Help searching the collection database

The British Museum collection database online currently includes more than 1,500,000 records for the Museum’s objects from Africa; the Americas; central, east, south and southeast Asia, including the Sir Percival David Collection of Chinese Ceramics; ancient Egypt and Sudan; Europe, ancient Greece and Rome; the Middle East; Oceania; prehistory, and prints, drawings and other works of flat art from all over the world. It is updated every week and new records and images are continuously being added as work on the database continues.

Searching

The most direct way to access these records is through the free text search.

Any word entered in the search box will return results from across all fields of the collection database and will retrieve every record that has this word in it, including plural versions of it (for example, lion will also retrieve results for lions).

The search works in much the same way as most online searches, so you can enter one or more words as well as punctuation. For example:

British watercolour
           
British OR watercolour

"St Peter" 

wood*                                 

will find all records containing both 'British' and 'watercolour', or watercolours

will find records containing either word (OR must be upper-case)

will find records containing that exact phrase

will perform a wild card search and find records containing wood, woods, wooden, woodwork, woodcock, woodcocks and so on.

You can narrow down your search by selecting one of the check boxes below the main free text box.

Search by date

You can also search by date range. Or combine a date range with words entered in the free text search to narrow it down.

For more focussed and accurate results, use the Advanced search.