The British Museums department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan is one of
the biggest collections of Ancient Egyptian art in the world.
Only the
Egyptian Museum in Cairo has a bigger collection. They cover Egyptian and
Sudanese history from around 10000 BC all the way to the 12th century AD,
a period of around 12,000 years.
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Around 150 of the objects in the Egyptian department were part of the
first collection which was given to the Museum by Hans Sloane in 1753.
In
1801 the British defeated the French, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, at the battle
of the Nile. After the battle, British forces took
lots of Ancient Egyptian
artifacts from the defeated French. They were given to the British Museum in
1803.
These objects included the famous Rosetta Stone.
The department continued to get bigger, paying for archaeologists to go
to Egypt and Sudan. They did this until 2001 when the Egyptian government
made it much harder for Museums to take historical
artefacts back to their
own country.
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The collection now has over 110,000 exhibits.
Department of Greece and Rome
The British Museum's department of Greece and Rome is one of the
biggest collections of Ancient Greek and Roman objects in the world.
The
objects come from nearly 4000 years of European history, from 3200 BC all
the way to the4th century AD.
It contains parts of two of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World;
the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. It
also had many pieces taken from the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. Like the
rest of the Museum the department
gets most of its collection
from excavations or the acquiring of private collections.
Some of the earliest
objects in the collection were bought from the collection of Sir William
Hamilton in 1772.
In recent years the Museum's
rules on how it can get
objects have become much stricter. Other countries rules on allowing
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Museums to take objects away have also got stricter. This has meant the
British Museum has gradually taken fewer items each year in recent times.
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