London - The British Museum and a Cold

Between Wednesday and Friday I managed a tour of the British Museum and managed to get a nasty cold that kept me out of action for most of Thursday. Disappointing but I didn't mind a day off. The rest of my time was mostly spent at the British Museum, one of the largest museums in the world and a centre of controversy over how many of the items were acquired.

To be fair the British didn't pillage them the way the Spanish did. Everything was purchased from somebody. However, to use the most famous example the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon, they were not purchased by the people who's ancestors built them but by the colonial power in charge. In brief Lord Elgin went to Greece in 1812 while serving at the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire and purchased a right to do an archaeological survey of the Parthenon and to remove items for study. This was granted by the Ottoman sultan who ruled Greece at the time. The problem is that no Greeks were consulted and no limit was given to the time Lord Elgin could have them. The result is that he took parts of the Parthenon back to London. In 1816 the British government purchased them and they have been at the museum ever since. Of course today independent Greece wants the statues and fresco's taken from the Parthenon to be returned. The problem of course is that Lord Elgin went about removing them legally at the time, but the Greeks had no say as they were ruled as a colony of the Ottomans who had no right to be in Greece in the first place. You can see the dilemma. This story was repeated in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, China, India and elsewhere. However today they are preserved much better than they would be in many of those countries (the British Museum has the second largest collection of Assyrian artifacts taken from modern day Iraq before WWI. The largest had been at the Baghdad Museum, but after 2003 much of it was pillaged and stolen and the British Museum may now have the largest collection of any museum).

Regardless of HOW they got it the museum today boasts an amazing collection of artifacts from all over the globe, though by far the most impressive collections are from Greece, Rome and Egypt. To look at busts carved in 1600 BC is mind boggling. It was so impressive and large that I took two full days to explore it all. I say two because on Thursday I had a very nasty cold that took me no farther than the Thames for a walk. I left Friday with a sense of awe that can not be explained. An amazing place to visit.