Building the collection
The British Museum’s original collection, based on that
of Sir Hans Sloane, was encyclopaedic in range. The Act of
Parliament that brought about the founding of the Museum in 1753
described it as including “books, drawings, manuscripts, prints,
medals, and coins, ancient and modern antiquities, seals, cameos
and intaglios, precious stones, agates, jaspers, vessels of agate
and jasper, crystals, mathematical instruments, drawings and
pictures”.
With that starting point the Museum grew and grew through the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Objects from around the world
were added to the collection by inquisitive collectors,
antiquaries, archaeologists and ethnographers. The result today is
a collection of more than seven million artefacts that represent an
incredibly wide range of cultures from around the world.
However, staff at the Museum continue to make sure the
collection remains, in the words of the Act, ‘modern’, and alive,
by building on it and adding to it.
In aiming to tell the story of the world’s cultures, the Museum
has a responsibility to future generations to keep on collecting so
that the story can be told comprehensively and with authority. So,
acquisitions are made to tell a new story about the past or
present, or to fill a gap in an existing collection.
For example, over the past 25 years the Museum has been building
what is now the best collection of contemporary art from the Middle
East in any western museum. Adding these works is a natural step to
building on the Museum’s existing collection of antiquities and
Islamic art from the region.
Cultural laws mean new material acquired by the Museum is mostly
contemporary or comes from Britain. But occasionally, perhaps once
or twice every ten years, the opportunity will come along to
acquire a major ancient object from a culture outside this
country.
The Museum’s resources are never sufficient enough for it to be
able to make these important acquisitions on its own. But it is
generously helped by gifts and funding from public bodies and
private individuals.
In recent years the Museum has been able to acquire some hugely
significant artefacts in this way. These have included the
extraordinary ‘Queen of the Night’, an Old Babylonian clay plaque
from around 1800 BC and a unique Anglo-Saxon gold ‘mancus’, a coin
from the late eighth or early ninth century AD struck for Coenwulf,
King of Mercia.