British Museum

The exposition of the British Museum was collected in the XVII century from three collections: the collection of the British physician and naturalist Hans Sloan, the collection of Count Robert Harley and the antiques library of Robert Cotton.

The museum was originally housed in an aristocratic mansion located in the Bloomsbury area. But later on the museum expanded, there are even Greek and Egyptian acquisitions that came to England under dark circumstances, and still require a return.

In the XIX century, the collections were divided into departments, even numismatic, and zoological, botanical, geological and mineralogical were transferred to a special Museum of Natural History in South Kensington. In the early twentieth century, the British Museum, through numerous excavations by British archaeologists in Mesopotamia, expanded its collections of Middle Eastern art.

At the end of the XX century, the interior was redesigned by Norman Foster. Originally one of the main attractions of the museum was its library, the largest in the UK. It was in this library that V. I. Lenin and K. Marx worked.

In the XX century, the library received the oldest printed books and Buddhist manuscripts from Dunhuang, the Sinai Codex from Leningrad and an exceptional collection of Hebraistic texts. But in 1972, Parliament decided to separate the library from the museum, placing it in a separate building. Today it is the British Library.