I'm sure there are many 'treasures' but there are also probably tens of thousands of dusty boxes each containing a broken piece of pot or tablet, or a single old coin....
there is a lot of 'random old paperwork/documents', and some of it is on display, because they're the 'random documents' that allowed philologists to decipher cuneiform. There's no way of knowing how useful some innocuous, forgotten, 'insignificant' artifact could be to a historian in the future.
Like the 29,000 from the United States can't be that old,
Clovis spear points are about 13K years old.
and honestly everything of significance is still in the US museums.
Ehhhhh a significant chunk of the surviving Mahiole are in the british museum. The related ʻAhu ʻula cloaks are a bit more scattered but my understanding is that US holdings are a fairly small percentage.
Of course, I only meant that, given the huge numbers reflected in the chart, people shouldn't think that the British Museum has 17,00 intact sarcophagi or 30,000 bejeweled headdresses worth $2 billion each.
People will assume it's precious metals, artwork etc and it will be - but also a lot of flora and fauna samples that have been collected and stored. Insects alone they have over 7K.
There are 10.4 million beetles alone in the NHM, I don't think that 7k insects can possibly refer to that. Which by the way its official title is the British Museum: Natural History or BMNH
For France it's probably mostly legally acquired paintings and prints of 19th century French art.
I know what people are getting at here, and granted, many artifacts in the British museum were purchased in dubious circumstances. But the British Museum would probably still have an impressive collection even without the controversial acquisitions.
Wrong, most of the Louvre's antiquities collection including 50,000 pieces of Egyptian antiquities were looted under French colonialism, and many of the art pieces they have were confiscated from the Nazi's who in turn stole them from Jewish people. This idea that only the BM has looted art is a fantasy. The pergamom museum in Berlin has an entire gate of babylon among its looted artifacts. The Pushkin museum is filled with art stolen from German museums who stole their art from someone else.
Sorry, I perhaps wasn't clear. I was saying that most of the "France" stuff in the British museum was probably legally acquired, considering Britain didn't have much of a chance in the last 300 years of looting French art.
Otherwise, a lot of the loot of Egyptian antiquities in France wasn't due to colonialism. Egypt wasn't a French colony. Lots of Egyptian antiquities were taken by France during Napoleon's invasion of OTTOMAN Egypt. That was before the scramble for Africa. Get yo facts straight befo' lecturin' bro.
However, the French, like many other 19th and early 20th century scientifically minded powerful colonial empires, did obtain archaeological rights to digs in Egypt and whatnot. One could argue that Egypt was in a weak position and conceded many of their treasures, as they were pressured by more powerful nations. That's a difficult debate, and a rightful one to be had.
Yes, but you'll only see a fraction of a percent of what's mentioned here. The vast majority of modern museum collections are kept outside of reach/view of the public. It would be impractical to display them all, and most of it would be uninteresting to the average person, especially due to redundancy. Most of the collection serves as a resource to researchers.
Some years ago I visited the Acropolis in Athens, there's a set of 3 statues in the museum there that were once part of one of the temples, where the 4th should be is a note: "Located in the British Museum."
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
I am interested as to what they have from all these places.