British Museum Amazes!

Desiring more time at the British Museum, we devoted Saturday to our return visit. We arrived earlier, around 10:30 a.m., got through the security line, and began our exploration. This museum is spectacular outside:

and inside:

In the main area we were greeted by this royal creature:

and by this Quartzite head of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III dating from 1400 BC!

When we visited the British Museum 5 years ago, Jane's absolute favorite part of the museum was the Assyrian exhibit, and it still is. This five-legged horse greeted us as we entered the exhibit, as it would have at the entry to the palace 3,000 years before:

The tablets we witnessed exuded a sense of the enormity of that which has been recovered; to Jane's left is a depiction of two Kings, one with the gift of two monkeys, and the other holding up two fists in a sign of submission to a more powerful King, Tiglath-Pileser III, King of Assyria, 744 BC:

The tablets in the exhibit came from the Palace of Tiglath-Pileser III at Nimrud in Northern Iraq and date from 865-860 BC! The tablets depict rich stories of battles and of life in those times.

Below is one of our favorite tablets; there is a lot going on. There is fighting on both sides of a wall, a soldier is trying to climb up the wall, a spy is getting thrown off the wall, an invader is trying to crawl through a tunnel, and a soldier is trying to dig a tunnel.

This next tablet is interesting because it depicts a wheeled battering ram in a battle, which we thought was pretty high-tech for BC times!:

There are many beautiful sculptures to be found in the British Museum. Here is Lely's Venus (Aphrodite), 1st or 2nd century A.D.:

Another depiction of Venus:

Kew Gardens' Hermes (Mercury), 330-300 BC, without his winged shoes:

Hermes Farnese from the 2nd century AD, this time with his winged shoes:

Brock in his youth, admired by Jane:

Jane in her youth, admired by Brock:

The Nereid Monument, the largest and finest of the Lykian tombs found at Xanthous in Southwest Turkey, built around 390-380 BC:

The British Museum has a huge room filled with the original marble sculptures which lined the top of the Parthenon (built 447-432 BC):

The Mayan Lintel below (A. D. 770) was fascinating to us. From a culture with no contact or communication, the lintel is very similar in nature and style to the Assyrian tablets at approximately the same period of history. This depicts a woman on the left pulling a rope through her tongue, and her husband Bird Jaguar is on the right, about to let blood from parts unmentionable!

A sculpture of King George III, who made America possible

by going broke just prior to 1776:

This is just a small sample of the amazing things we saw in the museum. It would take years to examine everything in this museum. Come to London, it's a must to visit!