How did eight million objects from around the world come to sit in a museum in London?
The museum’s history runs through private collecting, the British Empire and today’s fierce debate over who owns the past.
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[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the British Museum.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a doctor with a collecting problem, the British Empire, some stones the Greeks want back, and the unanswered question of who the past actually belongs to.
[00:00:41] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] If you have been to London, there is a good chance you have visited the British Museum.
[00:00:56] In total, its collection numbers around eight million objects. They aren't all on display; on any given day, you can see perhaps 80,000 of them, a mere 1 per cent of the total.
[00:01:11] That is still a lot. To give you an idea of quite how much, if you wanted to see each object on display, and you spent only one minute with each one, it would take you almost two months. That is, if you didn't stop to sleep, or eat, and the museum allowed you to stay throughout the night.
[00:01:32] If you did the same for the entire collection, the full eight million, you would finish your visit a little over fifteen years from now.
[00:01:43] There is a vast amount of stuff: sculptures from Athens, mummies from Egypt, bronzes from Nigeria, chess pieces from a Scottish beach, and of course a stone from the banks of the Nile that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt.
[00:02:01] So the obvious question is: how did all of this end up in one building in London?
[00:02:09] The answer begins with a man named Hans Sloane.
[00:02:14] Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, and after training as a physician, he became one of the most fashionable doctors in London. He treated three monarchs, became president of the Royal Society, and even has a square in Chelsea named after him: Sloane Square.
[00:02:38] As a young man, he spent over a year in Jamaica as a doctor to the island's governor, and he came home with around 800 plant specimens.
[00:02:50] See, Sloane's passion was collecting. He collected plants, animals, coins, medals, books, manuscripts, shoes, drawings, and what he called "curiosities" from all over the world.
[00:03:05] Today, he might be called a "hoarder", someone who keeps everything and throws nothing away.
[00:03:13] By the time he died in 1753, aged 92, his collection had swollen to more than 71,000 objects.
[00:03:25] In his will, he offered his entire collection to the nation, on the condition that Parliament pay his daughters £20,000, which is almost £4 million in today's money.
[00:03:39] A lot of money, of course, but it was a fraction of what the collection was worth.
[00:03:46] He also asked that the collection be kept together, and shown to anyone who was curious, free of charge.
[00:03:55] Parliament agreed, and launched a national lottery to pay for it.
[00:04:00] Once the funds were raised, the collection passed into the hands of the state, and a building was bought to house it all.
[00:04:09] And so in 1759, in a mansion called Montagu House in Bloomsbury, the British Museum opened its doors. It was the first national museum in the world that belonged to neither a king nor a church, open to what its founding rules called "all studious and curious persons".
[00:04:33] Curious minds, one might even say.
[00:04:36] In the early years, visiting was not particularly easy. You had to apply in writing for a ticket, wait weeks, and then be marched through the rooms in a small group by an official. But from the start, the collection belonged to the public, and that was a bold new idea.
[00:04:59] And the collection kept growing.
[00:05:02] Now that Britain had a national museum, there was somewhere for things to go.
[00:05:09] Wealthy collectors followed Sloane's example and left their collections to it. Parliament bought others, including hundreds of ancient Greek vases collected by the British ambassador in Naples.
[00:05:24] As the empire expanded, and British ships sailed further and further from home, their crews brought back objects from all corners of the globe, and many of them ended up in the museum.
[00:05:37] And by law, the museum received a copy of every book published in Britain.
[00:05:43] Within a few decades, Montagu House was bursting at the seams. It was completely full.
[00:05:51] In the 19th century, it was knocked down and replaced by the great columned building you might have visited yourself.
[00:05:59] Soon enough, this building also started to fill up, but instead of knocking it down and building a bigger one, the solution was to move parts of the collection to other museums in London.
[00:06:13] Sloane's dried plants, stuffed animals and pickled creatures were moved out to South Kensington, where in 1881 they became the Natural History Museum.
[00:06:25] The books and manuscripts, as we will see, would leave later.
[00:06:29] What stayed in Bloomsbury were the things made by people, things from often distant civilisations.
[00:06:37] And many of these arrived in London thanks to British military and political power abroad.
[00:06:44] One such example is the museum's single most famous object: the Rosetta Stone.
[00:06:52] Now, we've made a full episode on the Rosetta Stone. It's episode number 141, so if you'd like the full story, you can listen to it there.
[00:07:02] But as a brief summary, or as a reminder, in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt.
[00:07:11] The following year, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta dug up a broken slab of dark stone, covered in three bands of writing: ancient Greek, everyday Egyptian script, and hieroglyphics.
[00:07:30] The scholars Napoleon had brought with him understood immediately what this could mean. Nobody on Earth had been able to read hieroglyphics for well over a thousand years. If all three texts said the same thing, the Greek could be used as a key, a dictionary to translate this ancient Egyptian script.
[00:07:56] But the French, alas, never got to keep their prize.
[00:08:00] In 1801, the British defeated Napoleon's forces in Egypt, and under the terms of the French surrender, the stone was handed over.
[00:08:11] It has been in the British Museum since 1802, and it remains the single most visited object in the building.
[00:08:20] And it's closely followed by the Parthenon Marbles.
[00:08:25] At the start of the 19th century, Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and the British ambassador to the Ottomans was a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Elgin.
[00:08:38] Between 1801 and 1812, Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens, and shipped them to Britain.
[00:08:54] Elgin claimed he had permission from the Ottoman authorities, although the original document giving him permission has never been found. The Greeks were never consulted, and if they had been, it seems extremely unlikely they would have agreed.
[00:09:11] Now, not to suggest that Elgin is deserving of a huge amount of sympathy, but the logistics of removing the marbles proved far more complicated and expensive than the ambassador had bargained for.
[00:09:27] By the time the marbles reached Britain, Elgin had spent more than £70,000 on the operation, which is the equivalent of around £6 million in today's money. He had borrowed much of it, at high interest rates.
[00:09:45] Financially, he was ruined, and he was forced to sell the sculptures to the British government, which paid him around half of what he claimed to have spent. In turn, the government gave them to the museum.
[00:10:01] And then there are the Benin Bronzes.
[00:10:04] In 1897, a British force invaded the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, as revenge for the killing of a British delegation.
[00:10:16] They burned Benin City to the ground, sent the king into exile, and carried away thousands of extraordinary brass plaques and sculptures from the royal palace.
[00:10:29] The British government then sold much of this artwork to cover the costs of the military expedition. Several hundred pieces went to the British Museum, which today holds more than 900 objects from Benin.
[00:10:45] Here, nobody even claimed to have permission. The bronzes were simply taken. Stolen, you might say.
[00:10:54] Plenty of the collection, however, arrived in other, friendlier, ways. Some of it was dug up with the agreement of the authorities of the time.
[00:11:05] In the 1840s, for example, a young adventurer named Austen Henry Layard dug into the mounds of northern Iraq. There, he uncovered the palaces of ancient Assyria, a civilisation then known mainly from the Bible.
[00:11:23] His finds included huge winged bulls of stone. They were floated down the River Tigris on rafts made of inflated animal skins, and they caused a sensation in London.
[00:11:36] Ordinary Victorians queued to see a world nearly three thousand years old.
[00:11:43] And some of the most important finds were simply given, donated, to the museum.
[00:11:50] In 1938, a widow named Edith Pretty invited an archaeologist to dig up some mysterious mounds of earth on her land at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, in the east of England.
[00:12:05] The following year, under the largest one, he found the outline of an entire ship, whose wood had long since rotted away. Inside it was the treasure of an Anglo-Saxon king: a warrior's helmet, gold buckles, and silver bowls from Byzantium.
[00:12:25] It was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain, an invaluable collection, and it was ruled that all of it belonged to Mrs Pretty.
[00:12:39] Mrs Pretty gave it to the museum, every piece. She asked for nothing in return.
[00:12:47] At the time, it was the most valuable gift the museum had ever received from a living person.
[00:12:54] Now, we will come back to some of the arguments over whether the museum should actually be the custodian of this vast collection, or at least parts of it.
[00:13:03] But first, there is another part of the museum's story: its library.
[00:13:09] In 1857, a magnificent circular reading room opened in the museum's central courtyard.
[00:13:17] It had a blue and gold dome, wider than that of St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:13:23] Beneath it sat hundreds of leather-topped desks, arranged in rows like the spokes of a wheel. And around it, on 40 kilometres of shelves, was one of the great libraries of the world.
[00:13:39] It was free to use, and you did not need to be rich or famous, just to have a letter of recommendation and a reason for study.
[00:13:49] Readers over the years included some of the greatest writers, thinkers, and politicians in modern history: Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
[00:14:04] Even Karl Marx sat under that dome, day after day, for decades, researching and writing the book that became Das Kapital.
[00:14:14] And a few decades later, a Russian revolutionary applied for a reader's ticket under the false name of Jacob Richter; his real name was Vladimir Lenin.
[00:14:26] So, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin might not be the first people who come to mind as beneficiaries of the British state, but they owed some small debt of gratitude to the British Museum.
[00:14:40] Now, if you're wondering where all these books are now, the library moved out in 1997, to the new British Library building a little bit up the road. The space around the reading room was transformed into the glass-roofed Great Court that visitors walk through today.
[00:14:59] So, back to the objects, and to the arguments over them.
[00:15:05] As you may know, today, many of the countries they came from want them back.
[00:15:11] Greece has formally demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles since the 1980s, when the actress-turned-culture-minister Melina Mercouri made them a national cause.
[00:15:24] In 2009, Greece opened a gleaming museum at the foot of the Acropolis, with a top floor built to the exact dimensions of the Parthenon. The pieces that are in London are shown there as plain white plaster copies, so visitors can see exactly what is missing.
[00:15:46] Greece is far from alone. Nigeria wants the Benin Bronzes. Egyptian archaeologists have campaigned for the Rosetta Stone. And on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to give it its Polynesian name, the islanders want back a giant stone figure taken by a British warship in 1868 and presented to Queen Victoria.
[00:16:11] The islanders' name for it is usually translated as "the lost friend" or "the stolen friend".
[00:16:19] The museum's traditional defence rests on three arguments.
[00:16:24] First, a legal one: an Act of Parliament from 1963 actually forbids the museum from giving away almost anything in its collection, so the trustees say their hands are tied. Legally, they aren't allowed to give anything back.
[00:16:43] Second, a philosophical one: that there is real value in a universal museum, a single place where a visitor can walk from Egypt to Greece to Benin in an afternoon and see human civilisation as one connected story. And, after all, the museum is still free to all. Granted, you need to get there, to get to London, but when you do, the collection is there for you.
[00:17:15] And third, a defence of security. Some of these ancient treasures, its defenders say, simply wouldn't be adequately protected if they were returned to areas of conflict. Just take a look at what ISIS did to sites of cultural value in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, it destroyed much of Nimrud, the very place where Layard had dug up his winged bulls.
[00:17:43] The museum has held to this defence for decades, but in recent years, things seem to be shifting.
[00:17:52] Other countries have started to give things back. Germany has signed over ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, and the Netherlands has sent back more than a hundred.
[00:18:06] And the British Museum and Greece have spent several years talking about an arrangement in which sculptures could return to Athens as part of a long-term exchange. More than once, reports in the press have suggested a deal was close.
[00:18:24] But the talks keep running into the same problem, which is the question of who owns the sculptures. The museum says it can only lend them. Greece says it cannot borrow something that it believes already belongs to it.
[00:18:42] And then there is the question of how well the museum looks after what it holds, and here the defence of "we're keeping things safe" starts to look a little shaky.
[00:18:55] In 1845, a drunken visitor picked up a lump of stone and hurled it at the Portland Vase, a piece of Roman glass nearly 2,000 years old and possibly the most famous vase in the world. It shattered into more than 180 fragments.
[00:19:16] The museum glued it back together. And has since taken it apart and restored it again, twice, as restoration techniques improved. Today, you can hardly see the joins, but still, it was damaged under the British Museum's watch.
[00:19:33] But in 2023, the museum faced a much bigger scandal.
[00:19:40] It emerged that around 2,000 objects had gone missing or been damaged over a period of several years. Most were small gems, jewellery and fragments from the storerooms. The museum alleges that they had been secretly removed by one of its own senior curators, with some pieces offered for sale for a fraction of their value.
[00:20:06] One Roman object, reportedly worth as much as £50,000, was offered for sale for just £40. Some had been bought by collectors who had no idea what they were holding.
[00:20:20] And the museum had been warned. An antiques dealer in Denmark had noticed suspicious pieces appearing on eBay and had emailed the museum about it in 2021, two years before the scandal broke.
[00:20:36] He was told, in effect, that he was wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about.
[00:20:42] When the scale of the losses finally became clear in the summer of 2023, the story went around the world. The director resigned. The curator was dismissed, and later ordered by a court to hand over his eBay records and to return what he still held.
[00:21:03] Museum staff began the long work of hunting their own collection across the internet. Hundreds of pieces have since been recovered, but many more are still missing.
[00:21:15] Part of the problem, it turned out, was that the museum did not fully know what it owned.
[00:21:21] Millions of objects had never been photographed or properly catalogued, so when small things vanished from a storeroom, their disappearance could go unnoticed. The museum has since promised to photograph and catalogue the entire collection, but this is a huge project that is expected to take years.
[00:21:44] So, where does that leave the British Museum?
[00:21:49] It is one of the most argued-about museums in the world, and still one of the most visited, with around six million people walking through its gates every year.
[00:22:00] It is, to some people, a crime scene, a warehouse full of stolen goods waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. To others, it is a marvellous collection of human ingenuity, creativity, and progress through time.
[00:22:18] Whatever you may think of it, there is one thing that has not changed in the almost 300 years of its existence. It is free. Anyone, old or young, rich or poor, can walk in and see some of the most remarkable things the world has ever produced.
[00:22:38] And I, for one, think that is something pretty special.
[00:22:44] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the British Museum.
[00:22:48] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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How did eight million objects from around the world come to sit in a museum in London?
The museum’s history runs through private collecting, the British Empire and today’s fierce debate over who owns the past.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the British Museum.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a doctor with a collecting problem, the British Empire, some stones the Greeks want back, and the unanswered question of who the past actually belongs to.
[00:00:41] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] If you have been to London, there is a good chance you have visited the British Museum.
[00:00:56] In total, its collection numbers around eight million objects. They aren't all on display; on any given day, you can see perhaps 80,000 of them, a mere 1 per cent of the total.
[00:01:11] That is still a lot. To give you an idea of quite how much, if you wanted to see each object on display, and you spent only one minute with each one, it would take you almost two months. That is, if you didn't stop to sleep, or eat, and the museum allowed you to stay throughout the night.
[00:01:32] If you did the same for the entire collection, the full eight million, you would finish your visit a little over fifteen years from now.
[00:01:43] There is a vast amount of stuff: sculptures from Athens, mummies from Egypt, bronzes from Nigeria, chess pieces from a Scottish beach, and of course a stone from the banks of the Nile that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt.
[00:02:01] So the obvious question is: how did all of this end up in one building in London?
[00:02:09] The answer begins with a man named Hans Sloane.
[00:02:14] Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, and after training as a physician, he became one of the most fashionable doctors in London. He treated three monarchs, became president of the Royal Society, and even has a square in Chelsea named after him: Sloane Square.
[00:02:38] As a young man, he spent over a year in Jamaica as a doctor to the island's governor, and he came home with around 800 plant specimens.
[00:02:50] See, Sloane's passion was collecting. He collected plants, animals, coins, medals, books, manuscripts, shoes, drawings, and what he called "curiosities" from all over the world.
[00:03:05] Today, he might be called a "hoarder", someone who keeps everything and throws nothing away.
[00:03:13] By the time he died in 1753, aged 92, his collection had swollen to more than 71,000 objects.
[00:03:25] In his will, he offered his entire collection to the nation, on the condition that Parliament pay his daughters £20,000, which is almost £4 million in today's money.
[00:03:39] A lot of money, of course, but it was a fraction of what the collection was worth.
[00:03:46] He also asked that the collection be kept together, and shown to anyone who was curious, free of charge.
[00:03:55] Parliament agreed, and launched a national lottery to pay for it.
[00:04:00] Once the funds were raised, the collection passed into the hands of the state, and a building was bought to house it all.
[00:04:09] And so in 1759, in a mansion called Montagu House in Bloomsbury, the British Museum opened its doors. It was the first national museum in the world that belonged to neither a king nor a church, open to what its founding rules called "all studious and curious persons".
[00:04:33] Curious minds, one might even say.
[00:04:36] In the early years, visiting was not particularly easy. You had to apply in writing for a ticket, wait weeks, and then be marched through the rooms in a small group by an official. But from the start, the collection belonged to the public, and that was a bold new idea.
[00:04:59] And the collection kept growing.
[00:05:02] Now that Britain had a national museum, there was somewhere for things to go.
[00:05:09] Wealthy collectors followed Sloane's example and left their collections to it. Parliament bought others, including hundreds of ancient Greek vases collected by the British ambassador in Naples.
[00:05:24] As the empire expanded, and British ships sailed further and further from home, their crews brought back objects from all corners of the globe, and many of them ended up in the museum.
[00:05:37] And by law, the museum received a copy of every book published in Britain.
[00:05:43] Within a few decades, Montagu House was bursting at the seams. It was completely full.
[00:05:51] In the 19th century, it was knocked down and replaced by the great columned building you might have visited yourself.
[00:05:59] Soon enough, this building also started to fill up, but instead of knocking it down and building a bigger one, the solution was to move parts of the collection to other museums in London.
[00:06:13] Sloane's dried plants, stuffed animals and pickled creatures were moved out to South Kensington, where in 1881 they became the Natural History Museum.
[00:06:25] The books and manuscripts, as we will see, would leave later.
[00:06:29] What stayed in Bloomsbury were the things made by people, things from often distant civilisations.
[00:06:37] And many of these arrived in London thanks to British military and political power abroad.
[00:06:44] One such example is the museum's single most famous object: the Rosetta Stone.
[00:06:52] Now, we've made a full episode on the Rosetta Stone. It's episode number 141, so if you'd like the full story, you can listen to it there.
[00:07:02] But as a brief summary, or as a reminder, in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt.
[00:07:11] The following year, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta dug up a broken slab of dark stone, covered in three bands of writing: ancient Greek, everyday Egyptian script, and hieroglyphics.
[00:07:30] The scholars Napoleon had brought with him understood immediately what this could mean. Nobody on Earth had been able to read hieroglyphics for well over a thousand years. If all three texts said the same thing, the Greek could be used as a key, a dictionary to translate this ancient Egyptian script.
[00:07:56] But the French, alas, never got to keep their prize.
[00:08:00] In 1801, the British defeated Napoleon's forces in Egypt, and under the terms of the French surrender, the stone was handed over.
[00:08:11] It has been in the British Museum since 1802, and it remains the single most visited object in the building.
[00:08:20] And it's closely followed by the Parthenon Marbles.
[00:08:25] At the start of the 19th century, Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and the British ambassador to the Ottomans was a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Elgin.
[00:08:38] Between 1801 and 1812, Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens, and shipped them to Britain.
[00:08:54] Elgin claimed he had permission from the Ottoman authorities, although the original document giving him permission has never been found. The Greeks were never consulted, and if they had been, it seems extremely unlikely they would have agreed.
[00:09:11] Now, not to suggest that Elgin is deserving of a huge amount of sympathy, but the logistics of removing the marbles proved far more complicated and expensive than the ambassador had bargained for.
[00:09:27] By the time the marbles reached Britain, Elgin had spent more than £70,000 on the operation, which is the equivalent of around £6 million in today's money. He had borrowed much of it, at high interest rates.
[00:09:45] Financially, he was ruined, and he was forced to sell the sculptures to the British government, which paid him around half of what he claimed to have spent. In turn, the government gave them to the museum.
[00:10:01] And then there are the Benin Bronzes.
[00:10:04] In 1897, a British force invaded the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, as revenge for the killing of a British delegation.
[00:10:16] They burned Benin City to the ground, sent the king into exile, and carried away thousands of extraordinary brass plaques and sculptures from the royal palace.
[00:10:29] The British government then sold much of this artwork to cover the costs of the military expedition. Several hundred pieces went to the British Museum, which today holds more than 900 objects from Benin.
[00:10:45] Here, nobody even claimed to have permission. The bronzes were simply taken. Stolen, you might say.
[00:10:54] Plenty of the collection, however, arrived in other, friendlier, ways. Some of it was dug up with the agreement of the authorities of the time.
[00:11:05] In the 1840s, for example, a young adventurer named Austen Henry Layard dug into the mounds of northern Iraq. There, he uncovered the palaces of ancient Assyria, a civilisation then known mainly from the Bible.
[00:11:23] His finds included huge winged bulls of stone. They were floated down the River Tigris on rafts made of inflated animal skins, and they caused a sensation in London.
[00:11:36] Ordinary Victorians queued to see a world nearly three thousand years old.
[00:11:43] And some of the most important finds were simply given, donated, to the museum.
[00:11:50] In 1938, a widow named Edith Pretty invited an archaeologist to dig up some mysterious mounds of earth on her land at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, in the east of England.
[00:12:05] The following year, under the largest one, he found the outline of an entire ship, whose wood had long since rotted away. Inside it was the treasure of an Anglo-Saxon king: a warrior's helmet, gold buckles, and silver bowls from Byzantium.
[00:12:25] It was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain, an invaluable collection, and it was ruled that all of it belonged to Mrs Pretty.
[00:12:39] Mrs Pretty gave it to the museum, every piece. She asked for nothing in return.
[00:12:47] At the time, it was the most valuable gift the museum had ever received from a living person.
[00:12:54] Now, we will come back to some of the arguments over whether the museum should actually be the custodian of this vast collection, or at least parts of it.
[00:13:03] But first, there is another part of the museum's story: its library.
[00:13:09] In 1857, a magnificent circular reading room opened in the museum's central courtyard.
[00:13:17] It had a blue and gold dome, wider than that of St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:13:23] Beneath it sat hundreds of leather-topped desks, arranged in rows like the spokes of a wheel. And around it, on 40 kilometres of shelves, was one of the great libraries of the world.
[00:13:39] It was free to use, and you did not need to be rich or famous, just to have a letter of recommendation and a reason for study.
[00:13:49] Readers over the years included some of the greatest writers, thinkers, and politicians in modern history: Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
[00:14:04] Even Karl Marx sat under that dome, day after day, for decades, researching and writing the book that became Das Kapital.
[00:14:14] And a few decades later, a Russian revolutionary applied for a reader's ticket under the false name of Jacob Richter; his real name was Vladimir Lenin.
[00:14:26] So, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin might not be the first people who come to mind as beneficiaries of the British state, but they owed some small debt of gratitude to the British Museum.
[00:14:40] Now, if you're wondering where all these books are now, the library moved out in 1997, to the new British Library building a little bit up the road. The space around the reading room was transformed into the glass-roofed Great Court that visitors walk through today.
[00:14:59] So, back to the objects, and to the arguments over them.
[00:15:05] As you may know, today, many of the countries they came from want them back.
[00:15:11] Greece has formally demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles since the 1980s, when the actress-turned-culture-minister Melina Mercouri made them a national cause.
[00:15:24] In 2009, Greece opened a gleaming museum at the foot of the Acropolis, with a top floor built to the exact dimensions of the Parthenon. The pieces that are in London are shown there as plain white plaster copies, so visitors can see exactly what is missing.
[00:15:46] Greece is far from alone. Nigeria wants the Benin Bronzes. Egyptian archaeologists have campaigned for the Rosetta Stone. And on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to give it its Polynesian name, the islanders want back a giant stone figure taken by a British warship in 1868 and presented to Queen Victoria.
[00:16:11] The islanders' name for it is usually translated as "the lost friend" or "the stolen friend".
[00:16:19] The museum's traditional defence rests on three arguments.
[00:16:24] First, a legal one: an Act of Parliament from 1963 actually forbids the museum from giving away almost anything in its collection, so the trustees say their hands are tied. Legally, they aren't allowed to give anything back.
[00:16:43] Second, a philosophical one: that there is real value in a universal museum, a single place where a visitor can walk from Egypt to Greece to Benin in an afternoon and see human civilisation as one connected story. And, after all, the museum is still free to all. Granted, you need to get there, to get to London, but when you do, the collection is there for you.
[00:17:15] And third, a defence of security. Some of these ancient treasures, its defenders say, simply wouldn't be adequately protected if they were returned to areas of conflict. Just take a look at what ISIS did to sites of cultural value in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, it destroyed much of Nimrud, the very place where Layard had dug up his winged bulls.
[00:17:43] The museum has held to this defence for decades, but in recent years, things seem to be shifting.
[00:17:52] Other countries have started to give things back. Germany has signed over ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, and the Netherlands has sent back more than a hundred.
[00:18:06] And the British Museum and Greece have spent several years talking about an arrangement in which sculptures could return to Athens as part of a long-term exchange. More than once, reports in the press have suggested a deal was close.
[00:18:24] But the talks keep running into the same problem, which is the question of who owns the sculptures. The museum says it can only lend them. Greece says it cannot borrow something that it believes already belongs to it.
[00:18:42] And then there is the question of how well the museum looks after what it holds, and here the defence of "we're keeping things safe" starts to look a little shaky.
[00:18:55] In 1845, a drunken visitor picked up a lump of stone and hurled it at the Portland Vase, a piece of Roman glass nearly 2,000 years old and possibly the most famous vase in the world. It shattered into more than 180 fragments.
[00:19:16] The museum glued it back together. And has since taken it apart and restored it again, twice, as restoration techniques improved. Today, you can hardly see the joins, but still, it was damaged under the British Museum's watch.
[00:19:33] But in 2023, the museum faced a much bigger scandal.
[00:19:40] It emerged that around 2,000 objects had gone missing or been damaged over a period of several years. Most were small gems, jewellery and fragments from the storerooms. The museum alleges that they had been secretly removed by one of its own senior curators, with some pieces offered for sale for a fraction of their value.
[00:20:06] One Roman object, reportedly worth as much as £50,000, was offered for sale for just £40. Some had been bought by collectors who had no idea what they were holding.
[00:20:20] And the museum had been warned. An antiques dealer in Denmark had noticed suspicious pieces appearing on eBay and had emailed the museum about it in 2021, two years before the scandal broke.
[00:20:36] He was told, in effect, that he was wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about.
[00:20:42] When the scale of the losses finally became clear in the summer of 2023, the story went around the world. The director resigned. The curator was dismissed, and later ordered by a court to hand over his eBay records and to return what he still held.
[00:21:03] Museum staff began the long work of hunting their own collection across the internet. Hundreds of pieces have since been recovered, but many more are still missing.
[00:21:15] Part of the problem, it turned out, was that the museum did not fully know what it owned.
[00:21:21] Millions of objects had never been photographed or properly catalogued, so when small things vanished from a storeroom, their disappearance could go unnoticed. The museum has since promised to photograph and catalogue the entire collection, but this is a huge project that is expected to take years.
[00:21:44] So, where does that leave the British Museum?
[00:21:49] It is one of the most argued-about museums in the world, and still one of the most visited, with around six million people walking through its gates every year.
[00:22:00] It is, to some people, a crime scene, a warehouse full of stolen goods waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. To others, it is a marvellous collection of human ingenuity, creativity, and progress through time.
[00:22:18] Whatever you may think of it, there is one thing that has not changed in the almost 300 years of its existence. It is free. Anyone, old or young, rich or poor, can walk in and see some of the most remarkable things the world has ever produced.
[00:22:38] And I, for one, think that is something pretty special.
[00:22:44] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the British Museum.
[00:22:48] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the British Museum.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a doctor with a collecting problem, the British Empire, some stones the Greeks want back, and the unanswered question of who the past actually belongs to.
[00:00:41] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] If you have been to London, there is a good chance you have visited the British Museum.
[00:00:56] In total, its collection numbers around eight million objects. They aren't all on display; on any given day, you can see perhaps 80,000 of them, a mere 1 per cent of the total.
[00:01:11] That is still a lot. To give you an idea of quite how much, if you wanted to see each object on display, and you spent only one minute with each one, it would take you almost two months. That is, if you didn't stop to sleep, or eat, and the museum allowed you to stay throughout the night.
[00:01:32] If you did the same for the entire collection, the full eight million, you would finish your visit a little over fifteen years from now.
[00:01:43] There is a vast amount of stuff: sculptures from Athens, mummies from Egypt, bronzes from Nigeria, chess pieces from a Scottish beach, and of course a stone from the banks of the Nile that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt.
[00:02:01] So the obvious question is: how did all of this end up in one building in London?
[00:02:09] The answer begins with a man named Hans Sloane.
[00:02:14] Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, and after training as a physician, he became one of the most fashionable doctors in London. He treated three monarchs, became president of the Royal Society, and even has a square in Chelsea named after him: Sloane Square.
[00:02:38] As a young man, he spent over a year in Jamaica as a doctor to the island's governor, and he came home with around 800 plant specimens.
[00:02:50] See, Sloane's passion was collecting. He collected plants, animals, coins, medals, books, manuscripts, shoes, drawings, and what he called "curiosities" from all over the world.
[00:03:05] Today, he might be called a "hoarder", someone who keeps everything and throws nothing away.
[00:03:13] By the time he died in 1753, aged 92, his collection had swollen to more than 71,000 objects.
[00:03:25] In his will, he offered his entire collection to the nation, on the condition that Parliament pay his daughters £20,000, which is almost £4 million in today's money.
[00:03:39] A lot of money, of course, but it was a fraction of what the collection was worth.
[00:03:46] He also asked that the collection be kept together, and shown to anyone who was curious, free of charge.
[00:03:55] Parliament agreed, and launched a national lottery to pay for it.
[00:04:00] Once the funds were raised, the collection passed into the hands of the state, and a building was bought to house it all.
[00:04:09] And so in 1759, in a mansion called Montagu House in Bloomsbury, the British Museum opened its doors. It was the first national museum in the world that belonged to neither a king nor a church, open to what its founding rules called "all studious and curious persons".
[00:04:33] Curious minds, one might even say.
[00:04:36] In the early years, visiting was not particularly easy. You had to apply in writing for a ticket, wait weeks, and then be marched through the rooms in a small group by an official. But from the start, the collection belonged to the public, and that was a bold new idea.
[00:04:59] And the collection kept growing.
[00:05:02] Now that Britain had a national museum, there was somewhere for things to go.
[00:05:09] Wealthy collectors followed Sloane's example and left their collections to it. Parliament bought others, including hundreds of ancient Greek vases collected by the British ambassador in Naples.
[00:05:24] As the empire expanded, and British ships sailed further and further from home, their crews brought back objects from all corners of the globe, and many of them ended up in the museum.
[00:05:37] And by law, the museum received a copy of every book published in Britain.
[00:05:43] Within a few decades, Montagu House was bursting at the seams. It was completely full.
[00:05:51] In the 19th century, it was knocked down and replaced by the great columned building you might have visited yourself.
[00:05:59] Soon enough, this building also started to fill up, but instead of knocking it down and building a bigger one, the solution was to move parts of the collection to other museums in London.
[00:06:13] Sloane's dried plants, stuffed animals and pickled creatures were moved out to South Kensington, where in 1881 they became the Natural History Museum.
[00:06:25] The books and manuscripts, as we will see, would leave later.
[00:06:29] What stayed in Bloomsbury were the things made by people, things from often distant civilisations.
[00:06:37] And many of these arrived in London thanks to British military and political power abroad.
[00:06:44] One such example is the museum's single most famous object: the Rosetta Stone.
[00:06:52] Now, we've made a full episode on the Rosetta Stone. It's episode number 141, so if you'd like the full story, you can listen to it there.
[00:07:02] But as a brief summary, or as a reminder, in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt.
[00:07:11] The following year, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta dug up a broken slab of dark stone, covered in three bands of writing: ancient Greek, everyday Egyptian script, and hieroglyphics.
[00:07:30] The scholars Napoleon had brought with him understood immediately what this could mean. Nobody on Earth had been able to read hieroglyphics for well over a thousand years. If all three texts said the same thing, the Greek could be used as a key, a dictionary to translate this ancient Egyptian script.
[00:07:56] But the French, alas, never got to keep their prize.
[00:08:00] In 1801, the British defeated Napoleon's forces in Egypt, and under the terms of the French surrender, the stone was handed over.
[00:08:11] It has been in the British Museum since 1802, and it remains the single most visited object in the building.
[00:08:20] And it's closely followed by the Parthenon Marbles.
[00:08:25] At the start of the 19th century, Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and the British ambassador to the Ottomans was a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Elgin.
[00:08:38] Between 1801 and 1812, Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens, and shipped them to Britain.
[00:08:54] Elgin claimed he had permission from the Ottoman authorities, although the original document giving him permission has never been found. The Greeks were never consulted, and if they had been, it seems extremely unlikely they would have agreed.
[00:09:11] Now, not to suggest that Elgin is deserving of a huge amount of sympathy, but the logistics of removing the marbles proved far more complicated and expensive than the ambassador had bargained for.
[00:09:27] By the time the marbles reached Britain, Elgin had spent more than £70,000 on the operation, which is the equivalent of around £6 million in today's money. He had borrowed much of it, at high interest rates.
[00:09:45] Financially, he was ruined, and he was forced to sell the sculptures to the British government, which paid him around half of what he claimed to have spent. In turn, the government gave them to the museum.
[00:10:01] And then there are the Benin Bronzes.
[00:10:04] In 1897, a British force invaded the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, as revenge for the killing of a British delegation.
[00:10:16] They burned Benin City to the ground, sent the king into exile, and carried away thousands of extraordinary brass plaques and sculptures from the royal palace.
[00:10:29] The British government then sold much of this artwork to cover the costs of the military expedition. Several hundred pieces went to the British Museum, which today holds more than 900 objects from Benin.
[00:10:45] Here, nobody even claimed to have permission. The bronzes were simply taken. Stolen, you might say.
[00:10:54] Plenty of the collection, however, arrived in other, friendlier, ways. Some of it was dug up with the agreement of the authorities of the time.
[00:11:05] In the 1840s, for example, a young adventurer named Austen Henry Layard dug into the mounds of northern Iraq. There, he uncovered the palaces of ancient Assyria, a civilisation then known mainly from the Bible.
[00:11:23] His finds included huge winged bulls of stone. They were floated down the River Tigris on rafts made of inflated animal skins, and they caused a sensation in London.
[00:11:36] Ordinary Victorians queued to see a world nearly three thousand years old.
[00:11:43] And some of the most important finds were simply given, donated, to the museum.
[00:11:50] In 1938, a widow named Edith Pretty invited an archaeologist to dig up some mysterious mounds of earth on her land at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, in the east of England.
[00:12:05] The following year, under the largest one, he found the outline of an entire ship, whose wood had long since rotted away. Inside it was the treasure of an Anglo-Saxon king: a warrior's helmet, gold buckles, and silver bowls from Byzantium.
[00:12:25] It was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain, an invaluable collection, and it was ruled that all of it belonged to Mrs Pretty.
[00:12:39] Mrs Pretty gave it to the museum, every piece. She asked for nothing in return.
[00:12:47] At the time, it was the most valuable gift the museum had ever received from a living person.
[00:12:54] Now, we will come back to some of the arguments over whether the museum should actually be the custodian of this vast collection, or at least parts of it.
[00:13:03] But first, there is another part of the museum's story: its library.
[00:13:09] In 1857, a magnificent circular reading room opened in the museum's central courtyard.
[00:13:17] It had a blue and gold dome, wider than that of St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:13:23] Beneath it sat hundreds of leather-topped desks, arranged in rows like the spokes of a wheel. And around it, on 40 kilometres of shelves, was one of the great libraries of the world.
[00:13:39] It was free to use, and you did not need to be rich or famous, just to have a letter of recommendation and a reason for study.
[00:13:49] Readers over the years included some of the greatest writers, thinkers, and politicians in modern history: Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
[00:14:04] Even Karl Marx sat under that dome, day after day, for decades, researching and writing the book that became Das Kapital.
[00:14:14] And a few decades later, a Russian revolutionary applied for a reader's ticket under the false name of Jacob Richter; his real name was Vladimir Lenin.
[00:14:26] So, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin might not be the first people who come to mind as beneficiaries of the British state, but they owed some small debt of gratitude to the British Museum.
[00:14:40] Now, if you're wondering where all these books are now, the library moved out in 1997, to the new British Library building a little bit up the road. The space around the reading room was transformed into the glass-roofed Great Court that visitors walk through today.
[00:14:59] So, back to the objects, and to the arguments over them.
[00:15:05] As you may know, today, many of the countries they came from want them back.
[00:15:11] Greece has formally demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles since the 1980s, when the actress-turned-culture-minister Melina Mercouri made them a national cause.
[00:15:24] In 2009, Greece opened a gleaming museum at the foot of the Acropolis, with a top floor built to the exact dimensions of the Parthenon. The pieces that are in London are shown there as plain white plaster copies, so visitors can see exactly what is missing.
[00:15:46] Greece is far from alone. Nigeria wants the Benin Bronzes. Egyptian archaeologists have campaigned for the Rosetta Stone. And on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to give it its Polynesian name, the islanders want back a giant stone figure taken by a British warship in 1868 and presented to Queen Victoria.
[00:16:11] The islanders' name for it is usually translated as "the lost friend" or "the stolen friend".
[00:16:19] The museum's traditional defence rests on three arguments.
[00:16:24] First, a legal one: an Act of Parliament from 1963 actually forbids the museum from giving away almost anything in its collection, so the trustees say their hands are tied. Legally, they aren't allowed to give anything back.
[00:16:43] Second, a philosophical one: that there is real value in a universal museum, a single place where a visitor can walk from Egypt to Greece to Benin in an afternoon and see human civilisation as one connected story. And, after all, the museum is still free to all. Granted, you need to get there, to get to London, but when you do, the collection is there for you.
[00:17:15] And third, a defence of security. Some of these ancient treasures, its defenders say, simply wouldn't be adequately protected if they were returned to areas of conflict. Just take a look at what ISIS did to sites of cultural value in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, it destroyed much of Nimrud, the very place where Layard had dug up his winged bulls.
[00:17:43] The museum has held to this defence for decades, but in recent years, things seem to be shifting.
[00:17:52] Other countries have started to give things back. Germany has signed over ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, and the Netherlands has sent back more than a hundred.
[00:18:06] And the British Museum and Greece have spent several years talking about an arrangement in which sculptures could return to Athens as part of a long-term exchange. More than once, reports in the press have suggested a deal was close.
[00:18:24] But the talks keep running into the same problem, which is the question of who owns the sculptures. The museum says it can only lend them. Greece says it cannot borrow something that it believes already belongs to it.
[00:18:42] And then there is the question of how well the museum looks after what it holds, and here the defence of "we're keeping things safe" starts to look a little shaky.
[00:18:55] In 1845, a drunken visitor picked up a lump of stone and hurled it at the Portland Vase, a piece of Roman glass nearly 2,000 years old and possibly the most famous vase in the world. It shattered into more than 180 fragments.
[00:19:16] The museum glued it back together. And has since taken it apart and restored it again, twice, as restoration techniques improved. Today, you can hardly see the joins, but still, it was damaged under the British Museum's watch.
[00:19:33] But in 2023, the museum faced a much bigger scandal.
[00:19:40] It emerged that around 2,000 objects had gone missing or been damaged over a period of several years. Most were small gems, jewellery and fragments from the storerooms. The museum alleges that they had been secretly removed by one of its own senior curators, with some pieces offered for sale for a fraction of their value.
[00:20:06] One Roman object, reportedly worth as much as £50,000, was offered for sale for just £40. Some had been bought by collectors who had no idea what they were holding.
[00:20:20] And the museum had been warned. An antiques dealer in Denmark had noticed suspicious pieces appearing on eBay and had emailed the museum about it in 2021, two years before the scandal broke.
[00:20:36] He was told, in effect, that he was wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about.
[00:20:42] When the scale of the losses finally became clear in the summer of 2023, the story went around the world. The director resigned. The curator was dismissed, and later ordered by a court to hand over his eBay records and to return what he still held.
[00:21:03] Museum staff began the long work of hunting their own collection across the internet. Hundreds of pieces have since been recovered, but many more are still missing.
[00:21:15] Part of the problem, it turned out, was that the museum did not fully know what it owned.
[00:21:21] Millions of objects had never been photographed or properly catalogued, so when small things vanished from a storeroom, their disappearance could go unnoticed. The museum has since promised to photograph and catalogue the entire collection, but this is a huge project that is expected to take years.
[00:21:44] So, where does that leave the British Museum?
[00:21:49] It is one of the most argued-about museums in the world, and still one of the most visited, with around six million people walking through its gates every year.
[00:22:00] It is, to some people, a crime scene, a warehouse full of stolen goods waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. To others, it is a marvellous collection of human ingenuity, creativity, and progress through time.
[00:22:18] Whatever you may think of it, there is one thing that has not changed in the almost 300 years of its existence. It is free. Anyone, old or young, rich or poor, can walk in and see some of the most remarkable things the world has ever produced.
[00:22:38] And I, for one, think that is something pretty special.
[00:22:44] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the British Museum.
[00:22:48] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the British Museum.
[00:00:28] It's a story about a doctor with a collecting problem, the British Empire, some stones the Greeks want back, and the unanswered question of who the past actually belongs to.
[00:00:41] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:48] If you have been to London, there is a good chance you have visited the British Museum.
[00:00:56] In total, its collection numbers around eight million objects. They aren't all on display; on any given day, you can see perhaps 80,000 of them, a mere 1 per cent of the total.
[00:01:11] That is still a lot. To give you an idea of quite how much, if you wanted to see each object on display, and you spent only one minute with each one, it would take you almost two months. That is, if you didn't stop to sleep, or eat, and the museum allowed you to stay throughout the night.
[00:01:32] If you did the same for the entire collection, the full eight million, you would finish your visit a little over fifteen years from now.
[00:01:43] There is a vast amount of stuff: sculptures from Athens, mummies from Egypt, bronzes from Nigeria, chess pieces from a Scottish beach, and of course a stone from the banks of the Nile that unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt.
[00:02:01] So the obvious question is: how did all of this end up in one building in London?
[00:02:09] The answer begins with a man named Hans Sloane.
[00:02:14] Sloane was born in Ireland in 1660, and after training as a physician, he became one of the most fashionable doctors in London. He treated three monarchs, became president of the Royal Society, and even has a square in Chelsea named after him: Sloane Square.
[00:02:38] As a young man, he spent over a year in Jamaica as a doctor to the island's governor, and he came home with around 800 plant specimens.
[00:02:50] See, Sloane's passion was collecting. He collected plants, animals, coins, medals, books, manuscripts, shoes, drawings, and what he called "curiosities" from all over the world.
[00:03:05] Today, he might be called a "hoarder", someone who keeps everything and throws nothing away.
[00:03:13] By the time he died in 1753, aged 92, his collection had swollen to more than 71,000 objects.
[00:03:25] In his will, he offered his entire collection to the nation, on the condition that Parliament pay his daughters £20,000, which is almost £4 million in today's money.
[00:03:39] A lot of money, of course, but it was a fraction of what the collection was worth.
[00:03:46] He also asked that the collection be kept together, and shown to anyone who was curious, free of charge.
[00:03:55] Parliament agreed, and launched a national lottery to pay for it.
[00:04:00] Once the funds were raised, the collection passed into the hands of the state, and a building was bought to house it all.
[00:04:09] And so in 1759, in a mansion called Montagu House in Bloomsbury, the British Museum opened its doors. It was the first national museum in the world that belonged to neither a king nor a church, open to what its founding rules called "all studious and curious persons".
[00:04:33] Curious minds, one might even say.
[00:04:36] In the early years, visiting was not particularly easy. You had to apply in writing for a ticket, wait weeks, and then be marched through the rooms in a small group by an official. But from the start, the collection belonged to the public, and that was a bold new idea.
[00:04:59] And the collection kept growing.
[00:05:02] Now that Britain had a national museum, there was somewhere for things to go.
[00:05:09] Wealthy collectors followed Sloane's example and left their collections to it. Parliament bought others, including hundreds of ancient Greek vases collected by the British ambassador in Naples.
[00:05:24] As the empire expanded, and British ships sailed further and further from home, their crews brought back objects from all corners of the globe, and many of them ended up in the museum.
[00:05:37] And by law, the museum received a copy of every book published in Britain.
[00:05:43] Within a few decades, Montagu House was bursting at the seams. It was completely full.
[00:05:51] In the 19th century, it was knocked down and replaced by the great columned building you might have visited yourself.
[00:05:59] Soon enough, this building also started to fill up, but instead of knocking it down and building a bigger one, the solution was to move parts of the collection to other museums in London.
[00:06:13] Sloane's dried plants, stuffed animals and pickled creatures were moved out to South Kensington, where in 1881 they became the Natural History Museum.
[00:06:25] The books and manuscripts, as we will see, would leave later.
[00:06:29] What stayed in Bloomsbury were the things made by people, things from often distant civilisations.
[00:06:37] And many of these arrived in London thanks to British military and political power abroad.
[00:06:44] One such example is the museum's single most famous object: the Rosetta Stone.
[00:06:52] Now, we've made a full episode on the Rosetta Stone. It's episode number 141, so if you'd like the full story, you can listen to it there.
[00:07:02] But as a brief summary, or as a reminder, in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt.
[00:07:11] The following year, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta dug up a broken slab of dark stone, covered in three bands of writing: ancient Greek, everyday Egyptian script, and hieroglyphics.
[00:07:30] The scholars Napoleon had brought with him understood immediately what this could mean. Nobody on Earth had been able to read hieroglyphics for well over a thousand years. If all three texts said the same thing, the Greek could be used as a key, a dictionary to translate this ancient Egyptian script.
[00:07:56] But the French, alas, never got to keep their prize.
[00:08:00] In 1801, the British defeated Napoleon's forces in Egypt, and under the terms of the French surrender, the stone was handed over.
[00:08:11] It has been in the British Museum since 1802, and it remains the single most visited object in the building.
[00:08:20] And it's closely followed by the Parthenon Marbles.
[00:08:25] At the start of the 19th century, Greece was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and the British ambassador to the Ottomans was a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Elgin.
[00:08:38] Between 1801 and 1812, Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, the ancient temple in Athens, and shipped them to Britain.
[00:08:54] Elgin claimed he had permission from the Ottoman authorities, although the original document giving him permission has never been found. The Greeks were never consulted, and if they had been, it seems extremely unlikely they would have agreed.
[00:09:11] Now, not to suggest that Elgin is deserving of a huge amount of sympathy, but the logistics of removing the marbles proved far more complicated and expensive than the ambassador had bargained for.
[00:09:27] By the time the marbles reached Britain, Elgin had spent more than £70,000 on the operation, which is the equivalent of around £6 million in today's money. He had borrowed much of it, at high interest rates.
[00:09:45] Financially, he was ruined, and he was forced to sell the sculptures to the British government, which paid him around half of what he claimed to have spent. In turn, the government gave them to the museum.
[00:10:01] And then there are the Benin Bronzes.
[00:10:04] In 1897, a British force invaded the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, as revenge for the killing of a British delegation.
[00:10:16] They burned Benin City to the ground, sent the king into exile, and carried away thousands of extraordinary brass plaques and sculptures from the royal palace.
[00:10:29] The British government then sold much of this artwork to cover the costs of the military expedition. Several hundred pieces went to the British Museum, which today holds more than 900 objects from Benin.
[00:10:45] Here, nobody even claimed to have permission. The bronzes were simply taken. Stolen, you might say.
[00:10:54] Plenty of the collection, however, arrived in other, friendlier, ways. Some of it was dug up with the agreement of the authorities of the time.
[00:11:05] In the 1840s, for example, a young adventurer named Austen Henry Layard dug into the mounds of northern Iraq. There, he uncovered the palaces of ancient Assyria, a civilisation then known mainly from the Bible.
[00:11:23] His finds included huge winged bulls of stone. They were floated down the River Tigris on rafts made of inflated animal skins, and they caused a sensation in London.
[00:11:36] Ordinary Victorians queued to see a world nearly three thousand years old.
[00:11:43] And some of the most important finds were simply given, donated, to the museum.
[00:11:50] In 1938, a widow named Edith Pretty invited an archaeologist to dig up some mysterious mounds of earth on her land at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, in the east of England.
[00:12:05] The following year, under the largest one, he found the outline of an entire ship, whose wood had long since rotted away. Inside it was the treasure of an Anglo-Saxon king: a warrior's helmet, gold buckles, and silver bowls from Byzantium.
[00:12:25] It was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain, an invaluable collection, and it was ruled that all of it belonged to Mrs Pretty.
[00:12:39] Mrs Pretty gave it to the museum, every piece. She asked for nothing in return.
[00:12:47] At the time, it was the most valuable gift the museum had ever received from a living person.
[00:12:54] Now, we will come back to some of the arguments over whether the museum should actually be the custodian of this vast collection, or at least parts of it.
[00:13:03] But first, there is another part of the museum's story: its library.
[00:13:09] In 1857, a magnificent circular reading room opened in the museum's central courtyard.
[00:13:17] It had a blue and gold dome, wider than that of St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:13:23] Beneath it sat hundreds of leather-topped desks, arranged in rows like the spokes of a wheel. And around it, on 40 kilometres of shelves, was one of the great libraries of the world.
[00:13:39] It was free to use, and you did not need to be rich or famous, just to have a letter of recommendation and a reason for study.
[00:13:49] Readers over the years included some of the greatest writers, thinkers, and politicians in modern history: Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
[00:14:04] Even Karl Marx sat under that dome, day after day, for decades, researching and writing the book that became Das Kapital.
[00:14:14] And a few decades later, a Russian revolutionary applied for a reader's ticket under the false name of Jacob Richter; his real name was Vladimir Lenin.
[00:14:26] So, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin might not be the first people who come to mind as beneficiaries of the British state, but they owed some small debt of gratitude to the British Museum.
[00:14:40] Now, if you're wondering where all these books are now, the library moved out in 1997, to the new British Library building a little bit up the road. The space around the reading room was transformed into the glass-roofed Great Court that visitors walk through today.
[00:14:59] So, back to the objects, and to the arguments over them.
[00:15:05] As you may know, today, many of the countries they came from want them back.
[00:15:11] Greece has formally demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles since the 1980s, when the actress-turned-culture-minister Melina Mercouri made them a national cause.
[00:15:24] In 2009, Greece opened a gleaming museum at the foot of the Acropolis, with a top floor built to the exact dimensions of the Parthenon. The pieces that are in London are shown there as plain white plaster copies, so visitors can see exactly what is missing.
[00:15:46] Greece is far from alone. Nigeria wants the Benin Bronzes. Egyptian archaeologists have campaigned for the Rosetta Stone. And on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to give it its Polynesian name, the islanders want back a giant stone figure taken by a British warship in 1868 and presented to Queen Victoria.
[00:16:11] The islanders' name for it is usually translated as "the lost friend" or "the stolen friend".
[00:16:19] The museum's traditional defence rests on three arguments.
[00:16:24] First, a legal one: an Act of Parliament from 1963 actually forbids the museum from giving away almost anything in its collection, so the trustees say their hands are tied. Legally, they aren't allowed to give anything back.
[00:16:43] Second, a philosophical one: that there is real value in a universal museum, a single place where a visitor can walk from Egypt to Greece to Benin in an afternoon and see human civilisation as one connected story. And, after all, the museum is still free to all. Granted, you need to get there, to get to London, but when you do, the collection is there for you.
[00:17:15] And third, a defence of security. Some of these ancient treasures, its defenders say, simply wouldn't be adequately protected if they were returned to areas of conflict. Just take a look at what ISIS did to sites of cultural value in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, it destroyed much of Nimrud, the very place where Layard had dug up his winged bulls.
[00:17:43] The museum has held to this defence for decades, but in recent years, things seem to be shifting.
[00:17:52] Other countries have started to give things back. Germany has signed over ownership of more than a thousand Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, and the Netherlands has sent back more than a hundred.
[00:18:06] And the British Museum and Greece have spent several years talking about an arrangement in which sculptures could return to Athens as part of a long-term exchange. More than once, reports in the press have suggested a deal was close.
[00:18:24] But the talks keep running into the same problem, which is the question of who owns the sculptures. The museum says it can only lend them. Greece says it cannot borrow something that it believes already belongs to it.
[00:18:42] And then there is the question of how well the museum looks after what it holds, and here the defence of "we're keeping things safe" starts to look a little shaky.
[00:18:55] In 1845, a drunken visitor picked up a lump of stone and hurled it at the Portland Vase, a piece of Roman glass nearly 2,000 years old and possibly the most famous vase in the world. It shattered into more than 180 fragments.
[00:19:16] The museum glued it back together. And has since taken it apart and restored it again, twice, as restoration techniques improved. Today, you can hardly see the joins, but still, it was damaged under the British Museum's watch.
[00:19:33] But in 2023, the museum faced a much bigger scandal.
[00:19:40] It emerged that around 2,000 objects had gone missing or been damaged over a period of several years. Most were small gems, jewellery and fragments from the storerooms. The museum alleges that they had been secretly removed by one of its own senior curators, with some pieces offered for sale for a fraction of their value.
[00:20:06] One Roman object, reportedly worth as much as £50,000, was offered for sale for just £40. Some had been bought by collectors who had no idea what they were holding.
[00:20:20] And the museum had been warned. An antiques dealer in Denmark had noticed suspicious pieces appearing on eBay and had emailed the museum about it in 2021, two years before the scandal broke.
[00:20:36] He was told, in effect, that he was wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about.
[00:20:42] When the scale of the losses finally became clear in the summer of 2023, the story went around the world. The director resigned. The curator was dismissed, and later ordered by a court to hand over his eBay records and to return what he still held.
[00:21:03] Museum staff began the long work of hunting their own collection across the internet. Hundreds of pieces have since been recovered, but many more are still missing.
[00:21:15] Part of the problem, it turned out, was that the museum did not fully know what it owned.
[00:21:21] Millions of objects had never been photographed or properly catalogued, so when small things vanished from a storeroom, their disappearance could go unnoticed. The museum has since promised to photograph and catalogue the entire collection, but this is a huge project that is expected to take years.
[00:21:44] So, where does that leave the British Museum?
[00:21:49] It is one of the most argued-about museums in the world, and still one of the most visited, with around six million people walking through its gates every year.
[00:22:00] It is, to some people, a crime scene, a warehouse full of stolen goods waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. To others, it is a marvellous collection of human ingenuity, creativity, and progress through time.
[00:22:18] Whatever you may think of it, there is one thing that has not changed in the almost 300 years of its existence. It is free. Anyone, old or young, rich or poor, can walk in and see some of the most remarkable things the world has ever produced.
[00:22:38] And I, for one, think that is something pretty special.
[00:22:44] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the British Museum.
[00:22:48] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
