What to See in the British Museum

I'm not a great museum fan so I'm going to prepare for the London museums and know what I'm supposed to see in each one, even though wandering serendipitously is my preferred method of tourism.  Penny can help us out here.  I was going to post several museums here but the British Museum, its Blog and Tweets, got me sidetracked.

The British Museum

Is this what the British took from other countries during its imperial period?  TimeOut London has a 2015 article on The Seven Wonders of the British Museum which are a bit quirky.  The British Museum itself lists 9 items to see in One Hour, including the Rosetta Stone, the Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs, and the Parthenon sculptures.  In a Three Hour visit, they list 25 items, including an Astrolabe, which might be of interest to Fernando, and The Flood Tablet, relating the Gilgamesh version of the flood.  You can read more about the ark before Noah in the BM Blog posting by Irving Finkel: "Was the ark round?  A Babylonian description discovered."  And you can read even more about the palm and pitch coracle in this Daily Mail article: "Is this the REAL Noah's Ark? Scaled-down replica based on 4000-year-old Babylonian tablet's instructions is rebuilt by hand."

Pazuzu

Irving Finkel has more interesting things to tell you about Mesopotamian demons, ghosts and sprites and how to deal with them in this YouTube video.  You can subscribe to the British Museum YouTube Channel and learn all sorts of things, not about London, of course, but it will get you into the BM spirit so that you can appreciate their collection better.  And you can also subscribe to the British Museum Twitter feed, if you happen to have an account and actually look at the thing.  Or sign up for the British Museum's email newsletter -- there's a signup box at the bottom of their pages.

You can learn more about the museum's collection by reading the Museum Stories in the British Museum Blog where objects are put into their historical context.  There's a recent blog on Suffrage Objects in the British Musuem, at the end of which the author says that the Museum of London is the place to go for the Women's Suffrage Movement.  And that's where we'll go next.  Oh.  Did I mention that the British Museum and the Museum of London are free?  Maybe Penny will get her wish and our lives will be spent in London museums...  and churches for free lunchtime concerts...