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Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………

1. Visiting the British Museum …………………………………………….

2. Greek and Roman antiquities

2.1. From Prehistoric to Classical Greece

2.2. The Harpy Tomb, Bassae frieze and Nereid Monument

2.3. The Elgin Marbles

2.4. The Tomb of Payava and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

2.5. The basement galleries: Greek and Roman sculpture

2.6. The first-floor galleries

3. Western Asiatic antiquities

3.1. Assyrian sculpture and relief

3.2. Mesopotamia, the Nimrud ivories and the Oxus Treasure

4. Egyptian antiquities

4.1. The Egyptian Hall

4.2. The mummies and other funerary art

5. The Prehistoric and Romano-British collection

6. The medieval, Renaissance and Modern collections

7. The Mexican Gallery

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8. The Oriental collections

8.1. Chinese collection

8.2. South East Asian antiquities

8.3. The Islamic gallery

9. The British Library

10. Conclusion

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 Introduction

The British Museum is one of the great museums of the world and, after
Blackpool Beach, is Britain's most popular tourist attraction (in excess of six
million visitors a year). With over four million exhibits-a number increasing daily
with the stream of new acquisitions, discoveries and bequests-ranged over two and
a half miles of galleries, this is one of largest and most comprehensive collections
of antiquities, prints, drawings and books to be housed under one roof.Its collection
of Roman and Greek art is unparalleled, its Egypt, and, in addition, there are
fabulous tresures from Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain, from China, Japan, India
and Mesopotamia-not to mention an enormous collection of prints and drawings,
only a fraction of which can be displayed at any one time.
The origins of the British Museum lie in the collection of over 80,000 curios
from plants and fossils to coins and medals-belonging to Sir Hans Sloane, a
wealthy Chelsea doctor who bequeathed them in 1753, in return for £ 20,000. His
collection was purchased by an unenthusiastic government to form the kernel of
the world's first public museum housed in a building bought with the proceeds of a
dubiously conducted public lottery. Soon afterwards the British Museum began to
acquire the antiquities that have given it a modern reputation as the world's largest
museum of stolen goods. The "robberies" of Lord Elgin are only the best known;
countless others engaged in sporadic looting throughout the Empire the Napoleonic
Wars provided the victorious British with heaps of antiquities pilfered by the
French in Egypt and the British museum itself sent out its own archeologists to
strip Classical sites bare.

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 As early as 1820 it was clear thet more space was needed for all this loot,
hence the present structure, built piecemeal over the course of the next thirty years.
The overall design was by Sir Robert Smirke, whose giant Ionian colonnade and
portico, complete with a pediment frieze, make this the grandest of London's Greek
Revival buildings. Lack of space has continued to be a problem, however: the
natural history collections were transferred to South Kensington in the 1880s, and
the ethnographical departament was later rehoused near Piccadilly to become the
Museum of Mankind. When the British Library eventually moves to its new
premises at St.Pancras, the museum's £ 60 million redevelopment plan aims to
bring the ethnographical department back to the British Museum, and to open up
Smirke's Great Court around the Round Reading Room of the British Library,
which will feature a glass roof designed by Norman Foster.

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 1. Visiting the British Museum

The British Museum's fourteen-acre site is enough to tire even the most
ardent museum lover, J.B.Priestley, for one, wished "there was a little room
somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and
good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke". Short of such a
place, the best advice is either to see the highlights and leave the rest for another
visit, or to concentrate on one or two sections. Alternatively, you might consider
one of the British Museum's guided tours, which cover the highlights in around one
and a half hours.
There are two entrances (both have cloakrooms): the main one, on Great
Russell Street, brings you to the information desk and bookshop, while the smaller
doorway on the north side of the building in Montague Place opens onto the
Oriental galleries. The information desk will furnish you with a free museum plan,
and the noticeboard close by announces which rooms are currently closed. Even
equipped with a plan, it's easy enough to get confused-the room numbering is
complicated and many sections are spread over more than one floor. It can get
crowded,too:if you're heading for the major sights, try to get here as early in the
day as possible, and avoid the weekends if you can, when the popular galleries are
overrun. It's a far cry from the museum's beginning in 1759 when it was open for
just three hours a day, entry was by written application only, and tickets for "any
person of decent appearance" were limited to ten per hour.
Because of the sheer volume of the British Museum's hoard of prints and
drawings, everything from Botticelli to Bonnard, there is only space for temporary
exhibitions in room 90, which change every three to four months. The same is true

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of the British Museum's collection of 500,000 coins and medals, of which only a
fraction can be shown at any one time in room 69a. The sensitive materials used in
Japanese art mean that the Japanese Galleries in rooms 91 to 94 also host only
temporary shows. And finally, the British Museum puts on regular temporary
exhibitions (Tutankhamun was the most famous) on a wide range of themes in
rooms 27 and 28, for which there is usually an entrance charge.

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 2. Greek and Roman antiquities

Greek and Roman antiquities make up the largest section in the museum,
spread over three floors. The ground floor is laid out along broadly chronological
lines, starting wiyh the Bronze Age and finishing up in late Roman times;
highlights include the Elgin Marbles and the Nereid Monument. The basement
holds the chaotic Townley collection, while the first floor houses generally less
spectacular find, the exception being the Portland Vase.

2.1.From Prehistoric to Classical Greece

From the foyer, pass through the bookshop, ignore the alluring Assyrian
sculpture to your right, and enter through the twin halfcolumns taken from one of
the beehive tombs at Mycenae. Room 1 kicks off with Cycladic figures from the
Aegean island, whose significance is still disputed, while room 2 contains Minoan
artefacts, the Aegina treasure of gold jewellery, and a small selection of
Mycenaean finds.
The British Museum boasts an exhausting array of Greek vases, starting
with the Geometric and early pictorial-style period in room 2, and moving on

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through the unusual Corinthian hybrid-animal vases to more familiar Athenian
black-figure vases of theArchaic period in room 3, and the later red-figure vases
from Greece's Classical age in room 4 and 5. There are further hoards of early
Greek vases in the basement of room 3, and later, mostly red-figure ones in room 9
and the mezzanine room 11, not to mention the various examples dotted about
rooms 68-73 on the first floor.

2.2. The Harpy Tomb, Bassae frieze and Nereid Monument

From room 5 onwards, the real highlights of the Classical selection begin,
starting with the marble relief from the Harpy Tomb, a huge imposing funerary
pillar from Xanthos, which originally rose to a height of nearly 30ft. Its name
derives from the pairs of strange bird-women that appear on two sides of the relief,
carrying children in their arms.
In the purpose-built mezzanine room 6 is the fifth-century BC Nereid
monument, a mighty temple-like tomb of a Lycian chieftain, fronted wiyh Ionic
columns interspersed with figures once indentified as Nereids, now thought to be
Aurae or wind goddesses. The monument was the most important construction at

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Xanthos-in western Turkey-until 1842, when it was carried off by Charles Fellows
on the HMS Beacon, along with the greater of the site's moveable art.

2.3. The Elgin Marbles

The large, purpose-built Duveen gallery is devoted to the museum's most

famous relics, the Parthenon sculptures, better known as the Elgin Marbles, after
Lord Elgin, who removed them from the Parthenon in Athens in 1801. As British
ambassador to Constantinople, Lord Elgin was able to wangle permission from the
Turkish Porte to remove "any pieces of stone with figures and inscriptions". He
interpreted this as a licence to make off wiyh almost all of the bas-reliefs of the
Parthenon frieze and most of its pedimental structure, which he displayed in a
shed in his Pall Mall garden until he eventually sold them to the British Museum
in 1816 for 35,000.
There were justification for Elgin's action-the Turk's tendency to use
Parthenon stones in their lime kilns, and the facts that building had already been
partially wrecked by a missile that landed on the pile of gunpowder the Turks had
thoughtfully stored there-though it was controversial ever then and opposed
notably by Byron. The Greek government has repeatedly requested the sculptures
be returned, and has commissioned a special museum to house them near the
Acropolis itself, though for the time being the British Museum shows no signs of
relenting.
Despite their grand setting, first impressions of the marblefriezes, carved
berween 447 and 432 BC under the supervision of the great sculptor Pheidias, can

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be a little disappointing. After the vigorous high relief of the Bassae frieze, the
Pathenon's sculptures seem flat and lifeless, made up of long, repetitive queues of
worshippers. If that is your reaction-and it must be said, other visitors are moved to
tears-head for the traffic jam of horsemen on the north frieze, which is better
preserved and exhibits more compositional variety.
As for the subject of the frieze, there is currently no agreement over what it
actually depicts: the Panathenaic festival held every four year to glorify the
goddess Athena, or the victory parade after the Battle of Marathon, at each end of
the room are the metopes and pedimental sculptures: the figures from the east
pediment are the most impressive, though most are headless; the surrounding
metopes, which vary enormously in quality, depict the struggle between Centaurs
and Lapiths in high relief.

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 2.4.The Tomb of Payava and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

Beyond the Nereid monument, in room 9, you come to two of Lond Elgin's
less defensible appropriations, looking particularly forlorn and meaningless: a
single column and one of the six caryatids from the portico of the Erechtheion on
the Acropolis.
Further on, in room 11, is another large relic from Xanthos, the Tomb of
Payava, built during the incumbent's lifetime; the reliefs on the tomb's steep roof
would have been out of view of earthbound mortals, and are best viewed from the
gallery containing the reserve collection of Greek vases.
Room 12 contains fragments from one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World: two huge figures, an Amazonian frieze and a marble horse the size of an
elephant from the self-aggrandizing tomb of King Mausolus at Halicarnassus from
the fourth century BC. A fragment from another Wonder of the World lies in room
14, a giant sculpted marble column drum from the colossal Temple of Artemis at
Ephesus, with figures carved in high relief.

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 2.5. The basement galleries: Greek and Roman sculpture

From room 12, steps lead down to the basement galleries. The architecture
gallery in room 77 is rather like a Classical builder's yard, piled high with bits of
columns, architraves, entablatures and capitals. Next comes a room full of
Classical inscriptions, followed by room after room of Greek and Roman
sculpture,arranged in the whimsical manner preferred by the eighteenth-century
English collectors who amassed the stuff.
The best selection is in the final room, which houses the Townley
Collection, bought from dealers in Rome and London between 1768 and 1791 by
Charles Townles for his house in Queen Anne's Gate. Among the bewildering
array of sculpture-much of it modified to Townley's own tastes - you'll find two
curiously gentle marble greyhounds, a claw-footed sphinx, a chariot-shaped latrine,
and one of Townley's last purchases, a Roman copy of the famous Classical Greek
bronze of Discobolus.
Elsewhere, in room 85 there are dozens of portrait busts of emperors and
mythological heroes, and in room 83 a monumental marble foot from a statue of
Zeus in Alexandria.

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 2.6. The first-floor galleries

The remainder of the Greek and Roman collection is situated on the first
floor, which you can approach either from the main stairs, or from the west stairs,
which are lined with mosaic pavements from Halicarnassus. Fromthe main stairs,
turn immediately right and right again to get to room 68, which is lines with
miniature statuary. The "Daily Life" exhibition in room 69 is one of the most user-
friendly in the whole collection, with a variety of objects grouped under specific
themes such as gladiators, music, women and so on.
The highlight of there first-floor rooms, though, is the Portland Vase, made
from cobalt-blue blown glass around the beginning of the first millennium, and
decorated with opaque white cameos. The vase was smashed into over 200
separate pieces by a young Irishman in 1845, but is perhaps best known as the
inspiration for Keat's Ode on a Grecian Urn. Nearby, and equally arresting in its
own way, is the warty crocodile-skin suit of armour worn by a Roman follower of
the Egyptian crocodile cult.
The last three rooms of Etruscal artefacts, Cypriot antiquities and Apullian
red-figure vases, which round off the Classical section, are of minor interest only.

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 3. Western Asiatic antiquities

The collection of the department of Western Asiatic Antiquities cover all the
lands east of Egypt and west of Afghanistan. The majority of exhibits on the
ground floor come from the Assyrian empire; upstairs you'll find the Nimrud
ivories, rich pickings from Mesopotamia and the Oxus Treasure from ancient
Persia.

3.1. Assyrian sculpture and reliefs

Through the bookshop, before you enter the Greek and Roman antiquities
section, two attendant gods, their robes smothered in inscriptions, fix their gaze on
you, signalling the beginning of the British Museum's remarkable collection of
Assyrian sculptures and reliefs. Ahead of you lies the Egyption Hall, but to
continue with Assyria, turn left and pass between the two awesome five-legged,

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human-headed winged bulls that once guarded the temple of Ashurnasirpal II.
Beyond is a fullscale reconstruction of the colossal wooden Balawat Gates from
the palace of Shalmaneser III, which are bound together with bronze strips
decorated with low-relief friezes depicting the defeat and execution of
Shalmaneser's enemies.
All the above serves as a prelude to the Assyrian finds that are raged in
rooms 19-21, parallel to the Egyptian Hall.Ay the centre of room 20 stands a small
black obelisk carved with images of foreign rulers paying tribute to Shalmaneser
III, interspersed with cuneiform inscriptions whose discovery in 1846 helped
significantly in the decoding of this early form of writing. The finest of the
Nineveh reliefs in room 21 record the stupendous effort involved in transporting
the aforementioned winged bulls from their quarry to the palance; they should be
read from left to right, so start at the far end ofthe room. Evidently the Assyrians
movel there huge carved beasts in one piece;not so the British, who cut the two
largest winged bulls in the British Museum into six pieces before transporting
them-the joins are stillvisible on the pair in room 16, round the corner from room
20.
The partitioned galleries, know collectively as room 17, are lined with even
more splendid friezes from Nineveh. On one side is an almost continuous band
portraying the chaos and carnage of the Assyrian capture of the Judaean city of
Lachish; the Assyrian king Sennacherib's face was smashed by Babylonian soldiers
when the Assyrian capital finally fell to its southern neighbours in 612 BC. on the
other side are depicted the royal lion hunts of Ashurbanipal, whichinvoled
rounding up the beasts before letting them loose in an enclosed arena for the king's
sport, a practice which effectively eradicated the species in Assyria; the succession
of graphic death scenes features one in which the king slaughters the cats with his

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bare hands.

3.2.Mesopotamia, the Nimrud ivories and the Oxus Treasure

From room 17, it's a convenient trot down into the basement, where
Mesopotamian friezes and domestic objects include ann iron bathtub-cum-coffin
from the Mesopotamian capital of Ur, thought to be the first great city on
earth,dating from 2500 BC.
Before heading back to the west stairs, which will take you up to the rest of
the collection, check out the gruesome reconstuction of a subterranean tomb in the
Ancient Palestine gallery by the stairs. Originally intended for one man, six others
joined him when they were convicted of grave-robbing and, according to Islamic
law, three had their right hands cut off. Up the west stairs from room 24, you leap

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forward again chronologically, in room 58, to the superb Nimrud ivories, which
include miniatures, low-relief panels and a whole set of croughing calves, much of
it brought to Assyria as war booty or tribute between 900 and 700 BC.
Further on, in room 56, are some of the British Museum's oldest artefacts,
dating from Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. The most extraordinary
treasures hail from Ur; the enigmatic Ram in the Thicket, a deep blue lapis lazuli
and white shell statuette of a goat on its hind legs, peering through gold-leaf
branches; the equally mystrious Standard of Ur, a small hollow box showing scene
of battle on one side, with peace and banqueting on the other, all fashioned in
shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli, set in bitumen;and the Royal Game of Ur, one
of the earliest known board game. A selection of tablets scratched with
infinitestimal cuneiform script includes the Flood Tablet, a fragment of the Epic of
Gilgamesh, perhaps the world's oldest story.
Finally, there's the Oxus Treasure, a hoard of goldwork which appears to
have passed from one band of robbers to another until it was eventually bought
from the bazaar at Rawalpindi by British collectors. The pieces date from the
seventh to the fourth centuries BC and hail from Persepolis, once capital of the
Persian empire. The most celebrated are the miniature four-horse chariot and the
amulet sprouting a pair of fantastical bird-headed creatures sporting horns. At the
time of writing, the Oxus Treasure was displayed in room 49, accessible only from
room 41, on the south side of the first floor.

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 4. Egyptian antiquities

The British Museum's collection of Egyptian antiquities, ranging from

Predynastic times to Coptic Egypt, is one of the finest in the world rivalled only by
Cairo's and the New York Met's; the highights are the Rosetta Stone, the vast hall
of Egyptian sculpture and the large collection of mummies.

4.1. The Egyptian Hall

Beyond the bookshop on the ground floor, just past the entrance to the
Assyrian section, two black granite statues of Amenophis III guard the entrance to
the Egyptian Hall, where the cream of the British Museum's Egyptian antiquities
are on display. The name "Belzoni" scratched under the left heel of the larger
statue, was carved by the Italian circus strongman responsible for dragging some of
the heftiest Egyptian treasures to the banks of the Nile, prior to their export to
England.
Beyond, a crowd usually hovers around the Rosetta Stone, a black basalt
slab found in the Nile delta in 1799 by French soldiers. It was surrendered to the

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Brits in 1801, but nevertheless it was a French professor who finally unlocked the
secret of Egyptian hiroglyphs, by comparing the stone's three different scripts-
ancient hieroglyphs, demotic, Egyptian and Greek.
Beyond the stone are a series of false doors richly decorated with
hieroglyphs and figures of the deceased, through which, it was believed, the dead
person's ka (soul) could pass to receive the food offerings laid outside urial
chamber. A long, dimly lit side gallery is the tomb-like setting for the brightly
painted sandstone head of Mentuhotep II, and, completely different in style, the
head of Queen Hatshepsut, formed from smooth green schist that bears an uncanny
resemblance to the texture of human skin. A naturalistic and oddly touching tomb
painting at the end of the room shows a nobleman hunting wildfowl with his wife
and daughter-the sky full of birds, fat fish floating in the river, and an excited tabby
cat clutching three deal birds in its claws.
Back in the main hall, a sombre trio of life-sized granite statues of Sesotris
III make a doleful counterpoint to the colossal pinkspeckled granite hear of
Amenophis III, whose enormous dislocated arm lies next to him. Glass cases in the
central atrium display a fascinating array of smaller objects from signet rings to
eye-paint containers in the shape of hedgehogs, as figurines and religious objects,
including a bronze of the cat goddess Bastet, with gold nose-and-ear-rings-the
subject of the museum's most popular reproduction. Further on still, another giant
head and shoulders, made of two pieces of different coloured granite, stillbears the
hole drilled by French soldiers in an unsuccessful attempt to remove it from the
Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramses II.
More evidence of Egyptian animal cults appears in the small avenue of
animal statues: a ram, a baboon, several falcons and Theoris, the goddess of
women in chidbirth, who is depicted as a hippopotamus with a swollen belly,

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standing on her hind legs. There are further animal statues in the second side
gallery (room 25b), whose gilded wooden sarcophagus is of a richness comparable
with the Tutankhamun treasures, whose display at the British Museum in 1972 (the
first time they had been seen outside Egypt) drew in a record one and a half milion
visitors.

4.2. The mummies and other funerary art

Climbing the west stairs brings you to the Egyptian mummy collection in
room 60 and 61. The sheer number of exhibitit here is over-whelming, and,
beautiful though many individual pieces are, it’s frustrating that there’s little in the
way of explanation (hence the box below). One display cabinet to make for, in
room 60, is that containing the mummies of various animals, including cats,
crocodiles and falcons, along with their highly ornate coffins-there’s even an eel,
whose bronze coffin depicts the deceased as a cobra with a human heal.
Room 62 contains funerary papyruses and tomb paintings showing scenes
from the Book of the Deal, and a whole cabinet of wood or wax shabti alongside
their little shabti boxes (see box below). The last few rooms are less interesting,
though the Nubian finds in room 65 are much more thoughtfully laid out, and the
five-thousand-yaer-old sand-preserved corpse in room 64 always comes in for

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ghoulish srtiny.

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 5. The Prehistoric and Romano-British collection

The British Museum fulfils its less controversial role as national treasure
house in the (rather loosely defined) Prehistoric and Romano-British colections on
the first floor (rooms36-40), though even here there have been calls for the items to
be shared more with the regional museums. At the top of the main stairs, forming
the centrepiece to room 35, is the British Museum’s largest Roman mosaic,centre
on the earli-est-known mosaic representation of Christ. Close by is a hologram of
the most sensational of the British Museum’s recent finds,the Lindow Man, whose
leathery half-corpse is displayed on the other side of the hologram. Clubbed and
garotted during a sacrificial Druid ceremony (or so it’s reckoned), he lay in a hide-
preserving Cheshire bog for some 2000 year.
Brilliant displays of Celtic craftwork follow in room 38, where two of the
most distinctive objects are the French Basse-Yutz wine flagons,made from bronze
and inlaid with coral.Showing Persian and Etruscan influences, they are supreme
example of Celtic art, with happy little ducks on the lip and rangy dogs for handles.
From England there are fabulous heavy golden necklaces, a horned bronze helmet,
and fine decorative mirrors and shields. Best of all is the Snettisham Treasure at
the far end of room 39, made up mostly of gold and silver torcs (neck-rings), the
finest of which is made of eight strands of gold twisted together, each of which is
in turn made up of eight wires.
Next door in room 40 is a gathering of domestic objects from Roman
Britain, the most famous of there being the 28 pieces of silver tableware known as
the Mildenhall Treasure - the Great Dish is an outstanding late Roman work,
weighing over eight kilos and decorated with a mixture of pagan and Christian

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images in low relief.

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 1.5. The Medieval, Renaissance and Modern collections

The medieval and modern collections cover more than a millennium from
the Dark Ages to the interwar period.The first gallery (room 41) houses finds from
all over Europe, but most visitors come here to see the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo
Treasure, which includes silver bowls, gold jewellery decorated with inset enamel,
and an iron helmet bejewelled with gilded bronze and garnets,all buried along with
a forty-oar open ship in East Anglia around 625 AD. Discovered by accident in
1939, this enormous haul is by far richest single archeological find ever made in
Britain.
In the next room (42) are the thick-set Lewis chessmen, wild-eyed twelfth-
century Scandinavian figures carved from walrus ivory, which were discovered in
1831 by a Gaelic crofter in the Outer Hebrides. There are more walrus ivories-
mostly chess pieces and religious plaques – from France and Germany elsewhere
in the room. At the far end of the room is the richly enameled, fourteenth – century
French Royal Gold Cup, given by James I to the Constable of Castille, only to find
its way back to this country in later life.
Room 43 displays tile mosaics and the largest tile pavement in the country,
but you’re likely to get more joy out of the adjacent room (44), which resounds to
the tick-tocks and chimes of a hundred or more clocks, from pocket watches to
grandfather clocks. There range in design from the very simple to highly ornate,
like the sixteenth-century gilded copper and brass from Strasbourg based on the
one that used to reside in the cathedral there; its series of moving figures includes
the Four Ages of Man, who each strike one of the quarter hours.
The purple-carpeted chamber beyond (room 45) contains the Waddesdon

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Bequest, amassed by Baron Rothschild in the nineteenth century: a mixed bag of
silver gilt, enamelware, glassware and hunting rifles. The two finest works are a
Flemish sixteenth-century boxwood altarpiece, which stands only six inches high
and is carved with staggering attention to detail, and the Lyte Jewel, which
contains a miniature of James I by Hilliard.
Renaissance and Baroque art the long gallery of room 46, with a bafflingly
wide range of works all over Europe (though much of it is of British origin).
Highlights to look out for are the Tudor silver dining service, two pure gold ice
pails that used to belong to Princess Di’s family, the magic mirror used by
Elizabethan alchemist John Dee, and the collection of Huguenot silver. Room 47
brings you into the revamped European nineteenth century section, and reflects the
era’s eclectic tastes, with almost every previously existing style – Chinese,
Japanese, medieval Gothic, Classical and so on – being rehashed.
Before you leave, you must pay a visit to room 48, whose small number of
early twentieth-century exhibits are of the highest quality. There are stunning
examples of Tiffany glass and Liberty pewter, a copper vase by Frank Lloyd
Wright, a good selection of Wiener Werkstätte products, and even some Russian
Suprematist porcelain, including one dish celebrating the firs anniversary of the
October Revolution. Perhaps the finest exhibit of all, though, is the chequered oak
clock with a mother-of-pearl face, designed by the Scottish architect and designer
Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

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 7. The Mexican Gallery

The British Museum’s new Mexican Gallery in room 33c, at the far end of
the British Library, marks the beginning of the return of the museum’s ethnography
department (currently housed in the Museum of Mankind). It’s dramatically lit
display, covering a huge period of Mexican art from the second millennium BC to
the sixteenth century AD.
As you enter, you’re greeted by an Aztec fire serpent, Xiuhcoatl, carvel in
basalt. On one side is a collection of Huaxtec female deities in stone, sporting fan-
shaped heassresses; on the other are an Aztec stone rattlesnake, thesquatting figure
of the sun god, Xochipili, and the death cult god, Mictlantecuhtli. A series of
limestone Mayan reliefs from Yaxchilan, depicting blood-letting ceremonies, lines
one wall. Elsewhere, there are some wonderful jade masks and figurines, and
whatever you do, don’t miss the brilliant colours of the Mixtec painted screen-fold
book made of deer skin.

8. The Oriental collections

The Oriental collections cover some of the same eographical area as the
museum’s Ethnography Department and also overlap with material in the V&A.
The Chinese collection is, however, unrivalled in the West, and the Indian
sculpture is easily as good as anything at the V&A. The easiest way to approach

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the Oriental galleries (rooms 33-34 and 91-94) is from the Montague Place
entrance; from the Great Russell Street entrance, walk though the British Libtary
section, continue up the stairs past the elevenmetre totem pole and pass along the
temporary displays in room 33a.

8.1.Chinese collection

The Chinese collection occupies the eastern half of the recently opened
Hotung Gallery (room 33), which is centred on a wonderful marble well that
allows you to look down onto the Montague Place foyer. The garish “three-colour”
statuary occupying the centre and far end of the room is the most striking,
particularly the central cabinet of horses and grotesque figures, but it’s the smaller
pieces that hold the attention the longest. For example, the cabinet of miniature
landscapes popular amongst bored Chinese bureaucrats during the Manchu Empire,
or the incredible array of snuff boxes in different materials – lapis lazuli, jade,
crystal, tortoiseshell, quartz and amber.
The Chinese invented porcelain long before anyone else, and it was highly
prized both in Chinaa and abroad. The polychrome Ming and the blue and White
Yuan porcelain became popular in the West from the fifteenth centuryonwards, as
did the brightly coloures cloisonné enamelware, but it’s the much earlier
unadorned porcelain which steals the show, with its austere beauty and subtle
pastel colours, as in the greygreen Ru porcelain and blue-green celadons from the
Song dynasty.

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 8.2. South East Asian antiquities

The other half of room 33 starts with a beautiful gilt-bronze statue of the
Bodhisattva Tara, who was born from one of the tears wept by Avalokitesvara, a
companion of the Buddha. She heralds the beginning of the South East Asian
antiquities, a bewildering array of artefacts from as far apart as India and
Indonesia. There are so many cultures andcountries coveres (albeit briefly) in this
section that it’s impossible to do more than list some of the highights: a cabinet of
Tibetan musical instruments, with a conch shell trumpet decorated with gilt and
precious stones; two fearsome dakinis, malevolent goddesses with skull tiaras; a
Nepalese altar screen with filigree work inset with bone, shell and semiprecious
stones; a jackfruit wooden door from a Balinese temple.
The classic Hindu image of Shiva as Lord of the Dance, trampling on the
dwarf of ignorance, occupies centre stage halfway along the hall. Beyond there are
larger-scale Indian stone sculptures, featuring a bevy of intimidating goddesses
such as Durga, depicted killing a buffalodemon with her eight hands. The
showpiece of the collection, however, lies behind a glass screen in room 33a, a
climatically controlled room of dazzling limestone reliefs, drum slabs and dome
sculptures purloined from Amaravati, one of the finest second-century Buddhist
stupas in southern India. The display is somewhat chaotic and you’ll have to
consult the accompanying illustrations to get any idea of how it might have looked.

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 8.3.The Islamic gallery

The museum’s Islamic antiquities, ranging from Moorish Spain to southern

Asia, are displayed in room 34, adjacent to the Montague Place entrance. The bulk
of the collection is made up of thirteenth-to fifteenth-century Syrian brass objects,
inlaid with sillver and gold and richlyengraved with arabesques and calligraphy,
and Iznik ceramics in pure blues, greens and tomato-reds.
The best stuff is at the far end of the room, where Moorish lustre pottery
resides alongside thirteenth-century astrolabes and celestial globes, scimitars and
sabres, and a couple of Mughal hookahs encrusted with lapis lazuli and rubies set
in gold. Most unusual of all is a naturalistic jade terrapin, discoveres in Allahabad
in 1600. Other curiosities include a falcon’s perch, a back-scratcher, a Dervish
begging bowl and a Russian-influenced laquered papier-mâché stationery set.

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 9.The British Library

The museum building is still the home of the British Library, currently in the
throes of a much-delayed move to a site near St.Pancras.
By law the British Library must preserve a copy of every book, magazine
and newspaper printed in Britain, so it’s hardly surprising that conditions here are
now too cramped, with literally thousands of books kept in outhouse stacks all over
London. In its infancy the British Library could be happily accommodated in the
copper-domed Round Reading Room, which lies to the north of the main foyer. It
was build over Smirke’s Great Court in the 1850s, boasts one of the largest domes
in the world and is surrounded by bookstacks thirty feet high. Its padded leather
desks have accommodated the likes of Karl Marx, who penned Das Kapital here,
and Lenin,who worked here under his pseudonym of Jacob Richter in 1902. Once
the move to St Pancras is completed, there are plans to restore the splendid domed
room to its original decorative scheme and to create a public study area, with a
multi-media reference library.
A small part of the library in the east wing, lined with tall, glass-protected
bookshelves, is used as exhibition space. From the main foyer, pass through the
Grenville Library to get to the Manuscript Saloon, where a selection of ancient
manuscripts and precious books are displayed. They include a selection of the
library’s classic literary manuscripts, among them James Joyce’s maniacally
scribbled Finnegans Wake – a chaotic contrast to Coleridge’s fastidious Kubla
Khan and the touchingly beautiful Hand-written and illustrated copies of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Musical texts range from the Beatles to Brahms,
while historical documents include the Magna Carta, a desperate plea from

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Charles I to the Earl of Newcastle, begging for troops to defend the monarchy in
the Civil War, and the last – unfinished – letter from Lord Nelson to Emma
Hamilton during the Battle of Trafalgar. Close by is a host of old maps: a tiny little
plan of New york from 1695 showing Broadway and Battery Park, a map of Britain
from 1250, and an Anglo-Saxon world map from 1000 AD with the words “here
lions abound” for the Far East.
The Middle Room (30a)displays a wealth of illuminated manuscripts, with
richly illustrated Lindisfarne Gospels, from the 690s AD – seen by many as the
apotheosis of Celtic art – always on show at the entrance.
On the other side of the manuscript saloon lies the long hall of the King’s
Library, built to house the 10,500 volumes donated to the museum by George II in
1757. Manuscripts and books from Persia to ancient China via Germany are
displayed here; at the centre stands Roubiliac’s statue of Shakespeare, whose
collected works from 1623 are on view nearby. Just beyond lies the Gutenberg
Bible, the first Bible printed using moveable type, opposide much earlier examples
of printing from eighth-century China. Finally, there are various pull-out panels on
either side of the room, used to mount highlights of the British Library’s
gargantuan stamp collection.

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 CONCLUSION

The British Museum's fourteen-acre site is enough to tire even the most
ardent museum lover, J.B.Priestley, for one, wished "there was a little room
somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and
good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke". Short of such a
place, the best advice is either to see the highlights and leave the rest for another
visit, or to concentrate on one or two sections. Alternatively, you might consider
one of the British Museum's guided tours, which cover the highlights in around one
and a half hours.
Because of the sheer volume of the British Museum's hoard of prints and

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drawings, everything from Botticelli to Bonnard, there is only space for temporary
exhibitions in room 90, which change every three to four months. The same is true
of the British Museum's collection of 500,000 coins and medals, of which only a
fraction can be shown at any one time in room 69a. The sensitive materials used in
Japanese art mean that the Japanese Galleries in rooms 91 to 94 also host only
temporary shows. And finally, the British Museum puts on regular temporary
exhibitions (Tutankhamun was the most famous) on a wide range of themes in
rooms 27 and 28, for which there is usually an entrance charge.

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