The British Museum celebrates its 255th anniversary today and Google has marked the occasion with its latest Google Doodle.
Impress your friends and astound your colleagues with 11 surprisingly interesting facts about the museum…
1. In 2005, a then little-known hoaxer named Banksy tricked museum staff by putting a ‘cave painting’ of a primitive man pushing a supermarket trolley on display.
A museum spokesperson shrugged off the hoax at the time, saying ‘It was only up for a couple of days.’
2. An erotic Japanese art exhibition was once dubbed raunchier than Page 3 by Sun editor David Dinsmore. The controversial collection had 87,893 visitors in three months and is one of the most successful in the museum’s history.
3. The museum’s collection contains at least eight million objects.
4. Among the vast collection are: the Rosetta Stone; statues that once adorned the Parthenon in Athens, Greece; a four-tonne stone likeness of the pharaoh Amenhotep III; and several mummified cats from ancient Egypt.
5. The Egyptian Book Of The Dead went on display at the British Museum in 2010. Containing a collection of ‘spells’ thought to guide the dead through the dangers of the afterlife, the collection is over 3,000 years old.
6. In 2004 a thief was thought to have walked out of the museum with ornate earrings, hairpins and fingernail guards – some of which date back to 700AD.
7. According to the British Museum website, its collection spans over two million years of human history.
8. The museum first opened its doors on the 15th January 1759 in Montague House, a seventeenth-century mansion on the site of the current Museum.
9. The museum received 6.7million visits in 2013, making it the most successful year in its history.
10. Other sites considered for the museum included the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham House, which became Buckingham Palace in 1837.
11. The museum’s latest exhibition contains 15th century treasures from the Ming dynasty.