This was a departure from the government's usual hands-off approach to the running of the museum. This project was announced in July 2007, with the architects Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. 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). It is particularly famous for the large number of late Roman silver treasures, many of which were found in East Anglia, the most important of which is the Mildenhall Treasure. In 2004, the ethnographic collections from Asia were transferred to the department. The department is also responsible for the curation of Romano-British objects – the museum has by far the most extensive such collection in Britain and one of the most representative regional collections in Europe outside Italy. There never has been a serious attempt to change the museum's name. 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. At the centre of the Great Court is the Reading Room vacated by the British Library, its functions now moved to St Pancras. [a] It was the first public national museum in the world.[4]. 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. [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. An adjacent gallery showcases the Amaravati sculptures and monuments.
[24] Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection, much of it Roman sculpture, in 1805. [118], In February 2020, 1,500 demonstrators, including British Museum staff, took part in a day of protest about the BP sponsorship, occupying 11 of the museum's rooms. Artefacts from the Islamic world are on display in Gallery 34 of the museum.
[41] 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].
[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. The Anthropology Library is especially large, with 120,000 volumes. Beginning from the early Bronze Age, the department 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. Gavin R de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (London, 1953). In 1881 the original natural history collections were transferred to a new building in South Kensington to form the Natural History Museum, and in 1973 the British Museum’s library was joined by an act of Parliament with a number of other holdings to create the British Library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras. The great eleven volume Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum compiled between 1870 and 1954 is the definitive reference work for the study of British Satirical prints. The Sainsbury African Galleries display 600 objects from the greatest permanent collection of African arts and culture in the world. The collection encompasses architectural, sculptural and epigraphic items from many other sites across the classical world including Amathus, Aphrodisias, Delos, Iasos, Idalion, Kalymnos, Kerch, Rhamnous, Salamis, Sestos, Sounion, Tomis and Thessanoloki.
Many Bronze Age objects from across Europe were added during the nineteenth century, often from large collections built up by excavators and scholars such as Greenwell in Britain, Tobin and Cooke in Ireland, Lukis and de la Grancière in Brittany, Worsaae in Denmark, Siret at El Argar in Spain, and Klemm and Edelmann in Germany. It became easier to lend objects, the constitution of the board of trustees changed and the Natural History Museum became fully independent. Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room, with space for a million books, opened in 1857. [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. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest library in the world by number of items catalogued.
We use cookies to make our website work more efficiently, to provide you with more personalised services or advertising to you, and to analyse traffic on our website. [35] 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.[35].
Altogether the British Museum showcases on public display less than 1%[60] of its entire collection, approximately 50,000 items.
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