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The Egyptian Hall in London’s Pall Mall being a good example. 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. [32], 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. British Museum, the national repository in London for treasures in science and art. 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. In reply the museum said: “We are aware of the comments from the PCS union and will continue to liaise with the British Museum PCS branch and our staff more generally.”[123], According to The Guardian, the UK government rejected the appointment of classicist Mary Beard as a British Museum trustee in 2019, due to her pro-European beliefs. Room 26 - Stone pipe representing an otter from Mound City, Ohio, USA, 200 BC - 400 AD, Room 2 - Stone tomb guardian, part human part jaguar, from San Agustín, Colombia, c. 300-600 AD, Room 1 - Maya maize god statue from Copán, Honduras, 600-800 AD, Room 24 - Gold Lime Flasks (poporos), Quimbaya Culture, Colombia, 600-1100 AD, Room 27 - Lintel 25 from Yaxchilan, Late Classic, Mexico, 600-900 AD, Room 24 - Bird pectoral made from gold alloy, Popayán, Colombia, 900-1600 AD, Room 24 – Rapa Nui statue Hoa Hakananai'a, 1000 AD, Wellcome Trust Gallery, Room 27 - Double-headed serpent turquoise mosaic, Aztec, Mexico, 1400-1500 AD, Room 27 - Turquoise Mosaic Mask, Mixtec-Aztec, Mexico, 1400-1500 AD, Room 2 - Miniature gold llama figurine, Inca, Peru, about 1500 AD, Room 25 - Part of the famous collection of Benin brass plaques, Nigeria, 1500-1600 AD, Room 25 - Detail of one of the Benin brass plaques in the museum, Nigeria, 1500-1600 AD, Room 25 - Benin ivory mask of Queen Idia, Nigeria, 16th century AD, Room 24 - Hawaiian feather helmet or mahiole, late 1700s AD, Bowl decorated with pearl shell and boars' tusks, used to serve the intoxicating drink kava, Hawaii, late 1700s AD, Great Court - Two house frontal totem poles, Haida, British Columbia, Canada, about 1850 AD, Room 25 - Mask (wood and pigment); Punu people, Gabon, 19th century AD, Room 25 - Otobo masquerade in the Africa Gallery, Nigeria, 20th century AD, Room 25 - Modern interpretation of kente cloth from Ghana, late 20th century AD, The British Museum is home to one of the world's finest numismatic collections, comprising about a million objects, including coins, medals, tokens and paper money. A large number of Chinese antiquities were purchased from the Anglo-Greek banker George Eumorfopoulos in the 1930s. Whether you’re searching for a little inspiration or … [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. In 1963, a new Act of Parliament introduced administrative reforms. There are plans in place to develop permanent galleries for showcasing art from Oceania and South America. This series was started in 1978 and was originally called Occasional Papers. Prehistoric objects from the region include a bird-shaped pestle and a group of stone mortars from Papua New Guinea. Founded in 1753, the British Museum's remarkable collection spans over two million years of human history. It is pretentious, in that it uses the ancient Marbles to decorate itself. [95] However, the Paul Hamlyn Library, which had become the central reference library of the British Museum and the only library there freely open to the general public, closed permanently in August 2011. Desire, love and identity Read the … A whole suite of rooms on the ground floor display the sculptured reliefs from the Assyrian palaces at Nineveh, Nimrud and Khorsabad, while 8 galleries on the upper floor hold smaller material from ancient sites across the Middle East. London: The British Museum Press, p. 270, Wilson, David, M. (2002). Objects from the Department of Greece and Rome are located throughout the museum, although many of the architectural monuments are to be found on the ground floor, with connecting galleries from Gallery 5 to Gallery 23. 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. This left the museum with antiquities; coins, medals and paper money; prints & drawings; and ethnography. A poignant artefact is the wooden shield found near Botany Bay during Cook's first voyage in 1770. It ranks as one of the largest and best print room collections in existence alongside the Albertina in Vienna, the Paris collections and the Hermitage. The Kayung totem pole, which was made in the late nineteenth century on Haida Gwaii, dominates the Great Court and provides a fitting introduction to this very wide-ranging collection that stretches from the very north of the North American continent where the Inuit population has lived for centuries, to the tip of South America where indigenous tribes have long thrived in Patagonia. [37] In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors. It was granted planning permission in December 2009 and was completed in time for the Viking exhibition in March 2014. [55] 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 Achaemenid collection was enhanced with the addition of the Oxus Treasure in 1897 and objects excavated by the German scholar Ernst Herzfeld and the Hungarian-British explorer Sir Aurel Stein. [124], Main Staircase, Discobolus of Myron (the Discus-Thrower), Ceiling of the Great Court and the black siltstone obelisks of Nectanebo II, c. 350 BC, Detail of an Ionic capital on a pilaster in the Great Court, African Garden – created by BBC TV programme Ground Force, Room 4 – Egyptian Sculpture, view towards the Assyrian Transept, The British Museum, Room 6 – Assyrian Sculpture, Room 8 – Pair of Lamassu from Nimrud & reliefs from the palace of Tiglath-Pileser III, Room 7 – Reliefs from the North-west palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, Room 89 – Nimrud & Nineveh Palace Reliefs, Room 20a – Tomb of Merehi & Greek Vases, Lycia, 360 BC, Main Staircase – Townley Caryatid, Roman, 140–160 AD, The museum has a collaboration with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the collection online. The British Museum is unique in bringing together under one roof the cultures of the world, spanning continents and oceans. Stone Age material from Africa has been donated by famous archaeologists such as Louis and Mary Leakey, and Gertrude Caton–Thompson. We use our collection to present educational opportunities and displays that illustrate the aesthetic, engineering and cultural evolution of the automobile. The Sainsbury African Galleries display 600 objects from the greatest permanent collection of African arts and culture in the world. [44], As part of its very large website, the museum has the largest online database of objects in the collection of any museum in the world, with 2,000,000 individual object entries, 650,000 of them illustrated, online at the start of 2012. [96] The website and online database of the collection also provide increasing amounts of information. 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. His collection included over 400,000 books and antiques from Greece, Rome, Egypt, Middle East and America. The remainder form the study collection which ranges in size from beads to large sculptures. Other groups of artifacts represented in the department include the national collection of (c.100) icon paintings, most of which originate from the Byzantine Empire and Russia, and over 40 mediaeval astrolabes from across Europe and the Middle East. This is a long outmoded idea, and the exact opposite of what a sculpture gallery should do. [16], 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. As Sir Robert Smirke's grand neo-classical building gradually arose, the museum became a construction site. When it reopens this week (27 August), the British Museum will have been closed for 163 days, the longest peacetime closure in its 261-year history. 2375 Followers. And, although it incorporates them, it is out of scale, and tends to dwarf them with its bogus Doric features, including those columns, supporting almost nothing which would have made an ancient Greek artist architect wince. Black History Studies lead a Black History Tour of the British Museum highlighting artefacts of African History held in the Museum. 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. Over the years more than 11,000 objects came from this source, including pieces from Amarna, Bubastis and Deir el-Bahari. Colley (1992), 85ff. [47], In 2013 the museum received a record 6.7 million visitors, an increase of 20% from the previous year. Key benefactors to the department have been Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, Richard Payne Knight, John Malcolm, Campbell Dodgson, César Mange de Hauke and Tomás Harris. Featuring around 100 works on paper, the majority of which have been collected by the British Museum during the past decade, this exhibition presents artists from across the Middle East and North Africa who reflect on their own societies, all of which have experienced extraordinary changes in living memory. Le Great Court Restaurant au British Museum, Great Russell Street, Londres WC1B 3DG. [49], The British Museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport through a three-year funding agreement. Other fieldwork collections have recently come from Dietrich and Rosemarie Klemm (University of Munich) and William Adams (University of Kentucky). The department also has 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. Zeus was the king of the gods. This department was founded in 1920. 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