If you thought I was done with the British Museum after my first trip, you are sorely mistaken. Carolyn and I decided to hit up a little culture while she was in town and, when I found out she had never been, we hopped a train to see some of the British Museum. Last time, I focused on the large monumental Egyptian pieces that had been ‘acquired’ from that part of the world. This time around, it was time for the funerary practices. That’d be mummies. Cool!

When you think of Egyptian burials, you think the iconic image of King Tut. However, when a civilization lasts in various forms for 4000 years, the trends differ, sometimes in small ways sometimes in large ways. For example, as Egypt lost it’s independence to the Romans, you suddenly start seeing the style of the portraits on the front of the coffins/sarcophagus’ take on a very Roman look. There’s one in the museum’s collection that is actually a frieze that looks like something found in Pompeii. There were also different types of wrapping. Depending on the person, the quality of what they were bured in could be quite different.

This was a very well-to-do citizen’s sarcophgus. These are the two inner-most parts of her burial. She was buried like one of those Russian dolls with layer upon layer of coffin.

Since the Egyptians belief in the after-life was that you ended up in a world not unlike the temporal world, they wanted to make sure you had everything you needed to live a good life. So they added things like food, coins and, in this picture above, beer to your tomb so you could enjoy a nice ale (right) while chilling out for eternity.

Since Carolyn had never been to the museum, we back-tracked to the monumental Egyptian section so she could see the large statues and the Rosette Stone. This allowed my to get a picture of the arm that used to be part of a very large statue:

It’s not 100 feet long, but it’s pretty big. 🙂

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 5:02 am and is filed under Life Abroad, London, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.