A Collection Built Across Empire

The museum's founding act of Parliament in 1753 established it on the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician whose cabinet of curiosities and specimens had grown to some seventy one thousand objects, books and manuscripts. Its holdings grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by purchase, excavation licensed by foreign governments, private donation, and, for a considerable share of the material now most associated with the museum, acquisition under the unequal terms of British colonial and military presence abroad. The pattern recurs across the religious and ritual material the museum holds: manuscripts and papyri bought from dealers and excavators working across the Ottoman and colonial world, temple and grave goods removed during periods of British administration, and objects donated by collectors and missionaries who had themselves acquired them abroad.

The museum is not a religious institution and asserts no doctrinal position on any of the traditions represented in its galleries. Its scale, close to eight million objects across departments spanning every inhabited continent, makes it a recurring point of reference across widely separated entries in this atlas: a magical papyrus, a divination deck, an artifact whose several surviving instances are scattered among different museums. Where an object's current location is the museum rather than its place of origin, that fact is itself part of the object's history and is recorded as such rather than smoothed over.