On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

These past few days have been packed with travel! This is somewhat fitting, seeing as it’s (roughly) my one week anniversary with London!

After my first writing assessment in English Lit on Friday, I journeyed across the ancient world, through Mesopotamia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Egypt and China. How? At the world renowned British Museum! Between adoring the frequent trips to the Newport Public Library as a kid and acquiring a love of museums as a teen (thanks Aunt Priscilla and Uncle Tom!), I grew up with a close relationship to many fields, particularly history and art. And the British Museum certainly satisfied both! It’s an expansive building, with an intricate maze of rooms to meander through and absorb knowledge of the past. Although I could have spent days there, I only had about five hours, so I focused on the Egyptian, Japanese, Grecian, Roman and Mesopotamian sections. Perhaps the most

famous artifact in the museum’s collection is the Rosetta Stone, a slab of rock that allowed archaeologists to decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, because it bore the same inscription in three different languages: Greek (known), Demotic (somewhat understood) and Hieroglyphics (previously incomprehensible). In short, this is one very important slab of rock. In addition to the Rosetta Stone, I also saw many statues, limestone reliefs, sarcophagi, mummies and jewelry in the Egyptian gallery, some of which – as I discovered when I realized how familiar they looked – I had seen

previously when they were on loan to the King Tut exhibit that was in Seattle a few years ago. Cool! Another highlight of the museum was the Japanese gallery, on the uppermost floor, wherein I saw everything from ancient wooden Buddha statues to the kimonos of geisha to modern pop art. Then, on the ground floor, I admired the Elgin marbles that so moved the poet John Keats. The Elgin marbles are the collection of marble statues and sculptures ‘legally

acquired’ (or, if you agree with Lord Byron and modern Greeks, ‘looted’ or ‘vandalized’) by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, from the Parthenon in Greece. They are absolutely awe-inspiring in their intricacies, size and resilience. I didn’t fully comprehend the history imbued in those pieces until long after I’d left the museum; they had lasted thousands of years atop the acropolis, maintaining their beauty despite the degradation of the sands of time and even Venetian cannon fire.

I did a different kind of traveling yesterday, and it was yet another first for me! Prior to this study abroad, I had never been on a train before, and

yesterday, everyone boarded the one to Cambridge. Once in the famous town, we took a tour of Trinity College, Isaac Newton’s alma mater, guided by a very engaging and entertaining woman named Jackie. She told us that Cambridge is actually composed of over 30 colleges, and when you apply to Cambridge, you only apply to a specific college. That college then is your home base, which supplies students with, in the case of Trinity College, what King Henry VIII, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I believed to be the four essentials: a dining hall, living quarters, a library and a chapel (the latter being heavily emphasized by Mary). The colleges are dispersed throughout the town of Cambridge, and hence, the lecture halls and classrooms are fully integrated into the town, so no formal university campus exists. While on the tour, we saw Isaac Newton’s rooms (or at least the window into what used to be his room), an apple tree cut from the one that so famously catalyzed Newton’s revelations about gravity, the Royal Chair Leg and many locations around town used in the movie “The Theory of Everything” starring Eddie Redmayne, who, like his character Stephen Hawking, attended Cambridge.

A brief interlude for lunch followed the tour, and while we ate, we watched the punters go by on the river Cam. Punting is a type of boating similar in technique to that of the canals in Venice, with the driver standing and using a long pole to propel the boat forward by digging into the riverbed. Punters at Cambridge stand at the back of the wide, shallow

boat, while at their rival institution, Oxford, punters work from the front of the boat. After we finished our food, we headed to the Fitzwilliam Museum to see their exhibit on illuminated (similar to illustrated) manuscripts and color, which tied the curriculum of my two classes together seamlessly; we studied medieval manuscript making in English Lit, and the science behind color perception and light in my physics class. Unfortunately, there were no pictures allowed due to the fragile nature of the texts, so I don’t get to share that experience with you, however, it was very interesting and the illuminations were gorgeous! Most of them included some sort of gold or silver leaf on their pages, thus reflecting the light incredibly beautifully (hence the term ‘illumination’). The Fitzwilliam also has an extensive art gallery, which I spent several hours looking through. They even had a few by Monet! The Fitzwilliam is easily my fourth favorite museum, behind the British Museum back in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Now I’m off to see the Queen! Well, to visit Buckingham Palace, anyway.