YOUR SAY

BRITISH MUSEUM TASK

While we were in London, we visited the British Museum. There, we had to do one task that consisted in finding some artworks in the museum. So we divided us in groups of 4-5 and we started searching. My group and I found them all:

ROSETTA STONE: The first work that we had to find was the famous Rosetta Stone, which is a granodiorite stele found in 1799. Its importance is huge because it is written in Ancient Egyptian using the hieroglyphic script, using the Demotic script and also in Ancient Greek. The three versions say almost the same, so the discovery of Rosetta Stone helped deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs (as the Greek was a known language). For me, Rosetta Stone is one of the “must-see” of the British Museum. Although, it was a shame that there were a lot of people all the time contemplating it, so we couldn’t appreciate it properly.

EGYPTIAN MUMMIES: The British Museum has 120 Egyptian human mummies and over 300 animal mummies (most of them are cats). A curious fact is that the museum has a four metre long mummified crocodile! But we weren’t able to find it. At the end, we only took a photo of a normal mummy. For me, mummies have always caught my attention, because I find them very curious. So it was nice to see some of them.

ASSYRIAN LION HUNT RELIEFS: Before I went to the museum, I didn’t know about these reliefs, but now I have investigated and I found out that they are regarded as "the supreme masterpieces of Assyrian art", and that they were found in the North Palace of Nineveh. The reliefs show a ritual hunt done by King Ashurbanipal in an arena, where he had to kill Asian lions with arrows, spears or his sword. It wasn’t the artwork that I liked the most in the museum, but it was good and interesting to see it.

PARTHENON SCULPTURES: The Parthenon is an ancient temple located on the Athenian Acropolis in Greece), and it’s dedicated to the goddess Athena. It was constructed between the 447 BC and the 438 BC and it’s considered the most important surviving building of Classical Greece and one of the world’s greatest cultural monuments. Although the temple is situated in Greece, the Parthenon sculptures of the facade are in the British Museum. This artwork was one of the most interesting ones for me, because in the subject History of Art we have studied it, so it was nice to see the original ones. Also, the Ancient Greek period has always caught my attention. 

CYRUS CYLINDER: It is an ancient clay cylinder (now broken into several pieces) on which is explained the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 539 BC and his own work at Babylon. The cylindrical form is typical of royal inscriptions of the Late Babylonian period. As the Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs, I didn’t know about this artwork before, but it was interesting and now I know more things about it.

SOMETHING THAT IT IS NOT ANCIENT: One thing that we found that it wasn’t ancient (and that also was really curious) is an exposition called “Cradle to Grave”, which showed how many pills takes an average person during its lifetime. In total, there were about 14,000! When you think about it, there’s so many pills, so it was really interesting to see it.

THE MOST CURIOUS OR SURPRISING OBJECT: Finally, we had to take a photo of the most curious or surprising object. In my case, I took a photo of a tree made of iron. I like it a lot because I think it’s original to represent nature using iron; it’s like a paradox. I don’t know exactly why, but I loved it.