sistawendy | culture vulture for an afternoon

I successfully hit Sainsy's this morning, then took a short tube ride to the British Museum.

Nobody checked my ticket, and there was no entrance line worth mentioning, just a light security screen. I'd say mask compliance was maybe 50%. Pretty mellow, and a nice way to beat the weather warmer than what I'd dressed for. It was, as you'd expect, educational as all git out. Let's see what I remember:

You may have heard of the hyksos, usually translated as "sea peoples", from ancient Egypt. They basically took over part of the country early in the second millennium BCE for a few centuries. I'd often heard them described as mysterious, but the British Museum folks seem pretty sure they came from modern Palestine. That would, of course, have made them close relatives of the Israelites, if not their ancestors.
Ancient Persian art hardly ever depicts women. Gosh, that isn't creepy at all.
Revenge porn was apparently something that happened in ancient Assyria. And when the perpetrator is the king, you don't have much recourse.
But sometimes ancient people acting like modern people is benign: on one of those massive, winged stone animals with human heads that the Assyrians used to decorate entrances, guards in antiquity carved a board for a dice game that had been popular for centuries at that point. They must have been bored.
The way you spell torc is... torc.
I'd forgotten that some Sumerian kings practiced human sacrifice. The museum was coy about saying that, but that's the only explanation for some of what they describe.
Golden torcs and the burial thereof were the principal method of concentrating, conveying, and preserving wealth in pre-Roman Celtic Britain. One of them in the museum's collection weighed over a kilogram, so they weren't comfortable for long-term wear. I love chunky jewelry, so of course I now want a massive torc.
They put a roof over what was once the central courtyard. That roof is high enough to admit two totem poles carved by the Haida people of the Canadian west coast; at least one of them came from a village that was all but wiped out by disease. I was so happy to see something from more-or-less home until I read that.
Speaking of more-or-less home, the Mexican room had the breakdown on which of the many ancient cultures were where and when in Mesoamerica, with artifacts from each, natch. It was something I'd been curious about, believe it or not.

I spent four hours in there. It's probably for the best that they kicked me out along with everybody else, or I would have ended up eligible for inclusion in one of their cases. I didn't cover the whole museum, sad to say; the last room that I made it to contained artifacts from the Sutton Hoo ship. That museum deserves more time than I spent at it, but I really did reach my physical limit.

And now for something completely different: the place where I'm staying has a washing machine, but it's out of order. Gosh, I wish I'd known that before I packed: I didn't pack enough socks & undies for two weeks. Luckily, I have early tomorrow afternoon unscheduled, so I may be hitting a nearby "launderette".

I have ridden the tube during the evening rush — about 1800 local time — on a Monday and it doesn't suck. Well done, TfL. I was about to take a picture of the beautiful old tile signs in Russell Square station when I saw my train pull up. The city girl in me took over and I jumped on right away, but I did get a shot through the train doors as they closed.