Unlucky Mummy

The Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan is a department forming an historic part of the British Museum, with Its more than 100,000 pieces making it the largest and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Hoa Hakananai'a is a moai, a statue from Easter Island. It was taken from Orongo, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in 1868 by the crew of a British ship and is now in the British Museum in London. It has been described as a "masterpiece" and among the finest examples of Easter Island sculpture. Though relatively small, it is considered to be typical of the island's statue form, but distinguished by carvings added to the back, associated with the island's birdman cult.

The Shabaka Stone, sometimes Shabaqo, is a relic incised with an ancient Egyptian religious text, which dates from the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt. In later years, the stone was likely used as a millstone, which damaged the hieroglyphs. This damage is accompanied by other intentional defacements, leaving the hieroglyphic inscription in poor condition.

The Department of the Middle East (formerly Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities, then Department of Ancient Near East), numbering some 330,000 works, forms a significant part of the collections of the British Museum, and the world's largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq. 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. A collection of immense importance, the holdings of Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian antiquities are among the most comprehensive in the world with entire suites of rooms panelled in alabaster bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces at Nimrud, Nineveh and Khorsabad. Only the Middle East collections of the Louvre and the Pergamon Museum rival it in the range and quality of artefacts.

The Department of Asia in the British Museum holds one of the largest collections of historical objects from Asia. These collections comprise over 75,000 objects covering the material culture of the Asian continent (including East Asia, South and Central Asia, and Southeast Asia), and dating from the Neolithic age up to the present day.

The Elgin Marbles (), also known as the Parthenon Marbles (Greek: Γλυπτά του Παρθενώνα, lit. "sculptures of the Parthenon"), are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures made under the supervision of the architect and sculptor Phidias and his assistants. They are original parts of the Parthenon and other sacred and ceremonial structures built on the Acropolis of Athens in the 5th century BCE. The collection is on display in the British Museum, in the purpose-built Duveen Gallery. From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheion, and had them transported by sea to Britain. Elgin argued as his authority for this that he had obtained an official decree (a firman) from the Sublime Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire which, as ruler of Greece, was at that time the legal owner of the sculptures. This firman has not been found in the Ottoman archives despite its wealth of documents from the same period and its veracity is disputed. The Acropolis Museum displays a portion of the complete frieze, aligned in orientation and within sight of the Parthenon, with the position of the missing elements clearly marked and space left should they be returned to Athens.In Britain, the acquisition of the collection was supported by some, while some others, such as Lord Byron, likened the Earl's actions to vandalism or looting. Following a public debate in Parliament and its subsequent exoneration of Elgin, he sold the Marbles to the British government in 1816. They were then passed into the trusteeship of the British Museum, where they are now on display in the purpose-built Duveen Gallery. After gaining its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, the newly founded Greek state began a series of projects to restore its looted monuments and art. It has expressed its disapproval of Elgin's removal of the Marbles from the Acropolis and the Parthenon, which is regarded as one of the world's greatest cultural monuments. International efforts to repatriate the Marbles to Greece were intensified in the 1980s by then Greek Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri, and there are now many organisations actively campaigning for the Marbles' return, several united as part of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. The Greek government itself continues to urge the return of the marbles to Athens so as to be unified with the remaining marbles and for the complete Parthenon frieze sequence to be restored, through diplomatic, political and legal means.In 2014, UNESCO offered to mediate between Greece and the United Kingdom to resolve the dispute, although this was later turned down by the British Museum on the basis that UNESCO works with government bodies, not trustees of museums. In 2021, UNESCO issued its first decision on the Parthenon Marbles, calling for the United Kingdom to return them to Greece.

Shakespeare: Staging the World was an exhibition at the British Museum about the world of Shakespeare, showing the way that he portrayed the world in his plays and related it to the events and politics of contemporary London. It was produced as part of the World Shakespeare Festival and ran from 19 July to 25 November 2012.

The British Museum Reading Room, situated in the centre of the Great Court of the British Museum, used to be the main reading room of the British Library. In 1997, this function moved to the new British Library building at St Pancras, London, but the Reading Room remains in its original form at the British Museum. Designed by Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, the Reading Room was in continual use until its temporary closure for renovation in 1997. It was reopened in 2000, and from 2007 to 2017 it was used to stage temporary exhibitions. As of 2021, it remains closed to the public while its future use remains under discussion.

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, is the covered central quadrangle of the British Museum in London. It was redeveloped during the late 1990s to a design by Foster and Partners, from a 1970s design by Colin St John Wilson. The court was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

The Obelisks of Nectanebo II are a pair of monumental obelisks that were found in Cairo but were originally located in the ancient city of Hermopolis (modern Al-Ashmunayn), central Egypt. The fragmentary monoliths were recovered by French scholars as part of Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt but, after the capitulation of French forces, they were confiscated by the British, along with a number of antiquities including the Rosetta Stone, and transported to England. They can now be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum.

The Field of the Forty Footsteps was part of meadow lands at the back of the British Museum, once known as the Long Fields, then Southampton Fields. As the land lay behind Montague House, the town house of Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu, completed in 1679, it became known as Montague Fields, which contained the Field of the Forty Footsteps.

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.The museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. 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 national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.Its ownership of a small percentage of its most famous objects originating in other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy through repatriation claims, most notably in the case of the Elgin Marbles of Greece, and the Rosetta Stone of Egypt.