous burial mound found in England was Sutton Hoo. What's left of an Anglo Saxon helmet is pictured in lots of textbooks.
The Portland Font, baptismal font of 22 kt gold, made in the late 1700's for the Duke of Portland.
The 18th century was a grand time for silver and goldsmiths.
One room is the history of clocks and watches. This one has a litle ball that takes one minute to run though a set of grooves, then the dial moves and it tips the platfform and runs back. It's in the video.
The chronometer used on the HMS Beagle, the ship Charles Darwin was on in his great voyage of discovery that led to a revolution in biology.
An example of early Egyptian "natural" preservation by the dry sands and low humidity of the time.
Canopic jars. The Egyptians put the visera of people in them after removing them for the mummification process.
The Egyptians apparently mummified pretty much anything and everything. "Memset, where's your little brother. I told you to watch him." "uhhhh"
A piece of a panel showing a sacrificial procession--inspiration for the line in Keats' "Ode on A Grecian Urn" in which he describes a similar procession: "A heifer lowing at the skies. . . . "
Here's for Jamie and me. We both read the 2009 Tracy Chevalier historical novel Remarkable Creatures. It's about an uneducated woman named Mary Anning who became one of the most famous fossil hunters at the time science was just beginning to understand what fossils were. As the novel mentions, one of them was sold to the British Museum. I was wandering in the Enlightenment Room, and there it was! My own little fossil discovery.
Mary's find.
An 18th century orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system. It could demonstrate the relative motions of the known planets and moons and their relation to the sun.
Celtic treasure hords. They get dug up in burial mounds in England. These "grave goods" of gold and silver went into the ground with the bodies.
A torc, two pounds of solid gold.
A guy who fell in a bog a very long time ago and got himself preserved.
Roman jewelry from the time about 2000 years ago when Britain was a Roman province. There are many Roman ruins throughout England.
The most famous burial mound found in England was Sutton Hoo. What's left of an Anglo Saxon helmet is pictured in lots of textbooks.
The Portland Font, baptismal font of 22 kt gold, made in the late 1700's for the Duke of Portland.The 18th century was a grand time for silver and goldsmiths.
One room is the history of clocks and watches. This one has a litle ball that takes one minute to run though a set of grooves, then the dial moves and it tips the platfform and runs back. It's in the video.
The chronometer used on the HMS Beagle, the ship Charles Darwin was on in his great voyage of discovery that led to a revolution in biology.
An example of early Egyptian "natural" preservation by the dry sands and low humidity of the time.
Canopic jars. The Egyptians put the visera of people in them after removing them for the mummification process.
The Egyptians apparently mummified pretty much anything and everything. "Memset, where's your little brother. I told you to watch him." "uhhhh"Here's the clock in motion. The dial on the right changes with each cycle.
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