British Museum

Aerial view of the British Museum
Location within Central London
Established	7 June 1753; 271 years ago (1753-06-07)
Location	Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG, England
Collection size	Approx. 8 million objects[1]
Visitors	5,820,860 (2023)[2] (up 42% from 2022) Ranked first nationally
Chair	George Osborne
Director	Sir Mark Jones
Public transit access	Tottenham Court Road Goodge Street; Holborn; Russell Square
Website	britishmuseum.org
Area	807,000 sq ft (75,000 m2) in 94 galleries

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world.^[3] It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.^[a] The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.^[4]

In 2023 the museum received 5,820,860 visitors, an increase of 42% from 2022. It was the most popular attraction in the United Kingdom according to ALVA, the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.^[2]

The museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane.^[5] It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. The right to ownership of some of its most well-known acquisitions, notably the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, is subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims.^[6][7]

In 1973, the British Library Act 1972^[8] detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.^[9]

History

Sir Hans Sloane

Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum". Its foundations lie in the will of the Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster. During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter,^[10] Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities, and not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for a sum of £20,000.^[11]

At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds^[12] including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.^[13]

Foundation (1753)

On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his royal assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum.^[b] The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dating back to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library, the collection of the Earls of Oxford. They were joined in 1757 by the "Old Royal Library", now the Royal manuscripts, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library^[15] including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf.^[c]

The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests.^[16] The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element, and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library.^[17]

Cabinet of curiosities (1753–1778)

The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, which was later converted into the present day Buckingham Palace, on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location.^[18][d]

With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759.^[19] At this time, the largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House, and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson, employed the former student of Carl Linnaeus, Daniel Solander, to reclassify the natural history collection according to the Linnaean system, thereby making the museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians.^[20] In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled by George III,^[21] and Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During the few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts and David Garrick's library of 1,000 printed plays. The predominance of natural history, books and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton's "first" collection of Greek vases.^[22]

Indolence and energy (1778–1800)

From 1778, a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of previously unknown lands. The bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems, coins, prints and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation; but Montagu House became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it was apparent that it would be unable to cope with further expansion.^[23]

The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts to the museum in 1784 together with a number of other antiquities and natural history specimens. A list of donations to the museum, dated 31 January 1784, refers to the Hamilton bequest of a "Colossal Foot of an Apollo in Marble". It was one of two antiquities of Hamilton's collection drawn for him by Francesco Progenie, a pupil of Pietro Fabris, who also contributed a number of drawings of Mount Vesuvius sent by Hamilton to the Royal Society in London.

Growth and change (1800–1825)

In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated the antiquities displays. After the defeat of the French campaign in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculptures and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs.^[24] Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt, British consul general in Egypt, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, laid the foundations of the collection of Egyptian Monumental Sculpture.^[25] Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection, much of it Roman sculpture, in 1805. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 removed the large collection of marble sculptures from the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them to the UK. In 1816 these masterpieces of western art were acquired by the British Museum by Act of Parliament and deposited in the museum thereafter.^[26] The collections were supplemented by the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia, Greece in 1815. The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from the widow of Claudius James Rich.^[27]

In 1802 a buildings committee was set up to plan for expansion of the museum, and further highlighted by the donation in 1822 of the King's Library, personal library of King George III's, comprising 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, maps, charts and topographical drawings.^[28] The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke, was asked to draw up plans for an eastern extension to the museum "... for the reception of the Royal Library, and a Picture Gallery over it ..."^[29] and put forward plans for today's quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and work on the King's Library Gallery began in 1823. The extension, the East Wing, was completed by 1831. However, following the founding of the National Gallery, London in 1824,^[e] the proposed Picture Gallery was no longer needed, and the space on the upper floor was given over to the Natural history collections.^[30]

The first Synopsis of the British Museum was published in 1808. This described the contents of the museum, and the display of objects room by room, and updated editions were published every few years.

The largest building site in Europe (1825–1850)

As Sir Robert Smirke's grand neo-classical building gradually arose, the museum became a construction site. The King's Library, on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handed over in 1827, and was described as one of the finest rooms in London. Although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851.

In 1840, the museum became involved in its first overseas excavations, Charles Fellows's expedition to Xanthos, in Asia Minor, whence came remains of the tombs of the rulers of ancient Lycia, among them the Nereid and Payava monuments. In 1857, Charles Newton was to discover the 4th-century BC Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In the 1840s and 1850s the museum supported excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard and others at sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh. Of particular interest to curators was the eventual discovery of Ashurbanipal's great library of cuneiform tablets, which helped to make the museum a focus for Assyrian studies.^[31]

Sir Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), a trustee of the British Museum from 1830, assembled a library of 20,240 volumes, which he left to the museum in his will. The books arrived in January 1847 in twenty-one horse-drawn vans. The only vacant space for this large library was a room originally intended for manuscripts, between the Front Entrance Hall and the Manuscript Saloon. The books remained here until the British Library moved to St Pancras in 1998.

Collecting from the wider world (1850–1875)

The opening of the forecourt in 1852 marked the completion of Robert Smirke's 1823 plan, but already adjustments were having to be made to cope with the unforeseen growth of the collections. Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room, with space for a million books, opened in 1857. Because of continued pressure on space the decision was taken to move natural history to a new building in South Kensington, which would later become the British Museum of Natural History.

Roughly contemporary with the construction of the new building was the career of a man sometimes called the "second founder" of the British Museum, the Italian librarian Anthony Panizzi. Under his supervision, the British Museum Library (now part of the British Library) quintupled in size and became a well-organised institution worthy of being called a national library, the largest library in the world after the National Library of Paris.^[17] The quadrangle at the centre of Smirke's design proved to be a waste of valuable space and was filled at Panizzi's request by a circular Reading Room of cast iron, designed by Smirke's brother, Sydney Smirke.^[32]

Until the mid-19th century, the museum's collections were relatively circumscribed but, in 1851, with the appointment to the staff of Augustus Wollaston Franks to curate the collections, the museum began for the first time to collect British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory, branching out into Asia and diversifying its holdings of ethnography. A real coup for the museum was the purchase in 1867, over French objections, of the Duke of Blacas's wide-ranging and valuable collection of antiquities. Overseas excavations continued and John Turtle Wood discovered the remains of the 4th century BC Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, another Wonder of the Ancient World.^[33]

Scholarship and legacies (1875–1900)

The natural history collections were an integral part of the British Museum until their removal to the new British Museum of Natural History in 1887, nowadays the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. With the departure and the completion of the new White Wing (fronting Montague Street) in 1884, more space was available for antiquities and ethnography and the library could further expand. This was a time of innovation as electric lighting was introduced in the Reading Room and exhibition galleries.^[34]

The William Burges collection of armoury was bequeathed to the museum in 1881. In 1882, the museum was involved in the establishment of the independent Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society) the first British body to carry out research in Egypt. A bequest from Miss Emma Turner in 1892 financed excavations in Cyprus. In 1897 the death of the great collector and curator, A. W. Franks, was followed by an immense bequest of 3,300 finger rings, 153 drinking vessels, 512 pieces of continental porcelain, 1,500 netsuke, 850 inro, over 30,000 bookplates and miscellaneous items of jewellery and plate, among them the Oxus Treasure.^[35]

In 1898 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed the Waddesdon Bequest, the glittering contents from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor. This consisted of almost 300 pieces of objets d'art et de vertu which included exquisite examples of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica, among them the Holy Thorn Reliquary, probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry. The collection was in the tradition of a Schatzkammer such as those formed by the Renaissance princes of Europe.^[36] Baron Ferdinand's will was most specific, and failure to observe the terms would make it void, the collection should be

placed in a special room to be called the Waddesdon Bequest Room separate and apart from the other contents of the Museum and thenceforth for ever thereafter, keep the same in such room or in some other room to be substituted for it.^[36]

These terms are still observed, and the collection occupies room 2a.

New century, new building (1900–1925)

By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's collections had increased to the extent that its building was no longer large enough. In 1895 the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding the museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around the west, north and east sides of the museum. The first stage was the construction of the northern wing beginning 1906.

All the while, the collections kept growing. Emil Torday collected in Central Africa, Aurel Stein in Central Asia, D. G. Hogarth, Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence excavated at Carchemish. Around this time, the American collector and philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan donated a substantial number of objects to the museum,^[37] including William Greenwell's collection of prehistoric artefacts from across Europe which he had purchased for £10,000 in 1908. Morgan had also acquired a major part of Sir John Evans's coin collection, which was later sold to the museum by his son J. P. Morgan Jr. in 1915. In 1918, because of the threat of wartime bombing, some objects were evacuated via the London Post Office Railway to Holborn, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and a country house near Malvern. On the return of antiquities from wartime storage in 1919 some objects were found to have deteriorated. A conservation laboratory was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence.^[38] In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors.

Disruption and reconstruction (1925–1950)

New mezzanine floors were constructed and book stacks rebuilt in an attempt to cope with the flood of books. In 1931, the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen offered funds to build a gallery for the Parthenon sculptures. Designed by the American architect John Russell Pope, it was completed in 1938. The appearance of the exhibition galleries began to change as dark Victorian reds gave way to modern pastel shades.^[f]

Following the retirement of George Francis Hill as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, he was succeeded by John Forsdyke.

As tensions with Nazi Germany developed and it appeared that war may be imminent Forsdyke came to the view that with the likelihood of far worse air-raids than that experienced in World War I that the museum had to make preparations to remove its most valuable items to secure locations. Following the Munich crisis Forsdyke ordered 3,300 No-Nail Boxes and stored them in the basement of Duveen Gallery. At the same time he began identifying and securing suitable locations. As a result, the museum was able to quickly commence relocating selected items on 24 August 1939, (a mere day after the Home Secretary advised them to do so), to secure basements, country houses, Aldwych Underground station and the National Library of Wales.^[40] Many items were relocated in early 1942 from their initial dispersal locations to a newly developed facility at Westwood Quarry in Wiltshire.^[40] The evacuation was timely, for in 1940 the Duveen Gallery was severely damaged by bombing.^[41] Meanwhile, prior to the war, the Nazis had sent a researcher to the British Museum for several years with the aim of "compiling an anti-Semitic history of Anglo-Jewry".^[42]

After the war, the museum continued to collect from all countries and all centuries: among the most spectacular additions were the 2600 BC Mesopotamian treasure from Ur, discovered during Leonard Woolley's 1922–34 excavations. Gold, silver and garnet grave goods from the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (1939) and late Roman silver tableware from Mildenhall, Suffolk (1946). The immediate post-war years were taken up with the return of the collections from protection and the restoration of the museum after the Blitz. Work also began on restoring the damaged Duveen Gallery.

A new public face (1950–1975)

In 1953, the museum celebrated its bicentenary. Many changes followed: the first full-time in-house designer and publications officer were appointed in 1964, the Friends organisation was set up in 1968, an Education Service established in 1970 and publishing house in 1973. In 1963, a new Act of Parliament introduced administrative reforms. It became easier to lend objects, the constitution of the board of trustees changed and the Natural History Museum became fully independent. By 1959 the Coins and Medals office suite, completely destroyed during the war, was rebuilt and re-opened, attention turned towards the gallery work with new tastes in design leading to the remodelling of Robert Smirke's Classical and Near Eastern galleries.^[43] In 1962 the Duveen Gallery was finally restored and the Parthenon Sculptures were moved back into it, once again at the heart of the museum.^[g]

By the 1970s, the museum was again expanding. More services for the public were introduced; visitor numbers soared, with the temporary exhibition "Treasures of Tutankhamun" in 1972, attracting 1,694,117 visitors, the most successful in British history. In the same year the Act of Parliament establishing the British Library was passed, separating the collection of manuscripts and printed books from the British Museum. This left the museum with antiquities; coins, medals and paper money; prints and drawings; and ethnography. A pressing problem was finding space for additions to the library which now required an extra 1+1⁄4 miles (2.0 km) of shelving each year. The Government suggested a site at St Pancras for the new British Library but the books did not leave the museum until 1997.

The Great Court emerges (1975–2000)

The departure of the British Library to a new site at St Pancras, finally achieved in 1998, provided the space needed for the books. It also created the opportunity to redevelop the vacant space in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court – the largest covered square in Europe – which opened in 2000. The ethnography collections, which had been housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind at 6 Burlington Gardens from 1970, were returned to new purpose-built galleries in the museum in 2000.

The museum again readjusted its collecting policies as interest in "modern" objects: prints, drawings, medals and the decorative arts reawakened. Ethnographical fieldwork was carried out in places as diverse as New Guinea, Madagascar, Romania, Guatemala and Indonesia and there were excavations in the Near East, Egypt, Sudan and the UK. The Weston Gallery of Roman Britain, opened in 1997, displayed a number of recently discovered hoards which demonstrated the richness of what had been considered an unimportant part of the Roman Empire. The museum turned increasingly towards private funds for buildings, acquisitions and other purposes.^[45] In 2000, the British Museum was awarded National Heritage Museum of the Year.^[46]

The British Museum today

Today the museum no longer houses collections of natural history, and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent British Library. The museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artefacts representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library.

The Round Reading Room, which was designed by the architect Sydney Smirke, opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult the museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras. Today it has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre.

With the bookstacks in the central courtyard of the museum empty, the demolition for Lord Foster's glass-roofed Great Court could begin. The Great Court, opened in 2000, while undoubtedly improving circulation around the museum, was criticised for having a lack of exhibition space at a time when the museum was in serious financial difficulties and many galleries were closed to the public. At the same time the African collections that had been temporarily housed in 6 Burlington Gardens were given a new gallery in the North Wing funded by the Sainsbury family – with the donation valued at £25 million.^[47]

The museum's online database had nearly 4,500,000 individual object entries in 2,000,000 records at the start of 2023.^[48] In 2022-23 there were 27 million vistis to the website.^[49] This compares with 19.5 millions website visits in 2013.^[50]

There were 5,820,860 visits to the museum in 2023, a 42% increase on 2022. The museum was the most visited tourist attraction in Britain in 2023. The number of visits, however, has not recovered to the level reached before the Covid pandemic.^[51]

A number of films have been shot at the British Museum.^[52]

Governance

Director

The British Museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport through a three-year funding agreement. Its head is the Director of the British Museum. The British Museum was run from its inception by a 'principal librarian' (when the book collections were still part of the museum), a role that was renamed 'director and principal librarian' in 1898, and 'director' in 1973 (on the separation of the British Library).^[53]

Trustees

A board of 25 trustees (with the director as their accounting officer for the purposes of reporting to Government) is responsible for the general management and control of the museum, in accordance with the British Museum Act 1963 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992.^[54] Prior to the 1963 Act, it was chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons. The board was formed on the museum's inception to hold its collections in trust for the nation without actually owning them themselves, and now fulfil a mainly advisory role. Trustee appointments are governed by the regulatory framework set out in the code of practice on public appointments issued by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments.^[55]

Building

The Greek Revival façade facing Great Russell Street is a characteristic building of Sir Robert Smirke, with 44 columns in the Ionic order 45 ft (14 m) high, closely based on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor. The pediment over the main entrance is decorated by sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott depicting The Progress of Civilisation, consisting of fifteen allegorical figures, installed in 1852.

The construction commenced around the courtyard with the East Wing (The King's Library) in 1823–1828, followed by the North Wing in 1833–1838, which originally housed among other galleries a reading room, now the Wellcome Gallery. Work was also progressing on the northern half of the West Wing (The Egyptian Sculpture Gallery) 1826–1831, with Montagu House demolished in 1842 to make room for the final part of the West Wing, completed in 1846, and the South Wing with its great colonnade, initiated in 1843 and completed in 1847, when the Front Hall and Great Staircase were opened to the public.^[56] The museum is faced with Portland stone, but the perimeter walls and other parts of the building were built using Haytor granite from Dartmoor in South Devon, transported via the unique Haytor Granite Tramway.^[57]

In 1846 Robert Smirke was replaced as the museum's architect by his brother Sydney Smirke, whose major addition was the Round Reading Room 1854–1857; at 140 feet (43 m) in diameter it was then the second widest dome in the world, the Pantheon in Rome being slightly wider.

The next major addition was the White Wing 1882–1884 added behind the eastern end of the South Front, the architect being Sir John Taylor.

In 1895, Parliament gave the museum trustees a loan of £200,000 to purchase from the Duke of Bedford all 69 houses which backed onto the museum building in the five surrounding streets – Great Russell Street, Montague Street, Montague Place, Bedford Square and Bloomsbury Street.^[58] The trustees planned to demolish these houses and to build around the west, north and east sides of the museum new galleries that would completely fill the block on which the museum stands. The architect Sir John James Burnet was petitioned to put forward ambitious long-term plans to extend the building on all three sides. Most of the houses in Montague Place were knocked down a few years after the sale. Of this grand plan only the Edward VII galleries in the centre of the North Front were ever constructed, these were built 1906–14 to the design by J.J. Burnet, and opened by King George V and Queen Mary in 1914. They now house the museum's collections of Prints and Drawings and Oriental Antiquities. There was not enough money to put up more new buildings, and so the houses in the other streets are nearly all still standing.

The Duveen Gallery, sited to the west of the Egyptian, Greek & Assyrian sculpture galleries, was designed to house the Elgin Marbles by the American Beaux-Arts architect John Russell Pope. Although completed in 1938, it was hit by a bomb in 1940 and remained semi-derelict for 22 years, before reopening in 1962. Other areas damaged during World War II bombing included: in September 1940 two unexploded bombs hit the Edward VII galleries, the King's Library received a direct hit from a high explosive bomb, incendiaries fell on the dome of the Round Reading Room but did little damage; on the night of 10 to 11 May 1941 several incendiaries fell on the south-west corner of the museum, destroying the book stack and 150,000 books in the courtyard and the galleries around the top of the Great Staircase – this damage was not fully repaired until the early 1960s.^[59]

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court is a covered square at the centre of the British Museum designed by the engineers Buro Happold and the architects Foster and Partners.^[60] The Great Court opened in December 2000 and is the largest covered square in Europe. The roof is a glass and steel construction, built by an Austrian steelwork company,^[61] with 1,656 uniquely shaped panes of glass. At the centre of the Great Court is the Reading Room vacated by the British Library, its functions now moved to St Pancras.

Today, the British Museum has grown to become one of the largest museums in the world, covering an area of over 92,000 m² (990,000 sq. ft).^{[62][failed verification][63]} In addition to 21,600 m² (232,000 sq. ft)^[64] of on-site storage space, and 9,400 m² (101,000 sq. ft)^[64] of external storage space. Altogether, the British Museum showcases on public display less than 1%^[64] of its entire collection, approximately 50,000 items.^[65]

There are nearly one hundred galleries open to the public, representing 2 miles (3.2 km) of exhibition space, although the less popular ones have restricted opening times. However, the lack of a large temporary exhibition space led to the £135 million World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre to provide one and to concentrate all the museum's conservation facilities into one centre. This project was announced in July 2007, with the architects Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. It was granted planning permission in December 2009 and was completed in time for the Viking exhibition in March 2014.^[66][67] In 2017, the World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for excellence in architecture.^[68]

Blythe House in West Kensington is used by the museum for off-site storage of small and medium-sized artefacts, and Franks House in East London is used for storage and work on the "Early Prehistory" – Palaeolithic and Mesolithic – and some other collections.^[69]

Departments

Department of Egypt and Sudan

The British Museum houses the world's largest^[h] and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities (with over 100,000^[70] pieces) outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. A collection of immense importance for its range and quality, it includes objects of all periods from virtually every site of importance in Egypt and the Sudan. Together, they illustrate every aspect of the cultures of the Nile Valley (including Nubia), from the Predynastic Neolithic period (c. 10,000 BC) through Coptic (Christian) times (12th century AD), and up to the present day, a time-span over 11,000 years.^[71]

Egyptian antiquities have formed part of the British Museum collection ever since its foundation in 1753 after receiving 160 Egyptian objects^[72] from Sir Hans Sloane. After the defeat of the French forces under Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile in 1801, the Egyptian antiquities collected were confiscated by the British army and presented to the British Museum in 1803. These works, which included the famed Rosetta Stone, were the first important group of large sculptures to be acquired by the museum. Thereafter, the UK appointed Henry Salt as consul in Egypt who amassed a huge collection of antiquities, some of which were assembled and transported with great ingenuity by the famous Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni. Most of the antiquities Salt collected were purchased by the British Museum and the Musée du Louvre.

By 1866 the collection consisted of some 10,000 objects. Antiquities from excavations started to come to the museum in the latter part of the 19th century as a result of the work of the Egypt Exploration Fund under the efforts of E.A. Wallis Budge. Over the years more than 11,000 objects came from this source, including pieces from Amarna, Bubastis and Deir el-Bahari. Other organisations and individuals also excavated and donated objects to the British Museum, including Flinders Petrie's Egypt Research Account and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, as well as the University of Oxford Expedition to Kawa and Faras in Sudan.

Active support by the museum for excavations in Egypt continued to result in important acquisitions throughout the 20th century until changes in antiquities laws in Egypt led to the suspension of policies allowing finds to be exported, although divisions still continue in Sudan. The British Museum conducted its own excavations in Egypt where it received divisions of finds, including Asyut (1907), Mostagedda and Matmar (1920s), Ashmunein (1980s) and sites in Sudan such as Soba, Kawa and the Northern Dongola Reach (1990s). The size of the Egyptian collections now stand at over 110,000 objects.^[73]

In autumn 2001 the eight million objects forming the museum's permanent collection were further expanded by the addition of six million objects from the Wendorf Collection of Egyptian and Sudanese Prehistory.^[74] These were donated by Professor Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University in Texas, and comprise the entire collection of artefacts and environmental remains from his excavations at Prehistoric sites in the Sahara Desert between 1963 and 1997. Other fieldwork collections have recently come from Dietrich and Rosemarie Klemm (University of Munich) and William Adams (University of Kentucky).

The seven permanent Egyptian galleries at the British Museum, which include its largest exhibition space (Room 4, for monumental sculpture), can display only 4% of its Egyptian holdings. The second-floor galleries have a selection of the museum's collection of 140 mummies and coffins, the largest outside Cairo. A high proportion of the collection comes from tombs or contexts associated with the cult of the dead, and it is these pieces, in particular the mummies, that remain among the most eagerly sought-after exhibits by visitors to the museum.

Highlights of the collections include:

Predynastic and Early Dynastic period (c. 6000 BC – c. 2690 BC)

• Mummy of Ginger and five other individuals from Gebelein (c. 3400 BC)
• Flint knife with an ivory handle (known as the Pit-Rivers Knife), Sheikh Hamada, Egypt (c. 3100 BC)
• The Battlefield Palette and Hunters Palette, two cosmetic palettes with complex decorative schemes (c. 3100 BC)
• Ivory statuette of a king, from the early temple at Abydos, Egypt (c. 3000 BC)
• King Den's sandal label from Abydos, mid-1st Dynasty (c. 2985 BC)
• Stela of King Peribsen, Abydos (c. 2720–2710 BC)

Old Kingdom (2690–2181 BC)

• Artefacts from the tomb of King Khasekhemwy from the 2nd Dynasty (2690 BC)
• Granite statue of Ankhwa, the shipbuilder, Saqqara, Egypt, 3rd Dynasty (c. 2650 BC)
• Several of the original casing stones from the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (c. 2570 BC)
• Statue of Nenkheftka from Deshasha, 4th Dynasty (2500 BC)
• Limestone false door of Ptahshepses, Saqqara (2440 BC)
• Abusir Papyri, some of the oldest papyri from ancient Egypt, Abusir (2400 BC)
• Wooden tomb statue of Tjeti, 5th to 6th Dynasty (c. 2345–2181 BC)

Middle Kingdom (2134–1690 BC)

• Inner and outer coffin of Sebekhetepi, Beni Hasan (c. 2125–1795 BC)
• Quartzite statue of Ankhrekhu, 12th Dynasty (1985–1795 BC)
• Limestone stela of Heqaib, Abydos, Egypt, 12th Dynasty (1990–1750 BC)
• Block statue and stela of Sahathor, 12th Dynasty, reign of Amenemhat II (1922–1878 BC)
• Limestone statue and stelae from the offering chapel of Inyotef, Abydos, 12th Dynasty (c. 1920 BC)
• Stela of Samontu, Abydos (1910 BC)
• Reliefs from the tomb of Djehutyhotep, Deir-el-Bersha (1878–1855 BC)
• Three Granite statues of Senwosret III, Deir el-Bahri (1850 BC)
• Statue of Rehuankh, Abydos (1850–1830 BC)
• Colossal head of Amenemhat III, Bubastis (1800 BC)
• Stela of Nebipusenwosret, Abydos (1800 BC)

Second Intermediate Period (1650–1550 BC)

• Coffin of King Nubkheperre Intef, Thebes (1570 BC)
• The famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an early example of Ancient Egyptian mathematics, Thebes (1550 BC)

New Kingdom (1549–1069 BC)

• Schist head of Pharaoh Hatshepsut or her successor Tuthmosis III (1480 BC)
• Statue of Senenmut with Princess Neferure on his lap, Karnak (1470 BC)
• Block statue of Sennefer, Western Thebes (1430 BC)
• Twenty Sekhmet statues from the Temple of Mut, Thebes (1400 BC)
• Fragment of the beard of the Great Sphinx of Giza (14th century BC)
• Pair of granite monumental lion statues from Soleb in Sudan, (1370 BC)
• Hoard of silver bullion from El-Amarna (1352–1336 BC)
• Colossal head from a statue of Amenhotep III (1350 BC)
• Colossal limestone bust of Amenhotep III (1350 BC)
• Amarna Tablets, 99 out of 382 tablets found, second largest collection in the world after the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin (203 tablets) (1350 BC)
• Stela of Horemheb from his tomb at Saqqara (1330 BC)
• London Medical Papyrus with 61 medical and magical treatments (1300 BC)
• Papyrus of Ani, one of the finest extant Book of the Dead from antiquity, Thebes (1275 BC)
• List of the kings of Egypt from the Temple of Ramesses II (1250 BC)
• Statue of Khaemwaset, son of Ramses II, Abydos (1250 BC)
• The Great Harris Papyrus, the longest surviving papyrus from antiquity, Thebes (1200 BC)
• D'Orbiney Papyrus with the Tale of Two Brothers (1200–1194 BC)
• Seated statue of Seti II, Temple of Mut, Karnak (1200–1194 BC)
• Face from the sarcophagus of Ramses VI, Valley of the Kings (1140 BC)
• Book of the Dead of Nedjmet with painted offering-vignettes and columns of Hieroglyphic text, Deir el-Bahari (1070 BC)

Third Intermediate Period (1069–664 BC)

• Greenfield papyrus, funerary papyrus of Princess Nesitanebetashru, daughter of Pinudjem II and Neskhons, and priestess of Amen-Ra at Thebes (950–930 BC)
• Pair of gold bracelets that belonged to General Nemareth, son of Shoshenq I, Sais (940 BC)
• Colossal column capital of Hathor from Bubastis, 22nd Dynasty (922–887 BC)
• Statue of the Nile god Hapy, Karnak (c. 900 BC)
• Mummy case and coffin of Nesperennub, Thebes (c. 800 BC)
• Shabaka Stone from Memphis, Egypt, 25th Dynasty (c. 700 BC)
• Coffin of king Menkaure, Giza (700–600 BC)
• One of the three statues of Amun in the form of a ram protecting King Taharqo, Kawa (683 BC)
• Inner and outer coffins of the priest Hor, Deir el-Bahari, Thebes, 25th Dynasty (c. 680 BC)
• Granite statue of the Sphinx of Taharqo (680 BC)

Late Period (664–332 BC)

• Saite Sarcophagus of Sasobek, the vizier (prime minister) of the northern part of Egypt in the reign of Psammetichus I (664–610 BC)
• Sarcophagus lid of Sasobek (630 BC)
• Bronze figure of Isis and Horus, North Saqqara, Egypt (600 BC)
• Sarcophagus of Hapmen, Cairo, 26th Dynasty or later (600–300 BC)
• Kneeling statue of Wahibre, from near Lake Mariout (530 BC)
• Sarcophagus of Ankhnesneferibre (525 BC)
• Torso of Nectanebo I (380–362 BC)
• Obelisks and sarcophagus of Pharaoh Nectanebo II (360–343 BC)
• Sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, Alexandria (360–343 BC)

Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 BC)

• The famous Rosetta Stone, trilingual stela that unlocked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (196 BC)
• Naos or temple shrine of Ptolemy VIII from Philae (150 BC)
• Giant sculpture of a scarab beetle (32–30 BC)
• Fragment of a basalt Egyptian-style statue of Ptolemy I Soter (305–283 BC)
• Mummy of Hornedjitef (inner coffin), Thebes (3rd century BC)
• Wall from a chapel of Queen Shanakdakhete, Meroë (c. 150 BC)
• Shrine of Ptolemy VII, Philae (c. 150 BC)

Roman Period (30 BC – 641 AD)

• Schist head of a young man, Alexandria (after 30 BC)
• The Meriotic Hamadab Stela from the Kingdom of Kush found near the ancient site of Meroë in Sudan, 24 BC
• Lid of the coffin of Soter and Cleopatra from Qurna, Thebes (early 2nd century AD)
• Mummy of a youth with a portrait of the deceased, Hawara (100–200 AD)
• Over 30 Fayum mummy portraits from Hawara and other sites in Fayum (40–250 AD)
• Bronze lamp and patera from the X-group tombs, Qasr Ibrim (1st–6th centuries AD)
• Coptic wall painting of the martyrdom of saints, Wadi Sarga (6th century AD)

• 
  Room 64 – Egyptian grave containing a Gebelein predynastic mummy, late predynastic, 3400 BC
• 
  Room 4 – Three black granite statues of the pharaoh Senusret III, c. 1850 BC
• 
  Room 4 – Three black granite statues of the goddess Sakhmet, c. 1400 BC
• 
  Room 4 – Colossal statue of Amenhotep III, c. 1370 BC
• 
  Great Court – Colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III, c. 1350 BC
• 
  Room 4 - Limestone statue of a husband and wife, 1300–1250 BC
• 
  Room 63 - Gilded outer coffins from the tomb of Henutmehyt, Thebes, Egypt, 19th Dynasty, 1250 BC
• 
  Book of the Dead of Hunefer, sheet 5, 19th Dynasty, 1250 BC
• 
  Room 4 – Ancient Egyptian bronze statue of a cat from the Late Period, c. 664–332 BC
• 
  Room 4 – Green siltstone head of a Pharaoh, 26th–30th Dynasty, 600–340 BC
• Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=British_Museum_Publications
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