British Museum

Our friends at Context will lead us through a 2.5 hour walk in the British Museum.

This walk explores how the British Museum came into existence in the mid-eighteenth century during the period of Enlightenment, so called because of people's desire to re-examine received ideas and explore new ones using different methods of collecting data. During the Enlightenment period different disciplines were born, among them archaeology, art history and the study of languages and scripts.

We will look at some of the antiquities and languages of ancient Iraq and Iran as material from these areas forms some of the earliest collections in the British Museum. Large-scale excavation in the ancient Middle East and the race for deciphering of hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts were inspired by the finds from Mesopotamia and Persia. The beginnings of the British Museum are inextricably tied to the European re-discovery of these ancient cultures.