Day 2 — The British Museum by Xavier Dupuy

This is a guest post by Xavier Dupuy.

On July 8th, we went to the British Museum. I really wanted to visit the British Museum because I did an Egyptian unit in school this year and thought it was very interesting. The Rosetta Stone piqued my interest just as it had piqued everyone else’s. We got to the museum by taking the Royal Oak tube train. The train was a bit squeaky, but otherwise good. We went in the back entrance, which was a good idea, because the back was not busy at all. We started with looking at the Rosetta Stone, which definitely lived up to the hype. It was VERY fascinating to see all those languages carved into stone, and I told my brother earlier that morning about what the story was, and if you have heard what the Rosetta Stone is, it is quite cool. The Rosetta Stone has a pretty boring back (just crooked rock) but the front has 3 different languages — Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. When it was discovered in 1799, during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, it allowed us to translate hieroglyphics for the first time.

After the Rosetta Stone, we visited the the Parthenon pieces (previously known as the Elgin marbles). There were some cool pieces and some that I recognized, like ones of Dionysus and Athena, but the one I liked the most was one of a horse’s head. It was really funny just seeing the head and nothing else. There are some recent stories about the dispute between the UK and Greece about these sculptures. Very interesting reading and a difficult debate.

Finally, we went to the Lewis Chessmen. Actually, when we first got to them (which was across the museum), I had no idea that it was the first chess set ever found in 1831 in Lewis, Scotland! That was surprising to me, but I had to find it out by looking at the writing next to the chess set. There were quite a lot of chess pieces in the case, and they were different than normal chess pieces. My brother kept wanting to go to Hamley’s toy store and he kept talking about it the whole trip so after the British Museum, we went there. During my time in the British Museum, I found everything fascinating and I hope to show my social studies teacher next school year.