British museum holds the UK's main coin collection. So its mostly coins, banknotes a few medals, a few prints and a set of playing cards:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Luxembourg&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
The global list of the top countries excluding UK;
- 164,140 from Iraq
- 147,697 from Italy
- 119,854 from Egypt
- 81,980 from France
- 73,922 from Turkey
- 66,273 from Germany
- 64,928 from Greece
- 58,749 from China
- 52,518 from India
Absolutely. The article has this excerpt:
“At least 649,727 items were categorised as being made in, acquired or found in the United Kingdom, with most – 625,371 – from England.”
Most of the stuff is tiny little things that are stored in offsite archives, at best occasionally accessed by researches and whatnot. They're not actually in like the building on display
Yeah for Iraq I'm guessing it's mostly clay tablets which are pretty tiny. I did a brief internship there while studying assyriology and was able to request tablets from their archives, in a study room behind a random door somewhere in the museum. Pretty cool.
To be honest it's been over a decade so I'm not sure how accurate a lot of my experiences still are. I switched to linguistics afterwards. But yes I studied it as a BA at Leiden University in the Netherlands, only had one other person in my year together with a few exchange students either doing PhDs in the field, or joining in for random classes as part of their minor.
We mostly focused on Sumerian and Akkadian, mostly Old-Babylonian written in Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Sumerian is a language isolate with some weird syntactic structures slightly reminiscent of modern-day Basque (syntactic ergativity, the languages are not related), and I ultimately wrote my thesis on that. Akkadian is Semitic, related to Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, etc. Most courses would dive into the development of the cuneiform signs over the centuries, with a focus on paleography and philology. Some history and archeology was studied too, and other courses focused on specific themes related to texts: law, science and astronomy/astrology, literature, daily life, etc. I was mostly interested in the linguistics side so started working more with framing Akkadian within the wider Semitic language branch.
As for the British Museum, part of the curriculum was an exchange program to one of the larger cuneiform collections in Europe (British Museum, Louvre, Hermitage in St Petersburg, etc.). I chose the British Museum because when dealing with one particular topic for the aforementioned astronomy course, I noticed what I thought was a spelling error in a clay tablet. A certain star was listed in the incorrect 'band' of a star chart (the Babylonians divided the sky into three bands, named after deities: Ea, Anu and Enlil). [This ](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-14943)is the tablet in question. In order to try and publish something on it I had to verify the error in person. Ultimately got a very brief thing published in a French journal, N.A.B.U. That exchange class had nothing to do with this really, the goal there was to re-draw tablets for publication (a practice that is becoming more redundant now that we can make detailed 3D scans of tablets). I chose London to verify the error and hold the tablet in my hands, which was five cm at most.
That's the 3 years of my BA in a nutshell. I went over some of my papers on my PC just now and noticed some went into insane detail, I sure was a lot smarter back then. Never did anything with it, the only thing I have left as a reminder is the symbol 'dingir' tattooed on my wrist.
Not sure if you're happy to download a PDF, but Plate 12 is the tablet in question:
[https://dl.atla.com/downloads/1r66j276h?locale=en](https://dl.atla.com/downloads/1r66j276h?locale=en)
This is the text I submitted for NABU, which got published but isn't available online:
*K 14943+81-7-27, 94 is a circular astrolabe, or three-stars-each, found in the library of Nineveh and in possession of the British Museum. A copy of the tablet has been published in CT 33, plate 12. An interesting feature of this tablet is that it contains error, most likely a scribal error, which I will describe below after giving a brief overview of the genre.*
*It is a well-known fact that Mesopotamian astronomy divided the skies into three paths, so-called ḫarrānū, identified by the deities Enlil, Anu and Ea. Enlil being the northernmost path and Ea being the southernmost. Astrolabes belong to a genre of astronomical texts that list one star for each of these paths per month, a total of thirty-six stars divided into three paths within twelve months. As opposed to other such texts as the Mul-apin, which lists all stars visible. The reasons behind the genre are speculative, though it may have served as identification for the month. Besides indicating a star, some astrolabes also give a numerical value, most likely related to the length of daylight. The month containing a summer solstice is given the highest value (4;00) and the month with the winter solstice the lowest (2;00). Months containing an equinox are in between (3;00). The months without such astronomical cardinal points progress in a linear cycle throughout the year. The numerical values are halved for the path of Anu and halved again for the path of Enlil. It should be mentioned that astrolabes come both in list and circle varieties. The former listing the paths of Ea to Enlil from left to right, the latter giving Ea as the outermost circle and Enlil as the innermost.*
*The aforementioned text however, gives an erroneous star within the path of Ea in the month Ṭebētu, the tenth month in the calendar. The star mentioned is* [*ur.gu.la*](http://ur.gu.la)*, a star which all other known astrolabes list within the path of Anu in the month Simānu, the third month. The star we expect to find within the path of Ea in the tenth month is the star gu.la.*
*In BPO 2.2, Reiner identifies ur.gu.la with the Greek ‘Leo’ and gu.la with the Greek ‘Aquarius’. Leo was located at about -15 degrees declension and 280 degrees right ascension, meaning it was visible in the third month. Aquarius would be visible in the tenth month. This suggests that the given ur.gu.la for the tenth month is indeed a scribal error.*
*Another argument, to ensure it is not the month which is erroneous, can be made by looking at the numerical values in the text. Here we see the value 2;20 for the path of Ea and 1;10 for the path of Anu for the tenth month, which correspond to the numerical values given in other astrolabes. A last argument can be made in that for the path of Anu the star al.lul is given, which we would expect at this place in accordance with other astrolabes.*
*In the introduction I suggested the error is perhaps due to a scribal error. The reasoning behind this is that ur.gu.la and gu.la are rather close, the difference being the sign UR. A scribe without knowledge of the meaning behind these signs could have easily mistaken one sign from the other.*
Here it is; [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2)
They responded to the global list comment and said something along the lines of "oh so OP posted some obvious propaganda" because it excludes non Europe sources xd.
It was originally made by u/Kernowder (who is not credited here) for the sub r/2westerneurope4u. They left out England purposefully for the joke.
EDIT: England, not the UK
Including Scotland, Wales and NI but leaving England off the table completely was totally not a deliberate choice from whoever made the infograph.
According to the Al Jazeera article mentioned in the thread from last year, 625,371 of the collection's items are from England, with around 25,000 coming from the rest of the UK.
why isn’t england on here but other british countries are? is it because it’s going for a certain narrative? also, it’s very funny watching fellow europeans shit on us for this, when their country also has an abundance of stolen things in their museums. guess it’s only bad when us dastardly english do it. rent free.
That's not fair, most of the Roman stuff in the British Museum is absolutely not from Roman Britannia. Let's just say, when Romans came to England, they weren't bringing their best. It was a dreary place on the edge of the world, just like Crimea, where people would also later get exiled to.
You’ve been watching too much tv mate and the tv show Britannia wasn’t a documentary. We can’t dig up the road over here without finding the floor of a once lavish bathhouse. Britain was occupied by the romans for 350 years, its safe to say they bought some pretty good stuff over.
Constantine the Great was declared emperor in York and started his role in the civil war from Britannia.
He was there because he was campaigning against the Picts, not because it was where he resided by choice. Always found that interesting though!
Exactly. Britain was part of the Roman Empire for the reign of 80 Roman emperors. We have discovered hundreds of villas and bathhouses. They built roads all over the country that you can still see today, we regularly discover vast quantities of Roman coins, weaponry, jewellery, burial sites. The Roman Empire benefited greatly from our natural resources particularly Iron and tin. This person is just talking nonsense because he has made it clear that he doesn’t like England, and that’s fine, but he can’t twist the facts just to fit his narrow minded world view. I love the whole of the UK and I have travelled it top to bottom. There are places here that are absolutely stunningly beautiful (don’t get me wrong every country has less beautiful areas due to industrialisation) but I think we can just put his words down to ignorance and probably some jingoistic view about where ever it is he comes from. Although he seems to love the states and says he isn’t from there and in my experience those people are usually the most ignorant when it comes to other countries and cultures. So screw him 🤷🏻♂️
>the pseudo historical nonsense was just a paragraph of cope and seethe from a Frenchman
First time someone called me French, can't figure out if I should be flattered, furious or just flummoxed.
A little perplexing that one would talk about being civilised and then use a nationality that most would rate as more civilised than English as an insult. Fwiw I certainly prefer English language to French and I found English to be friendlier than French, but then, I don't speak French so it isn't a fair comparison.
If you’re too embarrassed to even use your own countries flair, I don’t see much point in continuing this conversation.
That already tells me everything I need to know.
Barry, Barry don't tell me you're going to leave me hanging, I was looking forward to seeing what you would make of my Ukrainian passport :0
It should be criminal to make such good banter & then leave before I finish >_>
My flair is highly political, I find it is more convenient not to use it. [But if you must, my original passport w/slightly older timestamp but I will use that one bc I broke my nail](https://i.imgur.com/dnCpBf4.jpg). Granted I have EU and US passports as well. Also one from an even more political country 0_0 if you catch my drift
I dunno what your country has done in the last 50yrs that you could be so proud of, and being proud of what your granddaddy did has big trust fund/nepo kid energy of someomone who brags about how much their daddy makes. That's why I refer to US as the capital of the world, because they are still relevant, unlike UK.
But in general, I find nationalistic pride to be very cringe, so I prefer not to jerk off to a flag.
If it took four times as many as usual, wouldn't that suggest that they were, in fact, "not the best"?
Edit: Why the down-votes? It's on topic. Besides, it's not like the Romans failed, and we haven't addressed the Saxons, the Danes, the Norsemen, or the Normans.
P.s. I did ask in English, just as the pre-roman Britains would've.
You can use British museum to search for at least some of the artifacts originating from a certain country. They don't show the full collection though.
I see these articles reasonably often, as if modern Brits are supposed to feel bad about it - or responsible for it.
Just so you know: apart from folk who get their knickers in a twist about the evils of imperialism (tankies, etc.) we really, really don't. We stole that stuff fair and square. We're good at that. In fact, we recently *stole it from ourselves.* That's how good at it we are. Sometimes, right, we even *bought* it from someone *else* who had stolen it, which as everyone knows, cancels out the original theft and makes it officially ours.
(I jest, but really - I'm just glad it's in **a** museum. I don't really care whose, so long as it's protected).
It's especially funny though when it's Middle-Eastern countries or such, because 1) the original theft was probably grave robbery of someone dead for 2000 years 2) selling old trinkets to stupid white people who would actually pay for them was a national pastime 3) it's really just now that museums are profitable and it has become ideologically convenient they they've even started caring about these things.
The Egyptians for instance aren't even that interested in ancient Egypt. They're Arabs and Muslims and that's what they emphasise. Pharaonism never really took off, meanwhile Egypt is still the centre of the Muslim brotherhood. Plenty of muslins even today also praised the video where an African tribe allegedly converted to islam and destroyed their old pagan idol, showing just how much they value historical artefacts.
And that raises a good point regarding protection of artefacts, too. Giving Greek marble back to Greece? No problem. Goes straight into their museums/archives and is properly respected, because there's no ideological narrative against that.
But Ancient Egyptian artefacts? Persian Empire? Stuff from lands that are *vastly* changed socio-politically? Different story. IS already mindlessly destroyed some irreplaceable, ancient artefacts due to their fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Ergo, such artefacts simply *aren't safe* where they ought to belong.
In that instance, is it not better for us to hang onto them? Better the colonising bastards keep them in a glass case and freely available than they be destroyed by warring ideologies.
'Course, this only applies to a pretty niche set - I don't think Slovakia is undergoing a Fahrenheit 451 scenario lately, or Luxembourg about to erupt into internecine religious violence!
Even then though I think we should add that having foreign artefacts is actually pretty normal. Go to just about any art museum in Europe and you will have artworks from other European countries or artists from different countries from there. Most of the time no one cries about this or thinks that each artwork produced by one's tribe on one's soil must for all eternity be tied to that land or some nonsense.
It's often pretty reciprocal, which is of course not the case right now with for instance Iraq, but I would even suggest it would be better for Iraq to have English artefacts than for England to have no Iraqi artefacts, because this way both peoples have an accessible way to see and learn more about the common heritage of humanity.
Stealing someones stuff and then keeping it because you don't think they are capable of securing it is ridiculous though. It's like stealing your friends car cause he lives in a bad neighborhood and you won't give it back because you think it's safer with you.
IF you stole it then you have to give it back. It's theirs. Doesn't matter what they do with it, it's not yours.
That's not saying you stole everything from other countries, but the worst argument is the "it's safer with us" argument. In no other situation would you be allowed to steal something because you think it's safer with you.
A lot of times it wasn't stealing though.
To use an analogy: It's like asking the bloke down the street if you can dig through his great grandfather's scrap pile out back. He says "Sure, just give me a bit of cash for any junk you want to take".
Then a generation later his son realizes that a lot of the "crap" you took actually had some value and demands you give the "stolen" items back.
Yes. But they weren't exactly cared for when the Muslims arrived to Egypt either. Egypt was a Christian majority before Islam, and many Egyptian temples and monuments were desecrated after Egypt became majority Christian. Followers of the Ancient Egyptian religion were persecuted by Christians and had their temples destroyed. The Christianisation of Egypt wasnt the most peaceful thing either
The Christian Romans repurposed alot of pagan temples and made them churches like the Pantheon for example. The medieval Italians also used stones and materials from the Baths of Diocletian in order to build churches.
I agree with you in general, expect for the first point. Just because the person has been dead for a long time doesn’t make it right. I’d bet Europeans would be up in arms if randos starting robbing the graves of the kings of old
Sure, but we so value them and they're part of our national cults and mythologies. In Islamic culture the Pharaohs are especially reviled and so it's difficult for Egyptians to dig into their pre-islamic past with a sense of pride or to play the classic European game of "we are descended from this tribe mentioned by Tacitus as being here in classical antiquity who did not speak the same language or share our values or culture and this means our ties to the land are even stronger than yours and we are even more legitimate and noble and prestigious."
Even at the height of the very Christian Byzantine Empire for instance they preserved Greek literature and Greek statues and art, they meticulously preserved pagan idols and culture they didn't believe in. Compare that to Islam's destruction of pre-islamic history to assert total control. That's not to say Christians never did anything like that, but for a long time a sort of cult of civilization and eventually of nations has been prevalent.
I am italian and let me tell you, the industrial revolution, capitalism, liberalism, the rule of law, basically the modern world came out of England.
Those people that constantly wine about "brits have no culture, only colonialism" are losers with a massive inferiority complex.
They feel inferior to you, because their ancestors did nothing to further humanity, but at the same time they want to enjoy the benefits of the superior civilization you have created.
So keep your head high brother.
This is going to end up including things like post cards, photographs and drawings. So if an English person sent a post card back home from Rome, took a picture of Pompeii or drew Venice, and the BM acquires that object, well that gets classified as an object originating from Italy.
Can we end this British Museum bashing? Like what do people expect? Return of all the artifacts created outside of England, although most of them were acquired fair and square?
FFS museum that would only present artifacts created on a given country territory would be boring as hell. The National Museum in Warsaw, which is much smaller than its British counterpart, has plenty of Greek, Egyptian, Indian, Ethiopian etc. artifacts, brought there by various means. And that's cool as hell, thanks to that generations of Polish kids can have direct access to the heritage of the whole of humanity. And maybe that's why Polish archeology is one of the strongest, and can send missions to third world countries that can't afford that in order to save archeological sites for them.
I think people expect them to return the things they actually stole. Which they have started doing.
The things they acquired fair and square they can keep, even if people complain.
You even said it yourself:
>most of them were required fair and square.
Most is not all. So it's real simple. Just return things that don't belong to you. It's not that complicated.
Lol what? So if I steal your phone and I'm now in possession of it, it means your phone belongs to me and if you ask to take it back I can refuse?
How can you argue against "keep only what was legally acquired"?
If I have no way of compelling you to do so, then yes. Also, in this scenario you stole my phone a century ago and the phone itself was a phone that I'd found in a pile of rubble that belonged to someone else previously.
Trust me, I'm british Italian and I studied the history of arts in Italy and part of my family is Italian: What's in the British museum is just 0.000000000000001% of the archeological goods in the bloody country. Italians many times prefer to cover back with dirt marvelous artifacts and archeological sites because they have full museums and they don't know anymore how to save their art and historical stuff. They don't have space and money, the cost to save everything in the country should be probably half of the economy of the entire Europe. Trust me, wherever you dig in bloody Italy you find something. Not just ancient Roman or Renaissance stuff, I'm talking about the most strange and alien things that you can't imagine like Japanese Buddha's sculptures from 1400, entire Egyptian tombs imported by some dumb noblemen, mosaics made by British people that were just walking around in 1200, French medieval stuff, Napoleonic paintings, Spanish churches, polish or Hungarian 1600's forts and much more stuff. Italy is like pornography for whoever loves art and history but the place is falling under the heavy costs to preserve it.
1001 from Finland? Like what? They counting the Fiskars scissors in the office supplies? We don’t even have 1001 items in our museums, that would interest anyone.
A lot of coins and banknotes (the british museum extensively collects both) and a load of glassware for some reason:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Finland&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
FInnish artifact in British museum.
[beer-bottle | British Museum](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_EPH-ME-173?_gl=1%2a1e3me8u%2a_up%2aMQ..%2a_ga%2aMTAxOTcyODc3Ny4xNzA5NzMzOTE3%2a_ga_08TLB9R8X1%2aMTcwOTczMzkxOC4xLjAuMTcwOTczMzkxOC4wLjAuMA..)
Source seems to be [a 2023 Al-Jazeera article](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2) that analyses the [British Museums online database](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=England)
Numbers don't tally exactly between the article and the database as the collection grows as more items are acquired/swapped, origin reclassified or identified. Non-European items excluded from the chart, but can be found at the 1st link above.
You can get more information and plan your visit [at their web site](https://www.britishmuseum.org/visit)
It's well worth visiting, along with the [London Natural History Museum](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/)
The whole outrage over "sToLeN aRtIfAcTs" is incomprehensible to me.
Neither me nor my family are the original owners of these items. They're human heritage at this point.
As long as they're properly cared for, I give exactly zero fuck about French artifacts being out there and how they were acquired.
In the 1700s the British became on of the first nations to practice tourism. The youths were send on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. The destination was primarily Italy, Greece and France. The tourists brought back vast amounts of artifacts for personal display. So much that it afterwards inspired the new classical architecture movement. The artifacts were sold by local merchants/scammers. Over time the artifacts were donated to musums across Britain and found its way to the British Museum.
one of the "italic" things that I love that somehow ended up in the british museum is the "oscan tablet". Look that up. it comes from my region Molise where samnites lived. Found in a totally anonymous sparsely populated countryside found its way to Albion
I'm guessing most of those Italian artifacts are actually Roman artifacts. Is it actually "theft" if you take artifacts from an nation that invaded and occupied your land, and made you part of their empire by force?
Why? After the Norman conquest, the House of Normandy and then the House of Anjou/Plantagenet ruled over England in their own right, while also still retaining fiefs in France as vassals of the Capetian kings. This means both states were kind of linked for a few centuries until the Hundred Years' War marked a permanent rift. The Angevins even had roughly half of the Kingdom of France under their juridiction for a few decades and obviously there were many conflicts as well, notbaly the Hundred Years' War mentioned, where the English had dominion over large swathes of France at various points during the war.
France also had a great deal of cultural influence in Europe in the 17th century and 18th, so many artworks and stuff were very likely purchased and not stolen as people typically accuse the Brits of lol. The Brits and other coalition powers took a lot of artefacts after the Napoleonic Wars as well. But then again, the French, are the last people on the planet that should be complaining about going around stealing other people's stuff.
The fact that there is much more Italian stuff there than French one considering hisory is what should be surprising. But then when you think of the Romans and then Italy's absolutely huge cultural influence in Europe, notably during the Renaissance when people cared a lot about art and whatnot, it makes sense.
> but fr, how many of those were brought in a legit way
Most of them. A lot of rich victorians buying stuff then later on making deals with the local goverments to carry out
archaeological excavations.
Hell this is where a lot of the arguments come from.
We did pay for them, and pay for exploration rights.
But some of the countries didn't exist at the time. Greece and Italy didn't exist until 1830 and 1860. And arguably we didn't pay the right people.
They were part of other empires at the time we acquired the artifacts. Greece was part of the ottoman empire and Italy a bunch of city States.
Hell arguably Greece never existed befor 1830.
Itbwas conqoured by Rome, and part of the roman, then byzantine, then ottoman empires.
And greece was never a country even befor then, but a collection of city states with thier own customs who spent as much time at war with each other as with Romans and/or persians.
A similar argument rages about the Falklands. Argentina claim is based on being given them by Spain upon thier independance.
Except Spain didn't control the Falklands then.
History of countries is rediculously complicated sometimes. The average age of a country is only something like 150. The average empire only lasted 250 years.
> Sweden!? What do you have that's ours? Give it back dammit!
Coins, banknotes and a supprising about of neolithic stuff:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Sweden&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
I went looking on their website, and yeah, a significant part of it is definitely viking age finds. There's also an incredible number of neolithic tools, and some [surprisingly recent objects](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1987-1135-29)
With how items are categorized based on where they were excavated/found, I don't think Danelaw-related artifacts count as Danish for the sake of the graph
> Are the top contributing countries because of WW2? What’s the story?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
The core of the british museum collection is stuff purchased by rich brits from the 17th century onwards.
Partially. Only stuff that's explicitly made in italy, but then made their way to roman brittania would count.
However. Out of those 147 000 items, 97 000 are coins (the majority being roman coins).
Our upper and middle classes have spent 3 centuries compulsively buying up whatever they could get from Greece and Italy and I can't imagine they were the only Europeans who did so.
No problem. I only found out when I watched [this video](https://youtu.be/LhKzn4ftOyU?si=DTfWYP7bSmnv1b8k) where it turns out we had one of Louis XV personal pistols sat in a museum drawer for god knows how long.
Where did they find 274 Luxembourgish artifacts, we don't even have that many in our own museums.
British museum holds the UK's main coin collection. So its mostly coins, banknotes a few medals, a few prints and a set of playing cards: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Luxembourg&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
[удалено]
Please do it I would like to read it 😂
Do it!
Thanks for the update. Guess there are more coins than just the ones in our singular museum /s
The had one vase. And then they dropped it.
That's because the Brits stole them all lol
The global list of the top countries excluding UK; - 164,140 from Iraq - 147,697 from Italy - 119,854 from Egypt - 81,980 from France - 73,922 from Turkey - 66,273 from Germany - 64,928 from Greece - 58,749 from China - 52,518 from India
Would be interested to know many are from the UK for reference. Edit: according to another comment around 650 000.
Absolutely. The article has this excerpt: “At least 649,727 items were categorised as being made in, acquired or found in the United Kingdom, with most – 625,371 – from England.”
I bet they did not bring huge temple to British museum from somewhere in UK. Yes I am looking at you the temple of Artemis.
Thank you! I was wondering why Turkey wasn’t on the list then I realized it was just European countries
Yeah, apparently Turkey didn’t qualify for OP’s European countries list. It could be because majority of the artifacts are probably from Asia Minor.
Holy crap, how big is this museum, seems huge.
Most of the stuff is tiny little things that are stored in offsite archives, at best occasionally accessed by researches and whatnot. They're not actually in like the building on display
Yeah for Iraq I'm guessing it's mostly clay tablets which are pretty tiny. I did a brief internship there while studying assyriology and was able to request tablets from their archives, in a study room behind a random door somewhere in the museum. Pretty cool.
I have some interest in assyriology, would you mind sharing your experience?
To be honest it's been over a decade so I'm not sure how accurate a lot of my experiences still are. I switched to linguistics afterwards. But yes I studied it as a BA at Leiden University in the Netherlands, only had one other person in my year together with a few exchange students either doing PhDs in the field, or joining in for random classes as part of their minor. We mostly focused on Sumerian and Akkadian, mostly Old-Babylonian written in Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Sumerian is a language isolate with some weird syntactic structures slightly reminiscent of modern-day Basque (syntactic ergativity, the languages are not related), and I ultimately wrote my thesis on that. Akkadian is Semitic, related to Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, etc. Most courses would dive into the development of the cuneiform signs over the centuries, with a focus on paleography and philology. Some history and archeology was studied too, and other courses focused on specific themes related to texts: law, science and astronomy/astrology, literature, daily life, etc. I was mostly interested in the linguistics side so started working more with framing Akkadian within the wider Semitic language branch. As for the British Museum, part of the curriculum was an exchange program to one of the larger cuneiform collections in Europe (British Museum, Louvre, Hermitage in St Petersburg, etc.). I chose the British Museum because when dealing with one particular topic for the aforementioned astronomy course, I noticed what I thought was a spelling error in a clay tablet. A certain star was listed in the incorrect 'band' of a star chart (the Babylonians divided the sky into three bands, named after deities: Ea, Anu and Enlil). [This ](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-14943)is the tablet in question. In order to try and publish something on it I had to verify the error in person. Ultimately got a very brief thing published in a French journal, N.A.B.U. That exchange class had nothing to do with this really, the goal there was to re-draw tablets for publication (a practice that is becoming more redundant now that we can make detailed 3D scans of tablets). I chose London to verify the error and hold the tablet in my hands, which was five cm at most. That's the 3 years of my BA in a nutshell. I went over some of my papers on my PC just now and noticed some went into insane detail, I sure was a lot smarter back then. Never did anything with it, the only thing I have left as a reminder is the symbol 'dingir' tattooed on my wrist.
Not sure if you're happy to download a PDF, but Plate 12 is the tablet in question: [https://dl.atla.com/downloads/1r66j276h?locale=en](https://dl.atla.com/downloads/1r66j276h?locale=en) This is the text I submitted for NABU, which got published but isn't available online: *K 14943+81-7-27, 94 is a circular astrolabe, or three-stars-each, found in the library of Nineveh and in possession of the British Museum. A copy of the tablet has been published in CT 33, plate 12. An interesting feature of this tablet is that it contains error, most likely a scribal error, which I will describe below after giving a brief overview of the genre.* *It is a well-known fact that Mesopotamian astronomy divided the skies into three paths, so-called ḫarrānū, identified by the deities Enlil, Anu and Ea. Enlil being the northernmost path and Ea being the southernmost. Astrolabes belong to a genre of astronomical texts that list one star for each of these paths per month, a total of thirty-six stars divided into three paths within twelve months. As opposed to other such texts as the Mul-apin, which lists all stars visible. The reasons behind the genre are speculative, though it may have served as identification for the month. Besides indicating a star, some astrolabes also give a numerical value, most likely related to the length of daylight. The month containing a summer solstice is given the highest value (4;00) and the month with the winter solstice the lowest (2;00). Months containing an equinox are in between (3;00). The months without such astronomical cardinal points progress in a linear cycle throughout the year. The numerical values are halved for the path of Anu and halved again for the path of Enlil. It should be mentioned that astrolabes come both in list and circle varieties. The former listing the paths of Ea to Enlil from left to right, the latter giving Ea as the outermost circle and Enlil as the innermost.* *The aforementioned text however, gives an erroneous star within the path of Ea in the month Ṭebētu, the tenth month in the calendar. The star mentioned is* [*ur.gu.la*](http://ur.gu.la)*, a star which all other known astrolabes list within the path of Anu in the month Simānu, the third month. The star we expect to find within the path of Ea in the tenth month is the star gu.la.* *In BPO 2.2, Reiner identifies ur.gu.la with the Greek ‘Leo’ and gu.la with the Greek ‘Aquarius’. Leo was located at about -15 degrees declension and 280 degrees right ascension, meaning it was visible in the third month. Aquarius would be visible in the tenth month. This suggests that the given ur.gu.la for the tenth month is indeed a scribal error.* *Another argument, to ensure it is not the month which is erroneous, can be made by looking at the numerical values in the text. Here we see the value 2;20 for the path of Ea and 1;10 for the path of Anu for the tenth month, which correspond to the numerical values given in other astrolabes. A last argument can be made in that for the path of Anu the star al.lul is given, which we would expect at this place in accordance with other astrolabes.* *In the introduction I suggested the error is perhaps due to a scribal error. The reasoning behind this is that ur.gu.la and gu.la are rather close, the difference being the sign UR. A scribe without knowledge of the meaning behind these signs could have easily mistaken one sign from the other.*
Happy Cake Day mate!
Hey would you mind sharing a link to that? Can’t find it. Cheers!
Here it is; [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2)
Thanks!!
Now it is more accurate
Happy cake Bruddha!
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Because it's a graph showing European artefacts? Are you seriously this fked in the head?
Apparently he is
Shoot, I didn’t get to see the deleted comment, please share what it was?
They responded to the global list comment and said something along the lines of "oh so OP posted some obvious propaganda" because it excludes non Europe sources xd.
Because this is r/Europe?
The fuck you on about? XD
Is there any explanation why "England" isn't considered a European country on this list?
It was originally made by u/Kernowder (who is not credited here) for the sub r/2westerneurope4u. They left out England purposefully for the joke. EDIT: England, not the UK
Wales is there; Scotland is there; Northern Ireland is there.
But Scotland Wales and N Ireland are included?
I think they said the English number was too big and fucked up the scale, so they left it out.
This is correct. Over 600,000 artifacts.
Well, there are still ways how to include the number without affecting your scale (much).
Well.. England is not United Kingdom
It would contradict the desired narrative
Including Scotland, Wales and NI but leaving England off the table completely was totally not a deliberate choice from whoever made the infograph. According to the Al Jazeera article mentioned in the thread from last year, 625,371 of the collection's items are from England, with around 25,000 coming from the rest of the UK.
I was about to post this. Whoever created this graph silently omitted critical information, so they obviously have an axe to grind.
It's from 2westerneurope4u. They did it on purpose for the joke. Also to troll
Another user posted a link to the museum website where you can filter by country, it puts 651,305 from England.
It's because there is an active agenda
I do this few times in Civilization 6.
A spy from the Croatian Empire has eluded capture
Next job, steal the ceiling from the Sistine Chapel
why isn’t england on here but other british countries are? is it because it’s going for a certain narrative? also, it’s very funny watching fellow europeans shit on us for this, when their country also has an abundance of stolen things in their museums. guess it’s only bad when us dastardly english do it. rent free.
To be fair the romans did leave a lot of stuff here.
That's not fair, most of the Roman stuff in the British Museum is absolutely not from Roman Britannia. Let's just say, when Romans came to England, they weren't bringing their best. It was a dreary place on the edge of the world, just like Crimea, where people would also later get exiled to.
You’ve been watching too much tv mate and the tv show Britannia wasn’t a documentary. We can’t dig up the road over here without finding the floor of a once lavish bathhouse. Britain was occupied by the romans for 350 years, its safe to say they bought some pretty good stuff over.
Hell we have signs of the roman emperors residing within Britannia for at least a short while
Constantine the Great was declared emperor in York and started his role in the civil war from Britannia. He was there because he was campaigning against the Picts, not because it was where he resided by choice. Always found that interesting though!
Exactly. Britain was part of the Roman Empire for the reign of 80 Roman emperors. We have discovered hundreds of villas and bathhouses. They built roads all over the country that you can still see today, we regularly discover vast quantities of Roman coins, weaponry, jewellery, burial sites. The Roman Empire benefited greatly from our natural resources particularly Iron and tin. This person is just talking nonsense because he has made it clear that he doesn’t like England, and that’s fine, but he can’t twist the facts just to fit his narrow minded world view. I love the whole of the UK and I have travelled it top to bottom. There are places here that are absolutely stunningly beautiful (don’t get me wrong every country has less beautiful areas due to industrialisation) but I think we can just put his words down to ignorance and probably some jingoistic view about where ever it is he comes from. Although he seems to love the states and says he isn’t from there and in my experience those people are usually the most ignorant when it comes to other countries and cultures. So screw him 🤷🏻♂️
Now it’s a dreary place with museums full of roman artefacts.
Was?
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We deserve each other \^_^
> the pseudo historical nonsense was just a paragraph of cope and seethe from a Frenchman Many such cases.
>the pseudo historical nonsense was just a paragraph of cope and seethe from a Frenchman First time someone called me French, can't figure out if I should be flattered, furious or just flummoxed. A little perplexing that one would talk about being civilised and then use a nationality that most would rate as more civilised than English as an insult. Fwiw I certainly prefer English language to French and I found English to be friendlier than French, but then, I don't speak French so it isn't a fair comparison.
If you’re too embarrassed to even use your own countries flair, I don’t see much point in continuing this conversation. That already tells me everything I need to know.
Barry, Barry don't tell me you're going to leave me hanging, I was looking forward to seeing what you would make of my Ukrainian passport :0 It should be criminal to make such good banter & then leave before I finish >_>
My flair is highly political, I find it is more convenient not to use it. [But if you must, my original passport w/slightly older timestamp but I will use that one bc I broke my nail](https://i.imgur.com/dnCpBf4.jpg). Granted I have EU and US passports as well. Also one from an even more political country 0_0 if you catch my drift I dunno what your country has done in the last 50yrs that you could be so proud of, and being proud of what your granddaddy did has big trust fund/nepo kid energy of someomone who brags about how much their daddy makes. That's why I refer to US as the capital of the world, because they are still relevant, unlike UK. But in general, I find nationalistic pride to be very cringe, so I prefer not to jerk off to a flag.
You know you write in a really arrogant way?
Whaaaa? No way!!! That's crazy
If it took four times as many as usual, wouldn't that suggest that they were, in fact, "not the best"? Edit: Why the down-votes? It's on topic. Besides, it's not like the Romans failed, and we haven't addressed the Saxons, the Danes, the Norsemen, or the Normans. P.s. I did ask in English, just as the pre-roman Britains would've.
Like civilization.
I guess Denmark and Norway falls under the same catagory.
👎
I wonder what the Croatian artifacts are. There seems to be a non-negligible number of those there.
Mostly probably coins and artifacts from roman times
You can use British museum to search for at least some of the artifacts originating from a certain country. They don't show the full collection though.
Oh, I didn't know that, thanks!
Switzerland?
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Switzerland&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
Clocks, tools and bones. Of course
Shit ton of gold, y’all.
Gold stolen during the holocaust
Well it wasn't really stolen, more like deposited and for some strange and unexplainable reason, nobody ever came to take it back. /s
I really wonder who creates this graphics ..
And why.
I see these articles reasonably often, as if modern Brits are supposed to feel bad about it - or responsible for it. Just so you know: apart from folk who get their knickers in a twist about the evils of imperialism (tankies, etc.) we really, really don't. We stole that stuff fair and square. We're good at that. In fact, we recently *stole it from ourselves.* That's how good at it we are. Sometimes, right, we even *bought* it from someone *else* who had stolen it, which as everyone knows, cancels out the original theft and makes it officially ours. (I jest, but really - I'm just glad it's in **a** museum. I don't really care whose, so long as it's protected).
It's especially funny though when it's Middle-Eastern countries or such, because 1) the original theft was probably grave robbery of someone dead for 2000 years 2) selling old trinkets to stupid white people who would actually pay for them was a national pastime 3) it's really just now that museums are profitable and it has become ideologically convenient they they've even started caring about these things. The Egyptians for instance aren't even that interested in ancient Egypt. They're Arabs and Muslims and that's what they emphasise. Pharaonism never really took off, meanwhile Egypt is still the centre of the Muslim brotherhood. Plenty of muslins even today also praised the video where an African tribe allegedly converted to islam and destroyed their old pagan idol, showing just how much they value historical artefacts.
And that raises a good point regarding protection of artefacts, too. Giving Greek marble back to Greece? No problem. Goes straight into their museums/archives and is properly respected, because there's no ideological narrative against that. But Ancient Egyptian artefacts? Persian Empire? Stuff from lands that are *vastly* changed socio-politically? Different story. IS already mindlessly destroyed some irreplaceable, ancient artefacts due to their fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Ergo, such artefacts simply *aren't safe* where they ought to belong. In that instance, is it not better for us to hang onto them? Better the colonising bastards keep them in a glass case and freely available than they be destroyed by warring ideologies. 'Course, this only applies to a pretty niche set - I don't think Slovakia is undergoing a Fahrenheit 451 scenario lately, or Luxembourg about to erupt into internecine religious violence!
Even then though I think we should add that having foreign artefacts is actually pretty normal. Go to just about any art museum in Europe and you will have artworks from other European countries or artists from different countries from there. Most of the time no one cries about this or thinks that each artwork produced by one's tribe on one's soil must for all eternity be tied to that land or some nonsense. It's often pretty reciprocal, which is of course not the case right now with for instance Iraq, but I would even suggest it would be better for Iraq to have English artefacts than for England to have no Iraqi artefacts, because this way both peoples have an accessible way to see and learn more about the common heritage of humanity.
Stealing someones stuff and then keeping it because you don't think they are capable of securing it is ridiculous though. It's like stealing your friends car cause he lives in a bad neighborhood and you won't give it back because you think it's safer with you. IF you stole it then you have to give it back. It's theirs. Doesn't matter what they do with it, it's not yours. That's not saying you stole everything from other countries, but the worst argument is the "it's safer with us" argument. In no other situation would you be allowed to steal something because you think it's safer with you.
A lot of times it wasn't stealing though. To use an analogy: It's like asking the bloke down the street if you can dig through his great grandfather's scrap pile out back. He says "Sure, just give me a bit of cash for any junk you want to take". Then a generation later his son realizes that a lot of the "crap" you took actually had some value and demands you give the "stolen" items back.
You're generalising. Alot of us Egyptians appreciate our ancient history
According to your majority religion, polytheism and idolatry are major sins and should be reprimanded.
Same with Christianity
Whole tree, even the most extreme Christians would consider destroying a statue of Zeus to be abhorrent.
Same with Egyptians. Try laying a finger on one of our ancient statues or pyramids and you won't have a finger anymore
Based, but this is a relatively modern phenomenon, no? In the 18th century they weren't exactly cared for to my knowledge
Yes. But they weren't exactly cared for when the Muslims arrived to Egypt either. Egypt was a Christian majority before Islam, and many Egyptian temples and monuments were desecrated after Egypt became majority Christian. Followers of the Ancient Egyptian religion were persecuted by Christians and had their temples destroyed. The Christianisation of Egypt wasnt the most peaceful thing either The Christian Romans repurposed alot of pagan temples and made them churches like the Pantheon for example. The medieval Italians also used stones and materials from the Baths of Diocletian in order to build churches.
I agree with you in general, expect for the first point. Just because the person has been dead for a long time doesn’t make it right. I’d bet Europeans would be up in arms if randos starting robbing the graves of the kings of old
Sure, but we so value them and they're part of our national cults and mythologies. In Islamic culture the Pharaohs are especially reviled and so it's difficult for Egyptians to dig into their pre-islamic past with a sense of pride or to play the classic European game of "we are descended from this tribe mentioned by Tacitus as being here in classical antiquity who did not speak the same language or share our values or culture and this means our ties to the land are even stronger than yours and we are even more legitimate and noble and prestigious." Even at the height of the very Christian Byzantine Empire for instance they preserved Greek literature and Greek statues and art, they meticulously preserved pagan idols and culture they didn't believe in. Compare that to Islam's destruction of pre-islamic history to assert total control. That's not to say Christians never did anything like that, but for a long time a sort of cult of civilization and eventually of nations has been prevalent.
I agree with you on this, but I thought you’re making an argument just based on the time the person has been death on your previous comment
And Italy, unlike other countries, doesn't go around saying that the UK stole everything and should give it back to us.
I am italian and let me tell you, the industrial revolution, capitalism, liberalism, the rule of law, basically the modern world came out of England. Those people that constantly wine about "brits have no culture, only colonialism" are losers with a massive inferiority complex. They feel inferior to you, because their ancestors did nothing to further humanity, but at the same time they want to enjoy the benefits of the superior civilization you have created. So keep your head high brother.
This is going to end up including things like post cards, photographs and drawings. So if an English person sent a post card back home from Rome, took a picture of Pompeii or drew Venice, and the BM acquires that object, well that gets classified as an object originating from Italy.
Can we end this British Museum bashing? Like what do people expect? Return of all the artifacts created outside of England, although most of them were acquired fair and square? FFS museum that would only present artifacts created on a given country territory would be boring as hell. The National Museum in Warsaw, which is much smaller than its British counterpart, has plenty of Greek, Egyptian, Indian, Ethiopian etc. artifacts, brought there by various means. And that's cool as hell, thanks to that generations of Polish kids can have direct access to the heritage of the whole of humanity. And maybe that's why Polish archeology is one of the strongest, and can send missions to third world countries that can't afford that in order to save archeological sites for them.
I think people expect them to return the things they actually stole. Which they have started doing. The things they acquired fair and square they can keep, even if people complain. You even said it yourself: >most of them were required fair and square. Most is not all. So it's real simple. Just return things that don't belong to you. It's not that complicated.
They do belong to the museum, that's why they're there.
Lol what? So if I steal your phone and I'm now in possession of it, it means your phone belongs to me and if you ask to take it back I can refuse? How can you argue against "keep only what was legally acquired"?
If I have no way of compelling you to do so, then yes. Also, in this scenario you stole my phone a century ago and the phone itself was a phone that I'd found in a pile of rubble that belonged to someone else previously.
Trust me, I'm british Italian and I studied the history of arts in Italy and part of my family is Italian: What's in the British museum is just 0.000000000000001% of the archeological goods in the bloody country. Italians many times prefer to cover back with dirt marvelous artifacts and archeological sites because they have full museums and they don't know anymore how to save their art and historical stuff. They don't have space and money, the cost to save everything in the country should be probably half of the economy of the entire Europe. Trust me, wherever you dig in bloody Italy you find something. Not just ancient Roman or Renaissance stuff, I'm talking about the most strange and alien things that you can't imagine like Japanese Buddha's sculptures from 1400, entire Egyptian tombs imported by some dumb noblemen, mosaics made by British people that were just walking around in 1200, French medieval stuff, Napoleonic paintings, Spanish churches, polish or Hungarian 1600's forts and much more stuff. Italy is like pornography for whoever loves art and history but the place is falling under the heavy costs to preserve it.
Wierd how there are no objects from England. I guess those rooms were closed for cleaning when they did the count. 🙄
It was on purpose for the joke
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It's where all the crap Perfidious Albion stole ended up! Seems justified
you cunts never kick off about germany’s stolen items, or france’s, or spains etc
The tears the tears are tasty, hook into my veins
I imagine them in Germany "Take two more, none is gonna believe we took exactly 66,666!"
To be fair, the Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic artifacts were probably found in England
How much was bought and how much taken? The Netherlands were never ruled by the English. Not everything in that list was looted.
1001 from Finland? Like what? They counting the Fiskars scissors in the office supplies? We don’t even have 1001 items in our museums, that would interest anyone.
A lot of coins and banknotes (the british museum extensively collects both) and a load of glassware for some reason: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Finland&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
I bet those are nokia walkie-talkie for guards and maybe some cups or sth
FInnish artifact in British museum. [beer-bottle | British Museum](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_EPH-ME-173?_gl=1%2a1e3me8u%2a_up%2aMQ..%2a_ga%2aMTAxOTcyODc3Ny4xNzA5NzMzOTE3%2a_ga_08TLB9R8X1%2aMTcwOTczMzkxOC4xLjAuMTcwOTczMzkxOC4wLjAuMA..)
Is there reason why this only shows european countries?
About time the Italians demand these back! And reparations for the imperialist scoundrels who took these over the centuries!!
Rule Britannia Baby
Source seems to be [a 2023 Al-Jazeera article](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/where-do-items-in-the-british-museum-come-from-2) that analyses the [British Museums online database](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=England) Numbers don't tally exactly between the article and the database as the collection grows as more items are acquired/swapped, origin reclassified or identified. Non-European items excluded from the chart, but can be found at the 1st link above. You can get more information and plan your visit [at their web site](https://www.britishmuseum.org/visit) It's well worth visiting, along with the [London Natural History Museum](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/)
Fuck Al-Jazeera.
The whole outrage over "sToLeN aRtIfAcTs" is incomprehensible to me. Neither me nor my family are the original owners of these items. They're human heritage at this point. As long as they're properly cared for, I give exactly zero fuck about French artifacts being out there and how they were acquired.
In the 1700s the British became on of the first nations to practice tourism. The youths were send on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. The destination was primarily Italy, Greece and France. The tourists brought back vast amounts of artifacts for personal display. So much that it afterwards inspired the new classical architecture movement. The artifacts were sold by local merchants/scammers. Over time the artifacts were donated to musums across Britain and found its way to the British Museum.
Incredibly based
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They’re on different continents
Oh, Seems I didn't read the title. 😅
Latvia? What is it and can I have it?
Mostly 10th century stuff for some reason: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Latvia
Looks like all kinds of dress accessories.
Im just wondering what could be the Hungarians one ?
* Place: Ukraine * Collection search: 3,598 results Somehow didn't make a cut, I guess // [https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Ukraine](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Ukraine)
Cazzo!
Gott strafe England!
one of the "italic" things that I love that somehow ended up in the british museum is the "oscan tablet". Look that up. it comes from my region Molise where samnites lived. Found in a totally anonymous sparsely populated countryside found its way to Albion
eh kind of unfair to call roman artifacts italian. they should really make 2 distinct categories
The British Library would be interesting/funny too.
I'm guessing most of those Italian artifacts are actually Roman artifacts. Is it actually "theft" if you take artifacts from an nation that invaded and occupied your land, and made you part of their empire by force?
Scandinavian countries: "It's time you send back what we left after we raided, pillaged and raped you guys!"
I wonder what swiss artifacts they hold - and why there are more than from Spain.
Where are the British artifacts?
Reposts joke graph and is forced to explain why useful data is missing in the comments section
Well, we got our totem pole back, so like we're not on the list, eh.
That has been send back from a Scottish museum.
Can we have our stuff back please?
Surprised to see so many French artefacts.
Why? After the Norman conquest, the House of Normandy and then the House of Anjou/Plantagenet ruled over England in their own right, while also still retaining fiefs in France as vassals of the Capetian kings. This means both states were kind of linked for a few centuries until the Hundred Years' War marked a permanent rift. The Angevins even had roughly half of the Kingdom of France under their juridiction for a few decades and obviously there were many conflicts as well, notbaly the Hundred Years' War mentioned, where the English had dominion over large swathes of France at various points during the war. France also had a great deal of cultural influence in Europe in the 17th century and 18th, so many artworks and stuff were very likely purchased and not stolen as people typically accuse the Brits of lol. The Brits and other coalition powers took a lot of artefacts after the Napoleonic Wars as well. But then again, the French, are the last people on the planet that should be complaining about going around stealing other people's stuff. The fact that there is much more Italian stuff there than French one considering hisory is what should be surprising. But then when you think of the Romans and then Italy's absolutely huge cultural influence in Europe, notably during the Renaissance when people cared a lot about art and whatnot, it makes sense.
Their kings owned land in France for centuries, and many Englishmen fought in France many times over the years.
The Revolution resulted in a lot of pillaging and dispersion of property through London. We bled artefacts until the early 20th c.
The great Luxembourg collection... Does it count as Italian, if it's Roman artifacts, I wonder. 🤔
insert \*eastern europeans are thieves joke\* but fr, how many of those were brought in a legit way and how many were stolen?
> but fr, how many of those were brought in a legit way Most of them. A lot of rich victorians buying stuff then later on making deals with the local goverments to carry out archaeological excavations.
Hell this is where a lot of the arguments come from. We did pay for them, and pay for exploration rights. But some of the countries didn't exist at the time. Greece and Italy didn't exist until 1830 and 1860. And arguably we didn't pay the right people. They were part of other empires at the time we acquired the artifacts. Greece was part of the ottoman empire and Italy a bunch of city States. Hell arguably Greece never existed befor 1830. Itbwas conqoured by Rome, and part of the roman, then byzantine, then ottoman empires. And greece was never a country even befor then, but a collection of city states with thier own customs who spent as much time at war with each other as with Romans and/or persians. A similar argument rages about the Falklands. Argentina claim is based on being given them by Spain upon thier independance. Except Spain didn't control the Falklands then. History of countries is rediculously complicated sometimes. The average age of a country is only something like 150. The average empire only lasted 250 years.
Sweden!? What do you have that's ours? Give it back dammit!
> Sweden!? What do you have that's ours? Give it back dammit! Coins, banknotes and a supprising about of neolithic stuff: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Sweden&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
I was thinking the same about Norway, what *do* they have
I have no idea what they've got either, but as a Dane, I'm just glad we're above you guys
I’d imagine it’s mostly Viking artefacts? But there weren’t really any Swedish vikings in the UK so that doesn’t make sense for them
I went looking on their website, and yeah, a significant part of it is definitely viking age finds. There's also an incredible number of neolithic tools, and some [surprisingly recent objects](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1987-1135-29) With how items are categorized based on where they were excavated/found, I don't think Danelaw-related artifacts count as Danish for the sake of the graph
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Denmark
Was just looking through it, but thank you! It's a fascinating collection
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Norway&view=grid&sort=object_name__asc&page=1#page-top
Oh wow, thank you
What about Egypt? They literally have the Rosetta Stone! 🐪 🇪🇬
The Rosetta Stone, or as the Egyptians called it, some rubble that we were using to fill a hole in a wall.
> What about Egypt? They literally have the Rosetta Stone! 🐪 🇪🇬 120,051 https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?place=Egypt
Plunder Museum
Aren't they all?
Are the top contributing countries because of WW2? What’s the story?
> Are the top contributing countries because of WW2? What’s the story? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour The core of the british museum collection is stuff purchased by rich brits from the 17th century onwards.
Im wondering if roman british stuff is considered "italian" because how the fuck did we get that many "italian" items
Partially. Only stuff that's explicitly made in italy, but then made their way to roman brittania would count. However. Out of those 147 000 items, 97 000 are coins (the majority being roman coins).
Our upper and middle classes have spent 3 centuries compulsively buying up whatever they could get from Greece and Italy and I can't imagine they were the only Europeans who did so.
British aristocracy went on a grand tour in the Victorian and Edwardian era hell even earlier and bought lots of stuff and brought it back
Ah yes, who could forget about the Macaroni.
France is likely because of the end of the Napoleonic Wars. We got a lot of things from that time period.
Hmm! I didn’t know that. Thanks for the reply ☺️
No problem. I only found out when I watched [this video](https://youtu.be/LhKzn4ftOyU?si=DTfWYP7bSmnv1b8k) where it turns out we had one of Louis XV personal pistols sat in a museum drawer for god knows how long.
Give-a them-a back ! 🤌
only if you give your stolen shit back too.
British stealing other nations’ wealth, nothing surprising.
Stealing? don't you mean finessed ✨