The Egypt Wing of the British Museum

The next morning, I was very excited to head to the British Museum.  

I was pretty impressed with London's public transportation system.  This is an oyster card.  You preload it with $ (well, pounds, lol) and then embarking on the tube, or the busses, or the river Uber, you just tap it.  Super easy.  I used the City Mapper app (recommended by a video I watched on YouTube when I was "researching" obsessing? before my trip) to tell me the best way to get from my hotel to the British Museum, and it was quite simple.  Bus stop across the street from my hotel, quick ride, and then a short walk.  

And there it is.  There was a huge line to get through security, but it was moving fairly quickly.  The museum itself is free--which means I feel obligated to support them in the gift shop!  

The iconic glass ceiling I recognized from videos.  I wanted to see the Egypt wing first.  

And this is one of the pillars at the entrance to that area.  

There's the Rosetta Stone.  Wow.  

It's thicker than I expected.  

Words really cannot do this series of rooms justice.  

While it was thrilling to see so many neat artifacts, 

Including up close & personal hieroglyphics, 

And even chunks of wall with paint still left on the intricately carved surfaces, 

My main takeaway was 

Holy cow, did the Brits absolutely freaking plunder Egypt.

Like at first I was all, "Whoa, cool."

But after a while, there's just more and more and more of it... I almost felt... angry.  Particularly knowing that Egypt has asked for some of this stuff back.  

Nice kitty

He's annoyed at all the noisy schoolchildren.

And he's covered in cuneiform.  

They have the Assyrian stuff tucked in a back corner of the Egyptian wing.

This guy reminds me of the way Bri and I tease about touching things we're not supposed to touch in museums.  

Recreation of a gate.

Can you imagine making a mistake?  There's no Wite Out or erasers back then.  "Whoops, guess I need to find a new rock."

Stretched out panoramic view of a hallway gallery.  

A modern relic that spoke to me.  I bet it was a real workhorse in it's day.

This is the point where I suddenly realized I missed Grumman.  

I mean, what a colonialist thing to do.  Hey, these are neat columns!  Let's haul 'em back to the ship and take them home to jolly ol' England.  Who does that?

Okay, so that's the end of the downstairs Egypt wing.  But I'm going to tack on some more Egypt stuff I stumbled across later upstairs for the sake of continuity:  

Is that?  Yep.  Thassa mummy.  

I can see having one sarcophagus, and one mummy, and displaying them with lots of information.  

But when it's sarcophagus after sarcophagus and mummy after mummy, it gets to feeling icky again.

I did briefly rouse to inspect the canopic jars with interest.  

We made (okay, we painted) canopic jars when we learned about Egypt in our homeschool way back when.  

Sigh.