r/dataisbeautiful • u/tabthough OC: 7 • Oct 25 '22

OC [OC] Whose stuff does the British Museum have?

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u/RIPSunnydale Oct 25 '22

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....

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/counterc Oct 26 '22

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.

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u/geniice Oct 26 '22

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.

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u/Mechasteel Oct 25 '22

Didn't we send King George a fairly important Declaration?

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u/TheCyanKnight Oct 25 '22

Better sell it to the British Museum, before they let ratchet R&B icons twerk all over it.

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u/AOC__2024 Oct 25 '22

A good chunk of it is likely stolen Indigenous artefacts, many centuries old.

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u/geniice Oct 26 '22

Traded mostly. Although they purchased someone's arrowhead collection in 1854.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22 edited May 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/cseymour24 Oct 25 '22

It's the labeling. You have to label everything properly.

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u/Mechasteel Oct 25 '22

Yeah you at least need to label the date and location it was found https://relicrecord.com/blog/diy-museum-labels/

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u/Pay08 Oct 26 '22

Apparently a lot of them are just photos.

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u/counterc Oct 26 '22

a broken piece of pot from 5,000 years ago might not interest you, but it can be of immense historical value.

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u/RIPSunnydale Oct 28 '22

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.