****The British Museum is a staple of my experience in London. I visit it at least 3 times a week, and I never cease to find something new and captivating. They certainly left no stone unturned (or untaken) in their plundering.

The BM isn't just a repository of random stuff; it is in and of itself, a grand statement of the history of civilization. The layout and the items therein are all carefully constructed to tell the story of historical orthodoxy. History begins at Sumer and proceeds through Babylon to Crete to Greece to Rome to the Franks to France to England. End of story. Yeah, Egypt and Byzantium fit in there too... but the museum doesn't say how.

That said, the reason I can spend hours and hours in there is because the relation between the civilizations, expressed merely through their artifacts, is amazingly compelling. I can walk from Akkad to Greece, from Rome to Francia, from Crete to Etruscan Italy, and all the pieces fit together. Animals become gods, gods become angels, Greek letters become Latin! The only curious part is how Egypt doesn't quite fit. I mean, Egypt seems to be an outlier without obvious effects on later civilizations... Maybe the idea of the ka being weighed against one's soul to determine salvation... but the rest is very curious.


Egypt isn't the only peculiarity in the story told by the BM. From walking around, you'd think that Western Civ was the only human civilization that survived. Oddly enough, Western Civ is represented by some (almost campy) Western decorative arts. Does Roccoco really represent our cultural superiority?

The entirety of Islamic civilization is an easily overlooked appendage to the narrative. While one could argue that Islam is the true inheritor of the Semitic civilization of Mesopotamia (Hamurabbi's Code is much more like Sharia than it is like Napoleonic Code), the Islamic display is literally off to the side and separate from the rest.

Of course even that is better than Africa which has an even more paltry display in the basement. (Though admittedly Coptic Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nubia(Sudan) have a section upstairs in the Late Antique area of Egypt). Most of the Africa display seems to focus on symbolic crosses in Ashante artwork that led the early Portuguese explorers to think they had found Prester John (The semi-legendary Christian king who was supposedly going to help Western Christendom fight Islam). There is no answer though. What ARE these crosses???

The most impressive African artifacts are a series of bronze plaques from Benin that compare very favorably, in my opinion, with the plaques of the baptistery in Florence by Ghiberti. I'll leave this up to you:







Finally, there is Asian civilization. This is granted it's own area with large open spaces separating it from the other displays. There are no connections to other forms of civilization... India, China, Japan, and Korea exist on their own. For example, the role that Greeks played in the spread off Buddhism and their influence on Buddhist art is ignored. By separating Asia from "civilization" it is implied to be an interesting curiosity, but ultimately irrelevant to the future of humanity... the future that lies on the path of the grand narrative.

Regardless of what one thinks about what the museum it self says, its value as a repository is boundless, and with a critical mind and open eyes, one can draw their own conclusions as to how our ancestors made us who we are.

??.??.? punjabi tangiers 0rz