พิพิธภัณฑ์และโครงการพิพิธภัณฑ์บริติช (บริติชมิวเซียม)The British Museum

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.

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.