London Museums & Art Galleries

London Museums & Art Galleries of interest to me

The British Museum

This will be my first blog on the British Museum but certainly will not be my last.

I went to the museum on my first Saturday (23rd July) as I was given a one hour small group walk around the Egyptian section of the museum. I took no photos at the time but instead listened and when I was not quite comfortable with explanations, being me, I asked questions.

Once the guided talk was over I went to find the early writing section, which was also part of the Sumerian collection.

I present below images and some notes covering what I saw

The Rosetta stone is one of the most important artefacts ever discovered concerning the ancient world. The stone became the key to 'decypher' the scripts of the Ancient Egyptians, that we know as Hieroglyphics. The trilingual stone, dated to 27th March, 196 bce, shows the same decree in three different scripts, being Hieroglyphics (the written script of the priests), demotic (the everyday script of the literate classes ), and Ancient Greek, a script and language studied & understood by most scholars of the time.

The other critical key for understanding the Ancient Asia Minor world was made about 50 years later when the trilingual Behistan Inscription was deciphered via the understanding of Old Persian, which led to the deciphering of the Eliamite script and finally the cuneiform script