Tag: British Museum

This was from my visit to the British Museum a few weeks ago, the most viewed object in the collections apparently. This has meant that I’ve never really seen it that clearly before, it’s like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, there are nearly always other visitors standing there and taking photos in front of it. Hence why I took so many photos of it this time with the museum being so empty when I visited in late October.

There’s not much point writing much about the Rosetta Stone, it’s done much better in countless other places. But it dates to 196BC and it was rediscovered by the French in 1799, with the British deciding that they wanted it in 1802. The stone went to the British Museum in the same year and it has been there ever since. As visitors kept fiddling with it, the stone was barriered off in 1847, not that this stopped some people. Since 2004 it has been placed behind a rather more secure screen.

This doesn’t look quite as painful as the damaged spine, but this badly reset right femur must have been awkward as well. The bone was found in Upper Egypt and was acquired by the British Museum in 1902. The bone is from a mummy, so I’m not sure where the rest of the body is.

I like random exhibits like this, which is on the theme of mistaken identity at the British Museum. These pots were found off Herne Bay in Kent in 1776 and were presented to the museum. They weren’t thought to be of a good enough quality to be Roman, so it was decided that they were “probably Brazilian”. I’m not quite sure what that says about what the thoughts were of the time about Brazilian pottery, but it transpired later on that these were indeed Roman and a ship had been wrecked whilst bringing this Samian ware over from Gaul.

This is thought to be one of the earliest prosthetics used in the world, dating to around 1070BC to 664BC and it was found in Egypt. It’s not known whether the person had this toe when they were alive, as it’s possible that it was to fix a little accident caused by the mummification process. There was once something in the toenail bed (is that a proper term?) to recreate the nail, but that has been lost. The item was purchased in 1881 from Rev Greville John Chester, a clergyman who decided he fancied partaking in some adventures in Egypt in the mid nineteenth century.

I’m not sure quite what this young bull would have thought of spending his life in eternity like this, but he lived in the period after 30AD. The bull was found in Thebes, an ancient Egyptian city, and was acquired by the British Museum in 1821 from the archaeologist Henry Salt. Salt did a good job at sourcing items for the museum, forming a strong relationship with the ruler of Egypt, the Pasha Mohamed Ali, with large numbers of items leaving the country.

I’m not a medical expert, but I can write with some confidence that this isn’t ideal. It’s the spine of a female, aged between 20 and 34, who was suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, with the damage being so severe that the vertebrae have fused together and collapsed. The museum notes that this would have “significantly affected her mobility”, which is no doubt true, but I can’t imagine how painful this must have been as well. The body was found in Sudan, but the aging is quite wide, the lady could have lived during any period between the fourth and fifteenth centuries.

I like a nice book, although this isn’t exactly a big chunk of documentation. It’s a parchment dating to around the ninth or tenth centuries from the Nubians, a population who lived in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. The word in red is the ‘Archangel Michael’ and I hadn’t realised that the Nubians had converted to Christianity (but, it’s not something I’ve given a great deal of thought to in the past), although today this population is mostly Islam.