Expert Led British Museum Tour

Duration

clock3 hours

Overview

    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.

    We begin our walk in the Enlightenment Gallery where we will talk about how archaeology evolved from the work of antiquaries; how art history was born with the study of ancient Greek sculpture and vase painting, and how Greek art set the standard for the next 200 years of what was considered the model of fully evolved art. We then move onto discussing how ancient texts came to be deciphered in the first place and we will compare the ways in which hieroglyphs and cuneiform, the two earliest scripts, were cracked.

    Our discussion will be illustrated by the Rosetta Stone which now lives in the British Museum, along with about 130,000 pieces of cuneiform tablets from ancient Iraq, some of which are on display.
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What to Expect

Itinerary

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