British museum Automatic translate
One of the largest museums in the world, the oldest and largest is the British Museum. His collections began to take shape in the middle of the 18th century, and the building on Russell Street was built by 1857 according to the design of Sydney Twilight. The building of the British Museum has a majestic facade decorated with a colonnade.
The famous reading room of the museum library is covered by a dome with a diameter of 42 m. In fact, the British Museum includes a number of museums of various profiles: the Museum of Archeology and Ethnography, a collection of prints and drawings, a library and the Museum of Natural History. The latter since 1881 occupies a separate building in South Kensington.
The British Museum contains the richest collections of works of art exported to England from different countries. The museum has especially many monuments of monumental sculpture, ancient Egyptian art, reliefs of Assyrian palaces. The pride of the museum is the unique collections of Greek sculpture, the creation of Phidias from the Parthenon, the statues from the Halicarnassus mausoleum, named one of the seven wonders of the world. The most valuable collections of Mexican masks, bronze and stone statues from India and Ceylon, bronze sculptures from Equatorial Africa, created 5-6 centuries ago, are also stored here.
The famous British Library has collected more than 6 million volumes and a unique collection of manuscripts. Many famous scientists, researchers, historians and poets worked in the reading room of the library.
There are no collections of paintings in the British Museum. The main collections of paintings are in the Tate Gallery, National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The British Museum is so rich that only in order to quickly examine all the exhibits, you need to roam its halls for a week. Usually, a museum begins with a visit to the so-called Inscription room, where collections of Greek and Roman inscriptions are collected. From there, walking along the corridor, you can get into the huge reading room of the museum library. Nearby is the hall where ancient manuscripts and autographs of monarchs, scholars and writers are stored. Among them there are sketches of Albrecht Durer, the notebook of Leonardo da Vinci, autographs of Bacon, Milton, Byron, Michelangelo, Shelley, Dickens, Schiller, Goethe, Thackeray and others.
In the Assyrian Hall, the most interesting exhibits are two powerful winged bulls with human heads, once standing at the entrance to the palace of Sargon, the founder of the last dynasty of Assyrian rulers. These creatures, according to the beliefs of the Assyrians, guarded people’s homes from evil spirits. In the same room are stored plates, dotted with cuneiform writing, which tells about the battles of King Sargon. Here you can see many objects of worship and life of the Assyrians of the period 885-860. BC.
Signs found in the ruins of the royal library in Nineveh are considered extremely valuable exhibits of the British Museum. Each plate is covered with letters and provided with a label, apparently in order to make it more convenient to quickly find the right plate. The letters on the Nineveh tablets contain information about the creation of the world and the Flood, a story about Ancient Babylon. In addition, grammar studies, magic formulas, spells, and sacred hymns were found on tablets.
On the second floor of the museum are Egyptian halls, a hall with collections from Babylon and Assyria, where there are many exhibits related to the 5th millennium BC.
In the northern Egyptian gallery you can see statues, tombs, inscriptions made during the highest economic and political heyday of Egypt. Of particular interest are the head of the colossal statue of Pharaoh Thutmose III, several statues of the goddess Sekhet (goddess of fire and hell), the statue of Amenophis III, carved from black granite, a wooden statue of Seti I, a lion made of red granite and other statues and sculptural images. Many unique exhibits in other Egyptian halls.
The collections of the British Museum are considered the best and richest in the whole world. The decoration of the collection of antique works of art is called the sculptures of the temple of Artemis of Ephesus, fragments of the famous "Treasury of Atreus" (the tomb of Agamemnon) from Mycenae. In addition to the originals, in the Greek halls there are many casts from antique statues.
The beginning of the entire department of antiquity in the British Museum was laid by Lord Elgin, whose collections became the basis for a future collection of antiquities. Numerous finds from the destroyed Parthenon, the temple of Erechtheus in Athens, the temple of Apollo in Arcadia, the temple of Athena-Niki took their places in the windows of the British Museum.
In the gallery of Roman busts you can see sculptural images of famous ancient writers. In addition, the museum has a wide display of religious objects from various Eastern religions, the early era of Christianity and the Middle Ages.
The Natural History Museum was isolated from the British Museum and is located on the south side of Hyde Park. This museum is called unique. Here you can find graphic examples of the origin of species, natural selection and other stages of the development of wildlife on Earth. Some collections are compiled by Charles Darwin himself. In addition to shop windows, where you can observe the evolution of various species of animals, birds and humans, the museum houses magnificent botanical, mineralogical and osteological collections.