Ten MORE Must See Treasures Of The British Museum An In Depth Guided Tour

Ancient paint pigment in the palette's wells and they're thousands of years old. I'm Jessica the Museum Guide and today I'm back at the British Museum to show you 10 more must-see treasures that you can't miss when you come here. Today we're covering 10 more magical objects that I didn't include in my top 10 video. These are some of the most storied and awe-inspiring objects in the history of the world. They're things that change our perception of time, space, and history. Some of them, like the Tomb at Halicarnassus and the bust of Rameses II, are monolithic, while others, like the Cyrus Cylinder, can fit in the palm of your hand. But they're all united by mystery and fascination. I like to call this the Museum Magic. See, in my first British Museum top 10 video it was the things that you would expect to see, but I had a bit more creative license when choosing these ones today so I really hope you enjoy. Of course the best way to see the British Museum is on a tour with me and you can find all those links below. Let me also pause here to say that the British Museum is a place rife with controversies. I've got an entire video dedicated to that topic so I'm not really going to be touching on it too much today, but I want to be clear that I believe in repatriation of contested objects and I also believe that you can criticize an institution that you love. I love the British Museum but I don't think it's beyond reproach and I disagree with a lot of the things that they do. If you're new to my channel, welcome! I'm delighted to have you here and I hope that you enjoy this video and choose to like and subscribe. If you'd like to see even more content, then head on over to my Patreon channel. There, I release at least one extra video every month. This month it's an extra tour in the British Museum, all of the Egyptian artifacts associated with King Tutankhamen and his mysterious father. On Patreon, I also give out invites to my free annual in-person tours in London and you'll get access to my back catalogue as well. I'll see you over on Patreon. Just a note, my top 10 list is not in order of how important I think the objects are. I've purely ordered it chronologically. So, let's get started with the oldest object on our list. Number one, the mould gold cape. Now of course, normally when I'm talking about ancient things in the British Museum, we're in Rome or Greece or Egypt or Mesopotamia. But actually, the mould gold cape is from this island, though not England. It's from Wales. It's made of a solid sheet of gold and it dates from between 1900 to 1600 BCE. That's right, the mould gold cape is nearly 4,000 years old. It's named for a town in Flintshire, in Wales. And though it's endlessly fascinating, we don't know who it was for, why it was worn, or any of its symbolism. That's right, there was no writing here on this island before the Romans. This was part of a Bronze Age burial mound called Bryn Ur Allodon, which translates to Goblin Hill, and you know I love that. It was split into many, many fragments, about 200 to 300 bits, along with some amber beads in rows. They were originally on the cape, but only a single bead survives today. The amber beads must have come from the Baltic region, and it's amazing to think of that trade taking place all the way back then. Sadly, this wasn't carefully excavated. We probably would have found those amber beads if it was. And also, the skeleton said to have accompanied it, and that's long gone too, and it could have told us so much. It was excitedly pulled up out of the ground by workers, who divvied up the treasure between them. I mean, who could blame them? The cape was on the body of a person interred in a stone-lined grave. The local vicar, though, he was intrigued by the find, and he wrote an account that aroused the interests of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. He was able to convince a few of the local guys to go home and retrieve and return the pieces that they had taken. The farmer whose land it was found on sold the largest piece to the British Museum, but it did take over a hundred years for the British Museum to collect enough pieces to start to reconstruct the cape. It's so small that it could have only fit a teenager or a very slight adult. You can see here that she needed a lot of help to get it on. She's really tiny too. With the cape were some remains of coarse cloth and 15 fragments of sheet bronze. These were likely backing for the gold attached with bronze rivets. Two gold straps were found as well, alongside an urn with large quantities of bone and ash. Experts on this period of archaeology believe that it was worn for ceremonial purposes by a small woman. It was probably her skeleton that was originally discovered. Wait, that made it sound like the girl in the photo. No, whoever wore it originally 4,000 years ago, not this nice lady. But believe it or not, it was beaten out of a single ingot of gold, roughly the size of a ping-pong ball. It would have taken a huge amount of time and effort and skill. And then of course, as we can see, it was elaborately decorated with repoussé designs, and that word means pushed out. You can see that on the ribs and concentric rings. So of course it's fascinating because it's ancient and it's beautiful, but it also shows us a mix of local Britannic and continental influences. We can see similar decorative motif in other Bronze Age metalwork from Scotland. Look at the lenticular bosses found on this Migdale bronze necklace spacer, and these bronze amulets found at Melfort in Argyle, Scotland. But also, the similarities in this bull from Rangers in eastern France, and that one is itself influenced by Central European designs. It's so fine and delicate, but the next millennia will be all about massive gold work, like these huge torques. But that's gonna have to wait for another video. Today's video is sponsored by... me! Instead of a sponsor for today's video, I want to tell you guys about a bunch of new exciting projects that I'm currently working on. The first one is with Voicemap, a platform for curiously human audio tour guides. I've recorded an audio tour of the British Museum that's available right now on the Voicemap app and website. I'm also releasing an audio tour of the Louvre in the next couple of weeks. Even if you're not planning a visit to the British Museum, you can download it and listen to it at home and just refer to pictures. It's like being on a tour with me. The second project I wanted to tell you about was my newly released schedule of small group tours. In the past, I've always been a purely private tour guide, and I'm still available for private tours when you're in London or Canterbury. However, I've also decided to release a number of small group tours at the British Museum. They're available by booking directly on my website or through Get Your Guide, and I'll just pop those links below. The small group tours of 8 to 10 people allow you to experience essentially a private tour with me or one of my amazing guides and see the highlights of the British Museum just in the same way that I share them on my channel. But the small group tours are a bit easier on the pocketbook than the private ones. Now we're downstairs in room 4. Now we're in this room to talk about the fellow just behind me, Ramesses II, or Ramses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. But I don't want to talk about this statue or this one or any of the many others in this room. I call him the selfie king for a reason. I want to talk about this one. It's fitting that he has a crowd around him. Look at the way he's gazing down at us. That's rather unusual for a statue of this type, and confusingly this statue has been given the official name the Younger Memnon, and that's just owing to a mistake everyone made at the time that it was discovered. This statue was likely mistaken for one of those, but no, this is the vaunted Ramesses the Great. Now what can I say about this legendary king? Well, he was the third pharaoh of the 19th dynasty in this time period, and he lived between 1303 and 1213 BCE. He's often labeled as the most important and most powerful pharaoh of the new kingdom. He conducted at least 15 successful military campaigns and ruled for 66 years. He also had somewhere between 100 and 120 children with his many wives, and he was also worshipped as a deity during his own lifetime. Not too shabby. I'll save more of his bio for when I actually visit Egypt again, this time for my channel, and hopefully that's sometime soon. In the third year of his reign, Ramesses started the most ambitious building project after the pyramids. Remember, those were built almost 1500 years earlier. This included the monolithic Ramessium. Today it might not be more than ruins, but it was the grandest temple complex in Egypt at the time it was constructed. This particular statue stood at the entrance to the He is wearing the headdress with the cobra diadem on top, symbolizing his power. Sadly, his head was torn apart from the rest of his body, first by the French. See, Napoleon's men tried and failed to hoist this guy out of Egypt after his failed 1798 campaign. That's the same time period when they found the Rosetta Stone, by the way. That's likely when the hole in his breast was made. I've heard urban legends that the French under Napoleon were going to fill that hole with dynamite so that they could blow him up to pick up the pieces and take them back to France easily, but that's got to be an urban legend, right? Somebody let me know in the comments. A few decades later, British Consul General Henry Salt decided he wanted to bring this statue to England. That's a classic attitude. Salt is responsible for a lot of what is here in this gallery. In 1815, he hired an Italian circus sideshow strongman turned archaeologist and fixer named Giovanni Belzoni to help him. Belzoni used his skills with hydraulics and engineering to get the bust to the banks of the Nile. He acquired a boat, then loaded up his booty at the end of 1816. The head finally arrived in 1818 in Deptford and was purchased from Salt by the British Museum in 1821. When the Egyptian sculpture hall was completed a little over a decade later, the massive bust took pride of place. But we need to remember that plunder like this has always been controversial. It wasn't that it was a different time and everybody thought this was the right thing to do. No, there were vocal critics against what they saw as the sacking of the ancient world even at the time. People like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were outspoken in their criticism against what Henry Salt and other antiquarians were doing. In fact, while this huge bust was a major news story as it crossed the ocean, Shelley wrote a famous sonnet about it. You might know the name of the poem. It's Rameses II's Greek name, Ozymandias. The poem goes, I met a traveller from an antique land. And the poem continues on. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but its most famous lines are, My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. Now the poem is all about the hubris of a great leader who believes that their sculptures and monuments will outlive them. But it has also been interpreted as an indictment of the West plundering the treasures of the East and putting them in big sculpture holes like this one. Now here on the back of the huge bust we can also see the hieroglyph cartouche showing us the name of Rameses II. We're now in the tomb chapel of Nebemun and this room is, wow, I mean just wow. I think I've said that a lot on this tour today. It dates to the 18th dynasty and that's between 1550 and 1295 BCE, so around 3500 years ago. Nebemun was buried in the Theban necropolis which is located on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes and that's called Luxor today. The gallery at the British Museum is a series of lavishly illustrated frescoes depicting idealized scenes from Nebemun's life. He was a middle-ranking official scribe and grain counter. I often call the British Museum's mummies upper and middle management so I get a kick out of this. I mean scribes were a very very illustrious and well-paying job. In the early 2000s the British Museum underwent a 10-year period of conservation and research before opening this gallery and the Remember, at the time of Nebemun's death this wouldn't have been a sealed burial chamber meant to keep people out. It was a little bit like a museum. People would come to visit and make offerings for his better treatment in the afterlife. So the way that everything here is arranged now is meant to give us the impression of what it would have been like to actually enter into a shrine like this. Now though we know that this hails from the Theban region we don't know the exact location much to the chagrin of archaeologists. It was shrouded in secrecy during its excavation to maintain competition between excavators. We simply don't know where the young Greek excavator Giovanni or Yanni Dathanassi found it. He was working on behalf of Dathanassi clawed these frescoes out with a crowbar and he died in poverty having never revealed their exact location. Now though Nebemun wasn't the wealthiest of men he did have a grand luxurious tomb and a lot of these paintings are a lot of fun. Let's have a look at one of the best known from this assemblage. It's called Nebemun Hunting in the Marshes. Here we can see Nebemun in a small boat with his wife Hatshepsut and their young daughter in the marshes of the Nile. The hieroglyphic caption reads that he was quote enjoying himself and seeing beauty. He is surrounded by lotus flowers and plain tiger butterflies and look here at this cat. It's my favorite detail. He's catching birds and it shows that while cats were family pets they could also represent the sun god hunting the enemies of light and order. That's because the cat has a bit of gold gilding on his eye. This is highly unusual and might have been done to draw attention to the religious meanings of the scene. Now the symbolism of the fertile marsh should not be overlooked. They were seen as erotic places evocative of rebirth and the hunting itself could represent Nebemun's triumph over nature as his soul was reborn. But of course dominating the scene is the large figure of Nebemun forever young and strong. Now this is the part that might actually blow my mind the most. These are paint brushes and a painter's palette that date from this time period. There's ancient paint pigment in the palette's wells. These are the actual types of brushes and paints that were used to paint Nebemun's chapel and they're thousands of years old. Just look at the way they're carrying these hairs by the ears. So evocative. Let's look together at one more scene here. Now this is the feast to honor Nebemun. There are naked servant girls and servants waiting on his friends and relatives and the married guests are in pairs while the young women turn and talk to each other. Everyone is entertained by the dancers and the musicians. Here's some of the dancers here. There are some people are sitting on the ground and even clapping along. The words of the song in honor of Nebemun are in the hieroglyphs here. The earth god has caused his beauty to grow in every body and channels are filled with waters anew so the land is flooded for the love of him. I mean that's quite an ode for a scribe. Now we can see that some of the figures are actually looking out and facing towards us. This is highly unusual in ancient Egyptian art and it gives these lower class women a less formal and more lively appearance than the wealthier guests. Everyone's wearing fine linens. They're all draped gracefully around their body. Ideally this kind of erotic scene of wealth and relaxation is something that Nebemun can look forward to enjoying for the rest of eternity. As we walk through room 61 we can see objects on display from the same time period. Oh remember these things belonged to the wealthy and they survived inside the tomb. Average people aren't really represented well in the archaeological record. Now I want to talk about some of the majestic neo-Assyrian treasures that the British Museum has here on the ground floor. In particular a work of staggering genius called the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal. It comes from the north palace of Nineveh and was made in 645 BCE. The ancient Mesopotamian region, today in modern Iraq and Syria, was the cradle of civilization. It's there that cities and farming first emerged. There were also plenty of states that regularly conquered and fought each other in great battles. Ancient Assyria was one of those states, eventually evolving into an empire. Between the 21st and the 7th centuries BCE it was led by successive warrior kings who commanded vast armies that terrorized their enemies and sometimes literally salted the earth. They returned home with unimaginable riches that allowed them to build huge palaces and citadels like the one you can see behind me. These are the Balawat Gates. To get to the Lion Hunt we first pass through this pair of truly majestic guardians. These are Lamassu. Note their five legs, the king's head and their eagle's wings. I talked about Lamassu at length in my video about the off the beaten track Louvre if you want to learn more about these guys. Then we see here this replica of the Balawat Gates from the palace of Nimrud. This palace was built a few centuries earlier than the Lion Hunt reliefs by the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. He ruled from 883 to 859 BCE. Now some of the fittings like the ones here in this glass display case, they are original but these ones are replicas as is the cedar wood. This is just to show you how it would have looked. I mean look up, look way up. These are amazing. These never fail to take my breath away. Next we head into room 7 showing us some of the reliefs of the palace of Nimrud. These alabaster reliefs were originally in the royal apartments and the throne room and we can see Ashurnasirpal leading military campaigns and here being blessed with oils by these eagle-headed protective demons. You can also note the cuneiform writing pressed all over the front. King Ashurnasirpal II who was the most powerful man in the known world at the time would have been seated at the end of this throne room and the cuneiform celebrates his royal ancestry and his role as a high priest as well as his prowess in hunting and ah yes hunting. Hunting was both a favorite pastime but it also had spiritual and religious purposes. It was also symbolic of the king's duty to protect and fight for his subjects. Now we're going to leave King Ashurnasirpal II now and head into the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal, the reason why we're here. These are in room 10a and they've been regarded as the supreme pinnacle of ancient Assyrian art if not of ancient art full stop. These were excavated by Hormuz Rassam. We'll see him again later. He also excavated at Halikarnassus and he discovered the Cyrus cylinder and after Rassam this was further excavated by William Loftus. In this room we can see a ritual hunt by King Ashurbanipal. He's the large one in that chariot there. Now he reigned from 669 to 631 BCE during a time of great expansion and power and he called himself the king of the world. Now we call these the lion hunt but is it really a hunt? Not really. It's a contest in the same way that the bullfights in Spain are a contest. They're heavily weighted in favor of the humans. See he was hunting captured Asian lions. They are a smaller species than African lions and they've been hunted to near extinction now. The lions would be released from cages in an arena so that the king could quote catch them and slaughter them. He and his men would use arrows, spears or swords and they would be accompanied by this huge mast of dogs. Let's have a closer look at some of the details. Now the renderings are so incredibly realistic and it's impossible to not feel sadness for the lions. They're both male and female here. They're shown stuck with all kinds of arrows and spears collapsed on the ground and here one is vomiting blood. It's impossible to not feel bad for them. The king is depicted engaged in hand-to-paw combat with the lions. It's obviously an exaggeration. Remember he's surrounded by all kinds of soldiers and he's not in any true danger but he is on public display. When the king got older dignitaries and other important visitors could be paraded through these halls to show off how the king had once been so young and strong. Just look at some of these details. The fine details on the king's body, rosettes and images of the king himself. This would have been incredibly hard to do on the soft alabaster. Even just look at the little lion-headed bracelets and amulets that the different soldiers are wearing. No one is actually sure how they did this at the time. Modern sculptors can't figure out how these have lasted so long with the tools of the day. It is amazing craftsmanship. After Ashurbanipal's reign the Neo-Assyrian empire descended into ruin. A civil war broke out between his descendants and the military and there's no real record of what happened. Less than 25 years after these elaborate reliefs were made, the kingdom fell. We're now in room 52 which displays all aspects of life in ancient Iran. A major center of culture in the ancient world. During the 6th century BCE, a Persian king called Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. This vast and mighty empire would eventually come to rule from Egypt to Pakistan under kings like Darius the Great. While the stairwell just outside is home to massive plaster casts of sculptures from the grand city of Persepolis, and we will speak a bit later on about the Nereid monument which is also Achaemenid, what I want to show you now is much much smaller but still incredibly significant. See, some say that this small clay cylinder is an early declaration of human rights. On it we can see Akkadian cuneiform script. It dates to the 6th century BCE. It was discovered in 1879 in the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon which today is in Iraq. The excavation team was led by this man, Hormuz Rasam, the Assyro-British archaeologist who was carrying out investigations for the British Museum. He was continuing work started by Austin Henry Laird. We can see him back here in room 55. Laird helped Rasam secure some of the permissions he needed from the Ottomans. The permissions were called Firmans. And then Rasam discovered this cylinder on his second of four major excavations along with a lot of other really fascinating treasures. Now the cylinder itself was created sometime after 539 BCE following the Persian conquest of Babylon at which time Cyrus invaded. The text praises Cyrus detailing his genealogy to position him as a king from a long line of kings and denounces the Babylonian king Nabonidus as an oppressive tyrant from a low-born lineage. The cylinder states that the chief Babylonian god Marduk had selected Cyrus to restore peace and order to the Babylonians and then that the people welcomed him with open arms. It also states that Cyrus reinstated a lot of religious sanctuaries that had previously been outlawed and it allowed the repatriation of Jewish people after their Babylonian captivity. Though some people dispute that this is actually what the document says. A lot of people see the cylinder as evidence of a more enlightened way of ruling especially dealing with populations with varied religious practices. According to Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, the cylinder was quote the first attempt we know about running a society, a state with different nationalities and faiths, a new kind of statecraft. You can see it's very busy today and hot. There are some things in antiquity that just blow my mind. They seem almost mythic in their legend and their fame and that's probably because when it comes to things like ancient Greece and ancient Rome the myth often gets mixed up with the real history. For me it's the mausoleum at Halicarnassus that really blows my mind and I can't believe that it's here at the British Museum for better or for worse. I think it was the very retro 1960s child craft encyclopedias that I used to pore over. This was, after all, named by Antipater of Sidon as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world when he compiled his list in the first century BCE. The mausoleum at Halicarnassus is a truly elaborate tomb that was built around 350 BCE for a local ruler in Persia called Mausolus of Caria. The monument ended up being so incredibly impressive that that's where we get the term mausoleum after this mausolus to refer to all above ground tombs. Now here you can see a little maquette or a maca. It incorporated Greek, Lycian and Egyptian styles in its design. Now I actually almost included this behind me instead on our top 10 list today. This is the Nereid monument of Xanthos, a city in ancient Lycia, Turkey, and it's here in room 17. However, I then realized that the mausoleum of Halicarnassus took its inspiration from this tomb and did it on a much grander scale. Although this one is pretty impressive. I think it says a lot for the impressive nature of the collection at the British Museum that I didn't actually end up including the Nereid monument on the tour. There's just so many other things to talk about, but maybe I'll dedicate a video to it in the future. Now look at the Nereid monument. It's really tall. I have to look up at it. Well, at Halicarnassus, the building was up to 40 meters in height, that's 131 feet, and it was decorated with an elaborate amount of sculptures, both in relief and in the round. The carvings detail Mausolus' hopes for the afterlife, doing so through a series of Greek myths. These ones here, the Amazonomachy, the battle with the Amazons, and further down, the Lapiths fighting the Centaurs, aka the Centauromachy. So all around me here in room 21, we can see these marble reliefs and some freestanding stone slabs. Some of these are fragments of the quadriga, that is the huge marble four-horse chariot that crowned the roof, and others used to encircle other levels of the building. Look at the remains here of a colossal rider on a horseback. Let's have an even closer look at some of the sculptures. This massive horse is certainly one of the most famous. I don't know if you can get the scale here, let me get in it just so you can see. He dwarfs me, I mean a normal horse dwarfs me, but he's really huge. His head is down and turned to the left, but just look at his muscles and his flared nostrils. The way that his right eye is bulging with a hank of hair flopping down over it. He's working really hard. And as we already know, the ancient Greeks, they really knew how to sculpt. So evocative. I mean, but the whole thing is amazing. But just look at the bronze bridle that's still in place at his mouth. It's secured by dowels. These are long gone. On the Parthenon sculptures a few rooms away, there just the holes remain. Look, you can see a hole here where fittings like this would have been attached. But this is incredibly rare for ancient sculpture, for the bronze decorations and attachments to still be on the piece. It's the only time I've seen it. Now remember, all of these sculptures, these ancient pieces, they would have been carnivalesque with bright colors, almost hallucinogenic circus tents in style. Now let's have a good look at these statues here. They're often referred to as Artemisia and Mausolus, but there's no reason to believe that this is them. They probably actually represent members of the family. Regardless, they are stunning. She is carved from a single block of pentelic marble. Though sadly, most of her face is missing, her eyes remain and they meet our gaze at a kind of piercing stare right up at the top below her hairline there. We can see from the side that that's a close-fitting cap. And she wears a long chiton, that's the name of this garment, with elbow-length sleeves fastened by buttons. Now let's look at the man himself. I mean, we can continue calling him Mausolus, but he could just be like a guy. He has a full face, but rather small eyes with a short mustache and a close-trimmed beard. He's actually a few different pieces of marble. His head is Parian and his head is Parian marble, but his body is pentelic. Just look at his kind of almost loafer-like sandal. He's wearing a long tunic, which is unusually draped over his chest. And over here, we can see her foot mostly intact as well. That's quite rare. Hands and feet are often lost, so it's kind of cool that they still exist. And more scenes from the Amazonomachy. What do you think? Would this make it onto your list? These lions behind me in this grand staircase of the British Museum are also from the mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Just imagine eating your Christmas dinner from this majestic platter. That's exactly what the Ford family did in 1942. Behind me is the Mildenhall Treasure, discovered maybe between 1940 and 1942 near Mildenhall in Suffolk. And I'll explain why I said maybe in a minute. It's just one of the silver hoards that you can find here in room 49. But this, this staggering collection of 34 masterpieces of Roman silver tableware from the 4th century CE, it's the most valuable, both artistically and by weight of the bouillon. The great dish here weighs a staggering eight kilos. That's 18 pounds just for this dish alone. And there's all the rest of it in the case here. Now, it was discovered when ploughing by Gordon Butcher on Sydney Ford's farm. And here's where the details get fuzzy to say the least. This was the height of World War Two. And the men may have been worried it would have been confiscated by the government and melted down for the war effort. Or at least that's what they could say for plausible deniability. Even though Ford collected ancient objects and had Roman silver, the men later claimed that they didn't know what they had found. Ford displayed the pieces in his home. And yes, used them on special occasions. Some people even say that he was obsessed with them, dedicated to cleaning and restoring them obsessively. However, a friend reported the objects that he had seen in the Ford home. And so it was finally all declared. And by the way, according to the laws, Butcher would have actually laid claim to this discovery, even though it was on Ford's land. It's the treasure trove laws. But because Butcher didn't realize this, he was deprived to the full ex gratia reward made to finders of buried gold or silver. Now eventually, the finders were declared to be jointly Ford and Butcher, and they each received a thousand pound reward, which was far, far less than what they would have if they had just declared it when they found it. It could have been between half a million and a million pounds. What a tale. Now, if this all sounds familiar, you may have read the Roald Dahl account of the story. It's a rare piece of nonfiction from the writer, though he did take some creative liberties. Some people said he made Fordo to be a lot more cunning and nefarious than he actually was. Dahl eventually donated half of what he made from the story to Butcher's family. Now, at first, some experts were dubious about the origin of the pieces because they didn't believe that such fine silverware had ever been used in Roman Britain. However, finds in the subsequent decades, such as the Hoxney hoard right behind me, they've laid those doubts to rest. So now that we have all the dishy details out of the way, get it, let's actually look at the platter. The hoard consists of two large serving platters. This one is the more decorated one, as well as plates, bowls, and ladles, and eight long-handled spoons. These are called cochlyrium, and we think that they were used for eating snails. Now, the great dish is also known as the Oceanus dish, the Neptune dish, or the Bacchus dish. In the center, we see the head of a marine deity, probably Oceanus. His beard is made of seaweed, and he has dolphins emerging from his hair. He's meant to literally personify the ocean, and he's surrounded by Nereids, sea nymphs, we've already seen those, as well as tritons and other mythical and natural sea creatures. But now, let's back up and have a look at the Bacchanal, the great party. This is the dancing, music making, and drinking, and general carryings on of the god Bacchus. He's here with his panther, of course, and Silenus, after Bacchus's triumph over Hercules. Here's Hercules, he's staggeringly drunk, supported by two helpful satyrs. We can also see the god Pan, dancing and brandishing his pipes, alongside dancing maenads, the female devotees of Bacchus and satyrs. It's one of the most amazing pieces in this gallery, and it's really one of the coolest things in the whole museum. We've now entered into the China Gallery, and we're walking down towards the center. These are the Tang Dynasty tomb figures, believed to be from the grave of Liu Tingshun, a Chinese general who died at the age of 72 in 728 CE. This is a collection of 13 earthenware tomb figures found in Luoyang, Henan province. And there's really something that is so whimsical and almost contemporary about these. But remember, they're nearly 1300 years old, and of course, they're meant to accompany someone to the afterworld. Their almost cheerful nature is heightened by the Sun Tzu technique of glazing, and that means three colors. It was really innovative at the time, and the colors have a metallic element added, and then they're fired at 750 to 800 degrees Celsius. As you can see, when I back up here, they're split into five pairs and a set of three. But let's look here at the first duo. They're semi-human, but they're also winged creatures, and they have cloven feet. These guys are meant to scare us away from entering the tomb, which obviously didn't work. Then next, we can see the Buddhist tomb guardians. They're called Lokopala. And then, two officials or civil servants. One's military, and the other is a civilian. Then, we can see two horses with their own ceramic grooms, and two Bactrian, that is two humped, camels bringing up the rear. They were used as beasts of burden to carry goods around China and beyond. Now, while the horses could also be useful, they were usually exotic breeds imported into China from Mongolia, and they were definitely status symbols. They were mainly used for polo and prestige. So ancient Chinese graves included all of the essentials for day-to-day life. And yes, these figures were symbolically important. The tombs would have also contained sumptuous silks and lacquer, silver and gold. Now, you don't need me to tell you that this is the grave of a very important person. Liu Tingshan was a general and imperial privy counselor who lived in the middle of the Tang dynasty. We can see that his high status and his wealth are really on display here, but not just from the tomb figures. He actually wrote himself his own obituary, and it was found alongside the tomb as well. The sentiments of the obituary aren't necessarily for us or for any viewer. Remember, this tomb was supposed to be buried for the ages and not have any other human witnesses. Instead, it's for the judges of the afterlife. He would have wanted to impress them with his rank and abilities, and that would have ensured that he received a choice spot in the afterworld. In his obituary, we're told that his behavior was so exemplary as to set off a revolution in popular manners. He says, too, that he beats off invading troops just as a, quote, man brushes flies from his nose. Now, the Tang dynasty is 618 to 906 CE, and it's a time of expansion and wealth, a golden age in Chinese history, characterized by territorial expansion, cosmopolitan culture, and a flourishing of arts and literature. The country was defined at the time by the Silk Road and its outward-looking ethos. Tang dynasty China was a massive market for luxury goods, and Europe looks quite underdeveloped and backwards in comparison at this time. Now, remember, these objects would have been on display for the public only once, and then never meant to be seen again by the living. Yet, here we are. The tomb was discovered and then excavated sometime before the 1930s. We don't actually know who opened the tomb, how it was excavated, or any of those other details. We just know about it from when it entered the market. The British Museum purchased the group from the respected ceramics collector George Eumorphopoulos. I couldn't find anything else about their provenance. Eumorphopoulos was dedicated to preserving Chinese culture, and he saw himself as a savior of pieces that would have been destroyed during the political turmoil of the era. Now, of course, we have these figures here at the British Museum, but Eumorphopoulos ended up donating a lot of important pieces back to China and also to Greece, another region he collected from. Now, we're upstairs in a part of the museum that's not actually all that accessible. These are rooms 92 to 94, the Mitsubishi Corporation galleries of Japan. This is one of the most important collections of Japanese art and artifacts outside of Japan. One of the most famous objects in this collection is Hokusai, the great wave of Kanagawa, but due to its fragility, it's not usually on display. Instead, today, we're in these galleries to speak about a remarkable set of armor dating from the Edo period in the 18th century. This is an exceptionally high quality set of armor. It has many components, each of which is exquisitely detailed. I especially love the lacquered storage containers. These ones here for a sword, and this one here. It has metal fittings, and look, it also has Mori crests. The Mori clan was a Japanese samurai clan. Now, this is actually a very salient item to have on our tour today, because the British Museum just finished up a massive samurai exhibition, but they didn't actually include this set of armor in that exhibition. It remained here in gallery 92 for everybody to look at it for free. As I mentioned, this was created during the Edo period, when the Tokugawa Shogunate, that is, Japan's last feudal military government, enacted a four class system, with the warrior class as the ruling group. Therefore, armor like this wasn't necessary to wear in battle. It was to display in order to show off prestige. I kind of think of it as kind of like some First Nations powwow regalia, or maybe even like a coronation robe and crown. It's for ceremonial purposes. Now, I'm no armor expert. I do show some in my Wallace collection video, but I can't help but admire this one. During the Edo period, the samurai designs became so artistic and beautiful, they were actually kind of non-functional. The designs were too intricate to really move around in, and the helmets were too heavy to actually wear for very long. As I mentioned, this particular set of armor was created for the Mori clan of Harima province, and some of the branches of that family is used in the crest. This stylized crane profile within a circle. Just look at the curved stirrups. These are a little bit older. These in the 1600s. And this beautiful saddle tree decorated with dragons and clouds. And just look at the stunning sword. The armor is a type of armor called nimido gusoku. That means that the cuirass has two hinged parts instead of being wrapped around the chest. Look, it's decorated with real scales and with some stenciled doe skin. Let's look at the bowl style helmet. It's made up of 32 plates of lacquered iron and depicts the face of a grimacing man. We can see his wrinkles, copper teeth, and a mustache of animal hair. I love that detail. There's a great video about the cleaning and curation of this samurai suit on the British Museum's own YouTube channel. It's worth checking out if you're interested. We've now entered into room 68, all about money. We've been speaking about old things today, downright ancient things. But actually, the next item on our list is from the 20th century. It's a tiny piece of modern history that continues to fascinate us to this day. See, a few months ago, I did a poll over on Patreon and to ask my viewers what they would like to see as the final item on this tour. I don't mean final item in the video, I just mean it was the last thing I was undecided on including. And I included a lot of different options. But this next object won out overwhelmingly. This is a penny defaced by a suffragette. Now, this might seem like a minor thing to do, to stamp a message of civil disobedience on a penny. But it was actually a radical act and a very low budget one as well. So you can see the British penny with King Edward VII in profile, and stamped over his head, it says, votes for women. Throughout the 19th century, more and more different groups of men were given the right to vote. But not one single woman had the same right. The campaign for women's suffrage had begun shortly after the Great Reform Act of 1832. But things really heated up at the start of the 20th century. That's when the suffragette movement was born. And with it, more gusto, pressure, and yes, violence. Because make no mistake about it, the suffragettes were not some shrinking violets just asking politely to vote. They were considered terrorists, and they even invented the mail bomb. Here is just one instance. At 5.30pm one evening in 1912, hundreds of women in London produced hammers from their muffs and handbags, and then proceeded to smash up windows all over London. That's because they knew at exactly that moment, Emmeline Pankhurst was aiming a stone at the windows of 10 Downing Street. Now, this penny here was struck in 1903. That was the year that Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel founded the Women's Social and Political Union. More than 30 years earlier, Emmeline's husband presented the first women's suffrage bill to Parliament. It initially did well, but then Prime Minister William Gladstone spoke out against it, claiming that it could put women's most delicate attributes under threat. Their refinement, their delicacy, and their purity. People like Pankhurst got very frustrated. Until this point, women had been singing songs and waving placards, maybe breaking a few windows, and they had kept things mostly respectable. But now, they were deliberately committing criminal acts, and people didn't know what to make of them. The media also changed their names from suffragists, which is what they preferred, to suffragettes, which made them seem kind of cutesy. The coins were just one of their tactics. These pre-decimal bronze pennies were about the same size as a modern 2p coin. They were easy to stamp, but too low in value for the banks to bother recalling them, which means that the message circulated widely. The women put bombs in letterboxes, they slashed paintings like the Rokeby Venus in My National Gallery tour, and then they went on hunger strikes when they were arrested. The government enacted the Cat and Mouse Acts, which allowed them to force-feed the hunger strikers in really violent and horrible ways. Famously, Emily Davidson was killed when she threw herself in front of the King's horse at the Derby. During the outbreak of World War I, the suffragettes decided to stand down their actions and support the troops. But they actually provided excellent arguments for giving women the vote, as they flooded into traditionally male professions and environments, and they kept this country and many others running in the absence of men. It was impossible to see them as delicate flowers after that. In 1918, women over the age of 30 were given the right to vote, and in 1928, the Equal Franchise Act extended the vote to all women from the age of 21. That's a lot of history packed into one little penny. Well, that's the end of our tour here in front of these Neriads. I hope that you enjoyed seeing 10 more wonders of the British Museum, and I hope that you choose to come along on a tour with me sometime soon, whether that's in an audio guide form or in person in my new small group tours, or on a private tour. But until next time, I'll see you the next time I'm at the Museum.