Different but the same

Something that stands out in the stories from the British Museum is how similar we all are. The museum has items that are thousands of years old and yet some of their stories could be modern. No-one keeps their ancestors in the cellar these days, our culture is different, but as people, we are still the same.

Ancient Egypt

In the Egyptian Gallery there are wall-paintings from the tomb chapel of Nebamun, who worked in the temple complex at Karnak. In those days people took names related to their favourite God and Nebamun means, “My Lord is Amun”.


The colourful wall paintings show him and his wife enjoying the afterlife. There are parties and hunting as well as scenes from his life as a temple official.


A few years after the temple is built a new Pharoah comes to the throne, Akhenaten. He favours a new God; Aten and he forbids the worship of other Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. The chief God of the old system was Amun, and he orders the name of Amun to be erased.

 You can see that on one of the wall-paintings, someone has scratched out the Amun part of Nebamun's name.

I was familiar with the story of Akhenaten but to see evidence of it like this is quite something.


Ancient Assyria

The last great King of the Assyrian Empire was called Ashurbanipal. He was a successful warrior King and a scholar; he learnt to read and write and is often depicted with his writing stylus tucked into his belt. During his reign he gathered as much of the world’s knowledge as he could to his library in Babylon.


There are over thirty thousand clay tablet fragments that have survived making around ten thousand documents from the 7th BCE. They include financial documents, medical information and many records of omens and divination.


We find the tale of Gilgamesh, the epic Babylonian poem amongst them but my favourite is the spell to make your baby go to sleep. “Belch like a drunkard, snort like a baby gazelle, until your mother comes, strokes you, and picks you up.” All of us parents have had times when our baby will not sleep and we share that experience across the ages and culture, a universal human experience.




"Lamassu" by profzucker is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. New Paragraph

Assyrian Lamassu

The Lamassu are huge, sculptured figures with human heads and animal bodies. They stood guard in palaces and cities thousands of years ago. One of these sculptures has a small game board roughly carved into the base. This game, now called the Royal Game of Ur, resembles Ludo and was played across the ancient world. Three well-made boards were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb but this one is just scratched into the stone. Presumably some of the guards were bored and did this so that they could have a sneaky game while on duty.

Royal Game of Ur board

This one was made for a King or Queen and is around 4000 years old

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