Amulet Atlas

organizationsThe British Museum

also: BM

organizationBritain and IrelandUnited Kingdomneeds checking

London museum of human history, founded by act of parliament in 1753 and open to the public since 15 January 1759. It was the world's first public national museum and charges no admission except for loan exhibitions. For this atlas it is the largest single holding of Egyptian and Mesopotamian amulets in one building, and the institution whose keeper wrote the most-reprinted book about them.

cited

When

1753 to the present still carried cited

PeriodGeorgian to now
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteRoyal assent to the founding act, 7 June 1753; opened to the public 15 January 1759.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

The museum began with Sir Hans Sloane's 71,000 objects, bought for the nation for £20,000 after his death in 1753 — far under the £50,000 or more his collection was then reckoned at. Among them were 160 Egyptian objects, which is where the Egyptian collection starts. In 1802 George III presented the Rosetta Stone. Henry Salt, British consul in Egypt, supplied much of the rest from 1818 onward.

E. A. Wallis Budge ran the Egyptian and Assyrian department as keeper from 1894 to 1924 and did the buying, in Egypt, Sudan and Iraq. His methods are on the record in his own memoir and in later assessment: the archaeologist Brian M. Fagan has called him "one of the major illegal looters of antiquities".

The collection's size is stated two ways in the same account: eight million artefacts in the permanent collection, and over 13 million objects in total. This record gives both rather than picking one.

The museum's published position on returns rests on statute. It argues that the British Museum Act 1963 prevents any object from leaving the collection once it has entered it — "The Museum owns its collections, but its Trustees are not empowered to dispose of them" — and that the "restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other great museums of the world". It has nevertheless returned Tasmanian Aboriginal burial remains where legislation allowed, and it has a published policy on human remains. The Parthenon sculptures claimed by Greece, the Benin Bronzes claimed by Nigeria and the Ethiopian tabots are the standing claims; preliminary talks with the Greek government began in late 2022.

cited

Now

On 28 April 2020 the museum put over 1.9 million images of its collection online. Most images that are © The Trustees of the British Museum carry a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence: free to share and adapt for non-commercial use with a credit to the museum, and a separate licence from British Museum Images for anything the museum deems commercial. Inference — that licence is not on Wikimedia Commons' accepted list, because Commons requires that commercial use be allowed. So this atlas can link to a British Museum image and cannot host one, and that is a fact about the licence, not a judgement about the museum.

cited

What is on record about it

What this is near

placeRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British Museumthe room inside it this atlas sends a reader topersonE. A. Wallis Budgeits keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities from 1894 to 1924, and the buyer of much of what is herecarriesWedjat eyeheld here in quantity — the Egyptian amulet the collection has most ofcarriesIncantation bowlthe Mesopotamian object Budge's Iraq missions brought to BloomsburycontrastWikimedia Commonsthe repository this museum's images cannot go to, because the licence forbids commercial usecontrastThe Metropolitan Museum of Artthe comparison case: the same kind of collection, released under CC0 insteadstoryWho owns a charmthe long read on ownership; the 1963 Act argument is its clearest statement of one sidestoryFree to usethe long read on licensing, where this museum is the worked example of a licence that looks open and is not

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

orgHei-tikithe overseas collection holding about fifty, and part of the reason repatriation is a live questionorgIllaone of the collections holding Inca conopasheld-atJimatwhere the Raffles coins ended up, and where the standard catalogue of them was writtenorgMesopotamian household protectionone of the collections where these objects can be seenorgRoom 1: Enlightenment, the British Museumthe institution this room explains — its founding collection, and the argument it makes about keeping thingsorgFlinders Petriethe museum whose Egyptology he fought with, and where he showed the Fayum portraits he forced Cairo to give backorgE. A. Wallis Budgethe collection he bought for and then kept, and the one his acquisition methods are now argued about insidecontrastThe Metropolitan Museum of Artthe comparison case: a similar collection published under a non-commercial licence insteadparallelMusée du quai Branly — Jacques Chiracthe other institution where the inalienability argument is made, under a different statutecontrastWikimedia Commonsthe collection whose non-commercial licence does not clear it, however large the collection isheld-atBudge's amulet platesthe collection Budge built and photographed from, and the one most of these objects still sit inorgWho owns a charmthe institution that refuses most often, and publishes the Act it refuses under

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

Pass it on
BlueskyMastodonRedditWhatsAppEmail