„Mihai Bravu” Technical College

British Museum

Student's Name : Coordinating teacher:

Sanda Andreea Vasilescu Ani

May 2018

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Argument

I always loved history and the British Museum is everything I have ever dreamed of, all the
different departments from ancient Egypt to the Middle East making a beautiful collection of art
and of course history.

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 The British Museum, located in the Bloomsbury area of London, United Kingdom, is a
public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture. Its permanent collection numbers
some 8 million works, and is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence having
been widely sourced during the era of the British Empire, and documenting the story of human
culture from its beginnings to the present.

The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based 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, on the site of the current building. Its expansion over the following two
and a half centuries was largely a result of expanding British colonizationand has resulted in the
creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum of Natural
History in South Kensington in 1881 (it is nowadays simply called the Natural History Museum,
and is separate and independent).

In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 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 other
national museums in the United Kingdom it charges no admission fee, except for loan
exhibitions.

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 Irish-born British
physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). During the course of his lifetime Sloane
gathered an enviable 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.

At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds 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.

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Foundation (1753)

On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his formal assent to the Act of Parliament which
established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to
the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dated 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 including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole
surviving manuscript of Beowulf.

Growth and change (1800–25)

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 The Elgin Room, 1937

Left to Right: Montagu House, Townley Gallery and Sir Robert Smirke's west wing under
construction, July 1828

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus Room, 1920s

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. 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. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first

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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. 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.

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. 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 ..." 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, the proposed Picture Gallery
was no longer needed, and the space on the upper floor was given over to the Natural
history collections.

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.

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 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.

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 thirteen 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.

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. There is also a "Highlights" database with longer
entries on over 4,000 objects, and several specialised online research catalogues and online

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journals (all free to access). In 2013 the museum's website received 19.5 millions visits, an
increase of 47% from the previous year.

In 2013 the museum received a record 6.7 million visitors, an increase of 20% from the
previous year. Popular exhibitions including "Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum" and
"Ice Age Art" are credited with helping fuel the increase in visitors. Plans were announced in
September 2014 to recreate the entire building along with all exhibits in the video
game Minecraft in conjunction with members of the public.

Departments

Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan

The British Museum houses the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian
antiquities (with over 100,000 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 to the Coptic (Christian) times (12th century AD), a time-span over 11,000
years.

Room 4 – Three black granite statues of the pharaoh Senusret III, c. 1850 BC

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 

Room 4 – Three black granite statues of the goddess Sakhmet, c. 1400 BC

Room 4 – Colossal statue of Amenhotep III, c. 1370 BC

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 

Great Court – Colossal quartzite statue of Amenhotep III, c. 1350 BC

Room 4 - Limestone statue of a husband and wife, 1300-1250 BC

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Department of Greece and Rome

Room 17 – Reconstruction of the Nereid Monument, c. 390 BC

Room 18 – Parthenon marbles from the Acropolis of Athens, 447 BC

Room 21 – Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, mid-
4th century BC

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 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. These mostly range in date from
the beginning of the Greek Bronze Age (about 3200 BC) to the establishment of Christianity as
the official religion of the Roman Empire, with the Edict of Milan under the reign of the Roman
Emperor Constantine I in 313 AD. Archaeology was in its infancy during the nineteenth century
and many pioneering individuals began excavating sites across the Classical world, chief among
them for the museum were Charles Newton, John Turtle Wood, Robert Murdoch
Smith and Charles Fellows.

Department of the Middle East

Room 9 – Assyrian palace reliefs, Nineveh, 701–681 BC

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. A collection of
immense importance, 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 collections represent the civilisations of the ancient Near East and its adjacent areas. These
cover Mesopotamia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, the Caucasus, parts of Central
Asia, Syria, the Holy Land and Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean from
the prehistoric period and include objects from the beginning of Islam in the 7th century.

Room 9 – Assyrian palace reliefs, Nineveh, 701–681 BC

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 Biography:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum

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