HARTWIG FISCHER: Hello.
I'm Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you
right here at the entrance to the British Museum.
JAVI ALONSO: And I'm Javi.
And I'm very hydrated and I'm very ready to go.
[OPENING SOUND EFFECTS]
HARTWIG FISCHER: So here we are in the historic entrance
of the museum.
The museum was founded in 1753, based
on the collection of Hans Sloane, who
was a medical doctor, very [INAUDIBLE] person,
a great collector.
I want to show you something which has always intrigued me.
This inscription, let me say a couple of words about that,
if you like.
It says, "and let thy feet, millenniums hence,
be set in midst of knowledge."
That's what the museum is all about.
You visit the museum, you engage with the collections,
with the objects, with cultures from around the world.
You activate them as your own resources,
wherever you come from, wherever they come from.
And you take that knowledge into the future--
the future of your own life, but also the future of humankind.
We're leaving the Great Court and we
enter the Egyptian Gallery now.
And here you can see the grandeur of the Smirke design,
with the columns, the coffered ceiling.
And what I'm going to look at with you
is the Rosetta Stone, which sits smack
in the center of this space.
You see it right here.
It is the most visited object in the museum,
and it has an absolutely intriguing story
that tells us a lot about who we are
and how we think about ourselves.
JAVI ALONSO: So obviously, it has been very important
for translators, Egyptologists, and historians
in order to understand hieroglyphics.
But why do you think the general public
has such a fascination for it?
Why is it the most visited object?
HARTWIG FISCHER: Because it is the key to the discovery
of ancient Egypt.
The stone is actually a tax decree,
and it is dated 196 before common era.
And it is set, probably at the entrance of the temple,
as you would find it in many, many places across Egypt.
It is written in three different scripts, if you like.
One is hieroglyphs, which is the ancient Egyptian writing
system, which was known only by the priests.
The other is demotic.
That sits right in the center.
Demotic, because the vast majority of people in Egypt
can only read that at that time.
The third, at the bottom, is Greek.
Since the end of the 4th century Before Common Era,
Egypt was ruled by Greek pharaohs,
following the conquest by Alexander.
So an official text would be written in Greek.
Now, this stone sat there, we don't know for how long.
And at some stage, nobody knew what it was good for.
The text didn't make sense anymore.
So people seized it and used it as a building material.
It was dumped into the foundation of a fort
and remained there, probably for centuries,
until another conqueror came along--
Napoleon, in the late 18th century.
Now, when the French renovated this fort,
Rashid, which they called Rosette.
And that's where the name comes from, the Rosetta Stone.
They looked at the foundaments, and found this stone.
Napoleon had brought on quite a number of scholars.
They instantly understood that this
was the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs.
After the British had seized it, the British Museum
then made copies of the text and the stone,
and distributed them among the learned society
of Europe and the US.
The race began to decipher the hieroglyphs.
And in 1822, Champollion, a brilliant French Egyptology,
published a book.
And that allowed scholars to read
the ancient texts, the papyri, but also
the inscriptions on monuments.
And thus, explode our knowledge of ancient Egypt.
And when you come to the museum today,
it is all that story which is behind that stone, if you like.
It's a thriller of scholarship, of conquest, of empire.
There's a lot of politics in there too, obviously.
It's that notion that in order to engage with cultures,
you have to translate the cultures of the past
into your own language, or languages,
if you have several languages.
And I think it's that which really
underpins the fascination of this one object.
Now we're moving.
JAVI ALONSO: I think just from watching this one room,
we can get a sense of how massive the museum is.
So how much time do you think is the minimum
that a person should spend in the museum
in order to get at least a good sense of the masterpieces
or the most important objects?
HARTWIG FISCHER: Oh, you can spend 10 minutes in here
and you get a lot out of it.
You can spend years in the museum,
and you can spend a lifetime in a museum.
You will never get your head around it completely.
JAVI ALONSO: Probably.
HARTWIG FISCHER: It's eight million objects
covering two million years of human history.
55,000 objects roughly on display.
That can keep you busy for quite some time.
JAVI ALONSO: Yeah.
And the rest of the 7.9 million objects,
how accessible are they?
HARTWIG FISCHER: It's very important
to understand that this museum is really about the public.
It's about giving access to specimens
of the cultures of the world and of the history of humankind.
So if you come to the museum and you
want to see something which is not on display,
you write to the museum and say, I want to see this,
or I want to study the archives.
And you will have access.
So where I'm going to take you now
is the Parthenon Sculpture Gallery.
This room contains a part of the sculptures which have survived,
that in the past adorned the Parthenon on the Acropolis
in Athens.
And Parthenon means virgin.
This was a temple dedicated to Athena, the patron
goddess of the city of Athens, and was completed mostly
in 432 BCE.
The frieze ran all along the temple, inside the colonnade.
It's quite an extraordinary feature.
And it shows the Panathenian Festival,
which took place every year to celebrate Athena's birthday.
And it meant that it was a long procession through the city
and up to the temple, with the sacrifice of animals
and a gift of the peplos, which is a garment of Athena.
There's a younger person here, and a bearded man right here.
And they fold the garment.
And next to them, you have seated figures.
Can you see that?
JAVI ALONSO: Yes.
HARTWIG FISCHER: Here you have Zeus, the father of the gods.
Next to him, his wife, Hera.
Here you have Mars, the god of war.
And then you have other gods sitting here.
And it shows you that for the Athenians,
the idea was that the gods were right in the middle of them.
So it was, if you like, the celebration
of the people who were close to their gods, to all the gods.
JAVI ALONSO: So what percentage of the sculptures
of the Parthenon do you think are there?
And how much are there at the actual Parthenon?
HARTWIG FISCHER: Roughly speaking,
half of the sculptures survived the millennia,
the transformations, the explosion.
Out of that, half is at the British Museum.
The other half is in Athens at the wonderful Acropolis Museum.
And then a number of fragments are
scattered in other museums, the Louvre, for instance, in Paris.
What you see here are two giant bulls, so-called lamassu.
And these lamassu flanked the entrances of royal palaces
in the Assyrian empire.
They had crowns with horns, and that indicated
that they were divine.
On one of these, you find scratched into the rock,
into the stone, a board game, which was put there
by soldiers who were on duty at the entrance to the palace,
bored stiff.
JAVI ALONSO: So they were bored, and they were playing
tic-tac-toe on a masterpiece.
HARTWIG FISCHER: Exactly.
JAVI ALONSO: Wow.
HARTWIG FISCHER: And that is what
the museum is really about.
You have the grand monuments--
JAVI ALONSO: And the human stories behind them, yes.
HARTWIG FISCHER: And the human, the everyday life.
Exactly.
So let's move upstairs now.
This is the board, and it's exactly the same shape
that we saw scratched into the pedestal
of the lamassu downstairs.
JAVI ALONSO: Wow.
So this is the real version, and the other one was a DIY.
HARTWIG FISCHER: Exactly.
It's a Royal Game of Ur.
That's what it's called.
Now fasten seat belts.
It's 1,800, 2,000 years older than the lamassu
we saw downstairs, with that same shape scratched into it.
JAVI ALONSO: Wow.
So really persistent through time.
People really enjoyed that game.
HARTWIG FISCHER: Yes, the they did.
This is a fragment from Library of Ashurbanipal.
Now this fragment belongs to one of the greatest literary works
of all time, the so-called Epic Poem of Gilgamesh.
Ashurbanipal had several copies of it in his library,
and this is one of the fragments.
Now, this fragment is particularly important,
not only because it's very big and is beautifully written
by a good scribe, but also because of the story
that it tells.
It was deciphered by this man, George Smith.
And when he deciphered it, when he realized
what he had in front of him, he got so excited
that, in the reading room in the British Museum,
he would take off his clothes.
So it's a famous story of discovery and excitement,
because what did he discover?
He discovered the tail of the Great Flood, which we know
from the Ancient Testament.
This means that the Ancient Testament integrated texts
from other cultures and from earlier tomes.
And of course, this was a great blow to everybody
who believed that the Ancient Testament contained
the word of God.
JAVI ALONSO: But I think it's a good representation.
And the museum does a good job of that,
of showing how all mythologies and all religions
are connected.
Because after all, they're looking for answers
to the same questions about nature.
So it's understandable that they all relate
and have similar stories.
HARTWIG FISCHER: You're right, Javi.
You know, this question of interconnectedness of cultures,
of belief systems, also the interconnectedness
of human reaction to big events in nature, exactly
the environment.
But when you walk through this museum,
you come away with a much better understanding
of the interconnectedness of cultures through the ages,
and sometimes across great distances.
Ideas travel.
Objects travel.
People travel.
In fact, it's that kind of exilic inspiration
that drove the development of humankind to good part.
Let me show you another famous object.
I'm standing now right in front of it.
JAVI ALONSO: The Cyrus Cylinder.
HARTWIG FISCHER: Exactly.
Here's the story.
Cyrus, conquering Babylon, would start to restore temples,
build fortification walls around the city.
And as these works progressed, he
would place cylinders like this inside the walls.
JAVI ALONSO: Wow.
HARTWIG FISCHER: It tells us that when
he arrived with his army, he was greeted
with open arms and open gates.
And then he did all sorts of good things.
He restored temples.
He reintroduced respect for the gods of Babylon.
And thus, showed that he was chosen by the gods.
JAVI ALONSO: So would you say an object
like this is considered more of an artwork
or a historical document?
HARTWIG FISCHER: [LAUGHS] That's a very, very good question.
It goes right to the heart of what happens in a museum.
This is a written document.
This is a propaganda of an empire.
Here, it has become a key document of history.
And if an artist comes in, he might, or she might,
see in this rather aesthetic qualities.
And of course, the museum allows all these different approaches
very openly, which you would not have
if you looked at it back in 539 BCE, as it was placed
place in the wall.
May I show you this object now.
It's the first depiction we know of two people making love.
It's a key document of human life, of human history.
JAVI ALONSO: It feels very abstract.
Are there any assumptions of their gender or sex?
HARTWIG FISCHER: It could be any.
It's a polymorphous object.
You could look at it as breasts, as buttocks, as glands,
as a phallus.
Everything is in it.
And you're right to say it's abstract,
because it encompasses all of these different aspects
of sexuality and erotic attraction.
It's 10,000 years old.
It belongs to the so-called Natufian culture,
which predates the neolithic.
That's the moment when human beings would
start to go into farming and breeding of livestock--
an absolutely revolutionary change in the way people would
live, moving from a nomadic existence, which had prevailed
for almost 2 million years.
JAVI ALONSO: To settle down.
HARTWIG FISCHER: To settlement and to being sedentary.
And it's one of my favorite objects,
not only because of what it shows--
the embrace, the intimacy, the beauty.
But also because it marks such a key moment
that would then trigger the development
of that form of human society that we are still part of.
This is the Akan Drum.
Initially, it was collected as an object from the Americas.
But scientists analyzing the wood then
found out that it was made in Africa, in Ghana by the Akan
people, and then transported on one
of their ships of the Middle Passage,
transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas.
So the presence of African culture,
and the endurance and preservation of traditions
and heritage among the enslaved people in the Americas.
JAVI ALONSO: On the more practical level,
what is the response of the museum to its colonial past,
and how a lot--
or some of the art that you have was forcefully taken
from the people that made it?
HARTWIG FISCHER: The answer to this is multilayered.
One is that British museum engages in collaboration
with many, many cultures and countries
the objects in the collection come from.
We do research together, explore cultural heritage on site
together.
Another aspect, again, is that we explore our own history,
in collaboration with scholars and representatives
from communities around the world, to rewrite our shared,
complicated, and at times, very painful history.
JAVI ALONSO: Um-hm.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
HARTWIG FISCHER: Thank you very much
indeed for joining us on this tour
through the British Museum, to show you just a few
of the objects that cover two million years of human history
in all its richness, variety, ambiguity, and so many exciting
aspects.
We very much hope to welcome you in person
once we reopen this summer.
JAVI ALONSO: I sure will go when I go to London.
Thank you, Hartwig, so much for your time.
I could listen to you talking for days.
Thank you for your time on this special tour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]