British Museum

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.

Several of the museum's best known holdings are the subject of long standing and unresolved repatriation claims by the countries or communities from which they were taken, the Parthenon Marbles removed from Ottoman Athens and the Benin Bronzes taken from the Kingdom of Benin during an 1897 British punitive expedition being the most publicly argued cases. The British Museum Act 1963 restricts the trustees' legal ability to permanently deaccession most objects from the collection, which the museum has cited as a constraint on returning contested items outright even where it has entered into loan or partnership arrangements instead.

For material relevant to this atlas the same pattern of contested custody recurs at smaller scale: manuscripts and ritual objects whose acquisition history is incompletely documented, and instances where the museum holds one example of an object type while sibling examples are dispersed among other institutions or held privately. The atlas records an object's custodian as a fact about where it currently is, not as a settled judgment on whether it should be there, and notes a dispute over an object's history in the object's own entry where one exists. International instruments such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the means of prohibiting illicit trafficking apply only prospectively and do not reach objects acquired before it took effect, which is the legal ground on which most of the museum's contested older holdings sit outside its scope, leaving the disputes to bilateral negotiation, loan arrangements and public argument rather than to any single settled legal process.