The Museum was founded 250 years ago as an encyclopædia of nature and of art. Today it no longer housescollections of natural history, and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent BritishLibrary. 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 BritishMuseum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library. The Round ReadingRoom, which was designed by the architect Sydney Smirke, opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers camehere to consult the Museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the BritishLibrary) moved to a new building at St Pancras. Today it has been transformed into the Walter and LeonoreAnnenberg Centre. This contains the Paul Hamlyn Library of books about the Museum's collections, which is open toall visitors. With the bookstacks in the central courtyard of the museum now empty, the process of demolition for Lord Foster`s glass-roofed Great Court could begin. The Great Court, opened in 2000, while undoubtedly improvingcirculation around the museum, was criticised for having a lack of exhibition space at a time when the museum wasin serious financial difficulties and many galleries were closed to the public. At the same time the African andOceanic collections that had been temporarily housed in 6 Burlington Gardens were given a new gallery in the NorthWing funded by the Sainsbury family. The
British Museum
is a museum of human history and culture situated inLondon. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and mostcomprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culturefrom its beginning to the present. The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Han Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu Housein Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centurieshas resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum of Natural History inSouth Kensington in 1887. Until 1997, when the current British Library building opened to the public, replacing theold British Museum Reading Room, the British Museum was unique in that it housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored bythe Department for Culture, Media and Sport. As with all other national museums and art galleries in the UnitedKingdom, the Museum charges no admission fee, although charges are levied for some temporary special exhibitions.Since 2001 the director of the Museum has been Nei MacGregor. From 1778 a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinatedvisitors with a glimpse of previously unknown lands. The bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems, coins, prints and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the Museum's reputation; butMontagu House became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it was apparent that it would be unable to cope withfurther expansion. In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laidand Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated the antiquities displays. After the defeat of the FrenchCampaign in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculpture and in 1802 KingGeorge 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 thecollection of Egyptian Monumental Sculpture. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-builtexhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection, much of it Roman Sculpture, in 1805. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, 7thEarl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 removed the large collection of marblesculptures from the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them to the UK. In 1816 thesemasterpieces of western art, were acquired by The British Museum by Act of Parliament and deposited in themuseum thereafter. The collections were supplemented by the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia, Greece in 1815. TheAncient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonianantiquities from the widow of Claudius James Rich. The Museum became a construction site as Sir Robert Smirke'sgrand neo-classical building gradually arose. The King's Library, on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handedover in 1827, and was described as one of the finest rooms in London although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857, however, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851. In spite of dirt anddisruption the collections grew, outpacing the new building. In 1857 Charles Newton was to discover the 4th-centuryBC Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In the 1840s and 1850s theMuseum supported excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard and others at sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh. Of particular interest to curators was the eventual discovery of Ashurbanipal's great library of cuneiform tablets, whichhelped to make the Museum a focus for Assyrian studies.Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and
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