In 1753, the Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed his life's work to the nation for a sum of £20,000, a price Parliament intentionally set far below the collection's estimated value of £50,000 to £80,000. This single act created the British Museum, the first public national museum in the world, founded on the will of a man who had married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter and spent his life gathering 71,000 objects ranging from 40,000 printed books to 337 volumes of dried plants. The museum opened its doors to the public on the 15th of January 1759, housed within the converted 17th-century Montagu House in Bloomsbury, London. At its inception, the institution was a universal museum, a place where natural history specimens occupied an entire wing on the first floor while the library dominated the ground floor. The foundation was not merely a collection of curiosities but a deliberate attempt to create a national library and museum combined, incorporating the Cottonian Library and the Harleian Library alongside Sloane's holdings. This unique structure meant that the museum housed treasures like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf, establishing a precedent for a public institution that belonged to neither church nor king.
The Age Of Expansion
The museum's collection grew rapidly in the early 19th century, driven by British military victories and the ambitions of collectors like Sir William Hamilton and Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Following the defeat of the French at the Battle of the Nile in 1801, the British Museum acquired significant Egyptian sculptures, and in 1802, King George III presented the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. The acquisition of the Elgin Marbles in 1816 marked a turning point, as these marble sculptures from the Parthenon were transferred from Athens to the UK and deposited in the museum by an Act of Parliament. The building itself underwent massive transformation under the direction of Sir Robert Smirke, who designed a grand neoclassical quadrangular building to replace the dilapidated Montagu House. Work on the East Wing began in 1823, and by 1831, the extension was complete, creating a space that would eventually house the King's Library. The museum became a construction site, with the King's Library on the ground floor of the East Wing described as one of the finest rooms in London, although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857. This era of expansion also saw the museum support excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard, leading to the discovery of Ashurbanipal's great library of cuneiform tablets and making the museum a global focus for Assyrian studies.
The Second Founder
Anthony Panizzi, an Italian librarian often called the second founder of the British Museum, transformed the institution's library into a well-organized national library that quintupled in size under his supervision. In 1857, the museum opened the Round Reading Room, a circular space with a cast iron dome designed by Sydney Smirke, which was then the second widest dome in the world. The central quadrangle of Smirke's design, originally a waste of valuable space, was filled at Panizzi's request to create this monumental reading room. The museum's collecting policy shifted dramatically in 1851 with the appointment of Augustus Wollaston Franks, who began to collect British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory, and 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. The museum also began to collect from the wider world, with overseas excavations continuing to bring in significant artifacts. John Turtle Wood discovered the remains of the 4th century BC Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, another Wonder of the Ancient World, while the museum supported excavations in Assyria and Egypt. The collection grew to include the William Burges collection of armoury bequeathed in 1881 and the Waddesdon Bequest from Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1898, which included the Holy Thorn Reliquary created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry.
As tensions with Nazi Germany developed in the 1930s, the museum's Director John Forsdyke ordered the preparation of 3,300 No-Nail Boxes to secure the museum's most valuable items. On the 24th of August 1939, a mere day after the Home Secretary advised them to do so, the museum began relocating selected items to secure basements, country houses, Aldwych tube station, and the National Library of Wales. Many items were relocated in early 1942 from their initial dispersal locations to a newly developed facility at Westwood Quarry in Wiltshire. The evacuation proved timely, for in 1940 the Duveen Gallery was severely damaged by bombing, and the King's Library received a direct hit from a high explosive bomb. The museum's collections were stored in various locations, including the London Post Office Railway to Holborn and a country house near Malvern, to protect them from wartime bombing. After the war, the museum continued to collect from all countries and all centuries, with spectacular additions including the 2600 BC Mesopotamian treasure from Ur, discovered during Leonard Woolley's 1922, 34 excavations, and gold, silver, and garnet grave goods from the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939. 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, with work beginning on restoring the damaged Duveen Gallery.
The Great Court
The departure of the British Library to a new site at St Pancras in 1998 finally provided the space needed for the books and created the opportunity to redevelop the vacant space in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court. The Great Court opened in December 2000 and is the largest covered square in Europe, featuring a roof of glass and steel built by an Austrian steelwork company with 1,656 uniquely shaped panes of glass. At the center of the Great Court is the Reading Room, vacated by the British Library, which has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre. The museum's online database had nearly 4,500,000 individual object entries in 2,000,000 records at the start of 2023, and in 2022, 23 there were 27 million visits to the website. The museum was the most visited tourist attraction in Britain in 2023, with 5,820,860 visits, a 42% increase on 2022. The number of visits, however, has not recovered to the level reached before the Covid pandemic. The museum now showcases on public display less than 1% of its entire collection, approximately 50,000 items, across nearly one hundred galleries open to the public. The lack of a large temporary exhibition space led to the £135 million World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, which was completed in time for the Viking exhibition in March 2014.
The Egyptian Collections
The British Museum houses a collection of over 100,000 Egyptian antiquities from all periods and many sites of importance in Egypt and the Sudan, illustrating every aspect of the cultures of the Nile Valley from the Predynastic Neolithic period through Coptic times. The collection includes the famous Rosetta Stone, a trilingual stela that unlocked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and over 140 mummies and coffins, the largest outside Cairo. The museum's Egyptian galleries can display only 4% of its Egyptian holdings, yet the mummies remain among the most eagerly sought-after exhibits by visitors. Highlights include the Battlefield Palette and Hunters Palette, two cosmetic palettes with complex decorative schemes, and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, an early example of Ancient Egyptian mathematics. The collection also features the Great Harris Papyrus, the longest surviving papyrus from antiquity, and the Papyrus of Ani, one of the finest extant Book of the Dead from antiquity. The museum conducted its own excavations in Egypt, receiving divisions of finds from sites such as Asyut, Mostagedda, and Matmar, and sites in Sudan such as Soba, Kawa, and the Northern Dongola Reach. 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, donated by Professor Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University in Texas.
The Classical World
The British Museum has one of the world's largest and most comprehensive collections of antiquities from the Classical world, with over 100,000 objects ranging from the beginning of the Greek Bronze Age to the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The collection includes important sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens, as well as elements of two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The museum also houses one of the widest-ranging collections of Italic and Etruscan antiquities outside Italy, as well as extensive groups of material from Cyprus and non-Greek colonies in Lycia and Caria on Asia Minor. The collection includes the famous Cameo glass Portland Vase, the most famous glass vessel from ancient Rome, and the Roman gold glass, the second largest collection after the Vatican Museums. The museum's Roman sculptures are particularly well represented by the Townley collection, and the collection includes architectural, sculptural, and epigraphic items from many other sites across the classical world. The museum also holds the Amarna Tablets, 99 out of 382 tablets found, the second largest collection in the world after the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, and the Standard of Ur, a masterpiece from the Royal Cemeteries of the 3rd millennium BC discovered by Leonard Woolley.
The Middle East
With a collection numbering some 330,000 works, the British Museum possesses the world's largest and most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. The holdings of Assyrian sculpture, Babylonian and Sumerian antiquities are among the most comprehensive in the world, with entire suites of rooms panelled in alabaster Assyrian palace reliefs from Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad. The collection includes the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, a large collection of cuneiform tablets of enormous importance that today number around 130,000 pieces, and the Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon, a bronze gate from Balawat, and a fine collection of Urartian bronzes from Toprakkale. The museum also holds the Standard of Ur, the Ram in a Thicket, the Royal Game of Ur, and two bull-headed lyres discovered by Leonard Woolley at Ur between 1922 and 1934. The collection includes three diorite statues of the ruler Gudea from the ancient state of Lagash and a series of limestone kudurru or boundary stones from different locations across ancient Mesopotamia. The museum also has a representative collection of Dilmun and Parthian material excavated from various burial mounds at the ancient sites of A'ali and other locations, as well as the finest collection of Yemeni antiquities outside that country.