British History Museum

Mosaic - under the Bank of England

We went along to the British Museum the other day, where we had our terrible run-in with the worst restaurant in London.  I think the British Museum is going to be a bit like the Louvre, in that it's not really something you can tackle in a single day.  We went straight passed the hordes surrounding the Rosetta stone and up to the medieval Europe section. 

The British Museum is a funny place, just like the Louvre is kind of a memorial to the pillaging of Napoleon, the British Museum is dedicated to the pillaging of the world.  If there's one thing the British did well (at least in quantity) it was colonisation.  And all these lovely artifacts from around the world thus ended up in the museum. 

There's a lot of annoyed countries demanding the return of historical artifacts.  The British Museum's argument is that they can better care for the objects than those countries.  It's a funny argument, can any country claim ownership of humanities shared history?  Just because something comes from a paticular country does that country necessarily have a bigger connection to the object than other people?  Can the British Museum really look after objects better than other countries, or is it more that if the artefacts are returned the British Museum is likely to find itself obsolete?  It has returned some things though, the remains of Tasmanian aborigines for one, after a 20 year battle, but I guess it's not completely inhumane.

Bronze horned helmet 150-50BC, found in the Thames

Recently there has been a radio programme here, a daily show running for 15 minutes which covers 100 objects in the Museum which have shaped human history.  These then become sort of the top-100 things to see in the museum, which is very smart as it gets people away from the Rosetta stone and the Elgin marbles and into the rest of the museum.  Though it's good to see that the curator of the museum chose as one of these top 100 the gold Mold cape.   This is a 4000 year old cape or solid gold which Wales is desperately trying to get returned.  That's never happening though.