 |
The British Museum
The British Museum in London is one of the world's largest and most important museums of human history and culture. It was established in 1753 and was based largely on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building.
The British Museum is home to over seven million objects from all continents illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present. Many of the artifacts are stored underneath the museum due to lack of space.
After the defeat of the French in the Battle of the Nile in 1801 the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculpture and the Rosetta Stone. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the Towneley collection in 1805 and the renowned Elgin Marbles in 1816. The natural history collections were an integral part of the British Museum until their removal to the new British Museum (Natural History), now The Natural History Museum, in 1887. The ethnography collections were until recently housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind in Piccadilly; they have now returned to Bloomsbury and the Department of Ethnography has been renamed the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
The temporary exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun, held by the British Museum in 1972, was the most successful in British history, attracting 1,694,117 visitors. It is a point of controversy whether museums should be allowed to possess artifacts taken from other countries, and the British Museum is a notable target for criticism. The Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes are among its most disputed collections, and organizations have been formed demanding the return of both sets of artifacts to their native countries of Greece and Nigeria respectively.
The British Museum is seen in the film The Mummy Returns although not from the outside. This view is actually of University College London. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_British_Museum)
|
 |
