The British Museum

I spent a respectable chunk of the afternoon labeling and organizing my family's digital pix from our London trip. Check me out in front of the famous reading room at the British Museum.

I went to this Museum practically on a weekly basis while I was a student in London. So I wasn't expecting to see anything particularly surprising during this visit. I was happy to be wrong. Just off the American exhibit, there was a little room filled with Mayan antiquities. I actually did a little dance, you know, the kind where you hop up and down and clap your hands and say "oooh! ooooh!" Below is a picture I took of Lintel 24. In one of my last semesters at the Y, I took Mayan Art and Culture 425 with Dr. Allen Christensen. Dr. Christensen is one of the foremost authorities in the field of Mayan everything. (I would love to hear what he has to say about Gibson's Apocalypto...) Imagine, a huge culture, rich in theology and steeped in tradition and art, that mysteriously disappears so suddenly that the language system is almost lost. For years, anything that was known about the Mayan was due either to remnants of theology that swim under the surface of contemporary religious rituals, or to interpretations made of discovered artifacts and temple murals. Without access to the language, all that could be read was their art. It is fascinating to me. Thanks to the work of Dr. Christensen and others, the language is fluently spoken again by more of the Mayan, and more correct interpretations are being made of what little text has been discovered. Consequently this is a field of study that is continually in flux. As part of the class we studied and memorized so many artifacts. Sometimes, we didn't even have photo's of the artifacts, just sketched pictures. Hence my delight in coming face to face with this amazing piece of history.

Lintel 24 portrays a royal blood letting ceremony. Kinda gross. The kneeling queen is pulling a thorn-laced chord through her tongue. (The kings let their blood from a different place that is better left unmentioned.) Mayan theology is saturated in doctrine of rebirth. This was a ceremony regularly performed by the royal heads of the society to insure the perpetuation of their way of life. It was incredible to see it along with the other lintels and artifacts the museum had on display.

Of course, it was amazing revisiting all the regular wonders; the Rosetta Stone, the Sutton Hoo treasure, and the Elgin Marbles. Gracie's reaction was pretty predictable. She was either in vocal opposition to being buckled into the stroller (like in the photo below), asleep, or happy in her dad's arms.

We rounded off the visit with a pricey trip to the bookstore. We got a coffee table book with illustrations of the BM's collections, a book regarding the history of idioms (very interesting), and a Jane Austen Cookbook (very cool).