The British Museum

Ron and I had been wanting to go to London to visit the British Museum, and we finally got the chance this past week-end. We spent most of two days there, and we still did not see everything we wanted to see! (I'm afraid this post is kind of long, but I did leave out lots of photos!.....)




The next photo of the outside of the building shows an advertisement for the exhibit of the Chinese Terracotta army of the first emperor of China. We got to go to that exhibit, but we could not take pictures there. It was such an interesting exhibit---there were many of the actual terracotta soldiers, as well as other artifacts.


The next picture is one of the inside of the building. The exhibit sections go off from this circular hallway, and then more exhibits are on other floors.

I had expected the museum to be more like the Smithsonian, but instead of many buildings, it is located in one huge building, which covers about 13 acres. It is a museum of human history and culture, so it does not have sections such as Air and Space or Transportation or Natural History, as the Smithsonian does. It was begun in 1753 and has been the recipient of extensive private collections and donations.
The museum is divided into sections, such as Ancient Eygpt, Greek and Roman Antiquities, Middle East, and the Department of Prehistory and Europe. It has acquired objects of historical importance that do not exist anywhere else in the world. It has also acquired parts of collections that exist only in a few museums, such as ones in Cairo or Rome, etc.
The most facinating things to us, and especially to Ron because of his long-time interest in Biblical archeology, were objects that we had heard about for years.

One in particular was the Rosetta Stone. (If you click on the photos, they will be enlarged.)



The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by an officer in Napoleon's army, and it came to the museum in 1802. It contains the same message in 2 different languages, Egyptian and Greek. The Egyptian is recorded in two different scripts, one of which is heiroglyphics. This stone became the key to unlocking the mystery of the heiroglyphic script and made possible the translation of Egyptian writings.


Another interesting object is the Cyrus Cylinder, which contains an account by Cyrus, king of Persia, of his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC and the plan for the return of captives in Babylon to their homelands to rebuild their temples.





Next is an obelisk from the time of Shalmaneser III. One panel on it shows the Israelite King Jahu before Shalmaneser.


The inscription beside #2 tells about the above panel.



Next is from the palace of King Sargon. His son was Sennacherib.






Next is from King Artaxerxes.





Ron is looking at some of the many Egyptian panels.



II Chronicles says that when Sennacherib invaded Palestine (about 700 B.C.) he established his headquarters in front of Lachish. The Bible doesn't say more about the fate of Lachish, but the panels in the following photos were taken from Sennacherib's palace in Nineveh, and they show the defeat of Lachish and the spoils of the defeat being presented to Sennacherib.





It is fascinating to see objects that have been discovered over the last 200 years that verify names and places from the Bible! So many of those names and places had never been found or recorded outside of the Bible before the discoveries. How can the Bible not be true??