What is it made of?

The British Museum

In the beginning…

Sir Hans Sloane was a great collector. He filled his house with rare books and pictures, precious stones, stuffed animals, birds and butterflies, and ancient remains from all over the world. There had never been a collection quite like it, and visitors were amazed by what they saw.

When Sir Hans Sloane died in 1753, his wife let the King buy the whole collection for just 20 000 pounds so that it could belong to the nation for ever.

This was the start of the British Museums.

It took thirty years and thousands of tons of stone to complete the building and the forty-four massive columns which decorated the front. The building of the British Museums was finished in 1948.

For animals to antiquities…

The British Museum started as a museum which collected everything. At first it was particularly famous for its natural history collection and its vast library of books.

Three stuffed giraffes used to stand at the top of the stairs in old Montagu house.

In the 1880s all the museum’s stuffed animals and birds were moved to the new Natural History museum at South Kensington.

Children today are sometimes surprised not to find any dinosaurs in the museum… but there are plenty of other ancient and marvelous things to look at.

The museum’s huge collection of books and manuscripts has now become the British Library. Many fine examples of famous books, Bibles, manuscripts and old maps are displayed in the British Library galleries in the museum.

For over two and a quarter centuries the collections of “antiquities” have gone on growing. Today the British Museum is a treasure house of old, beautiful and interesting objects. They come from all over the world and from thousand of years of history. The one thing they have in common is that they have all been made by hand. Every exhibit reveals the skill of its maker and tells us something about the time and place in which it was made.

Inside information

The heaviest exhibit is a winged lion made of stone. It weighs 16 tons (as much as two double-decker buses)!

There is something odd about its legs. What is it?

The tallest exhibit is the totem pole which is over 11 metres high.

The oldest exhibits in the museum are stone tools from Africa more than a million years old.

Scientists at work

What is it made of?

What would you think this mirror was made of? Everyone thought it was made of bronze like other Greek and Roman mirrors in the museum. Bronze contains copper and tin, and copper becomes covered with green corrosion like this when it is buried.

Scientists in the laboratory were trying to discover more about the metals used by the Greeks and Romans. When they tested a bit of this mirror they were puzzled because the metal did not behave like bronze.

They then used a special technique for analyzing metal and the results said:

Silver 92%

Copper 8%

Once they knew what it was made of, it was possible to clean it properly. The British Museum now has a rare Roman silver mirror on display!

Dragons and pots

The Chinese have been making pots out of fine white porcelain for a thousand years. The secret lay in a special type of white stone found in China which was ground to a paste and fired at a high temperature. European potters had great difficulty trying to imitate the porcelain from China which they admired so much.

This vase was made over four hundred years ago, when English pots were still being made out of thick coarse clay. It is decorated with six round pictures of dragons. Dragons were thought of as watery rain-bringing creatures.

Rain makes the crops grow, and crops make the land wealthy and happy, so the Emperors adopted the dragon as their special symbol.

You can see Chinese dragons on pots in the museum.

Here are five of them.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29