The most recommended British Museum books

James Delbourgo’s book shows that history matters. As the founder of London’s British Museum, Sir Hans Sloane has always played an important part in displaying our national heritage, and Delbourgo’s book explores the wondrousness of the artifacts he amassed from all over the world. But it also reveals how his wealth, fame, and success depended on the international trade in enslaved peoples during the eighteenth century. Sloane’s statue has not been destroyed, but it no longer stands prominently in the Museum’s entrance hall. Like Delbourgo, I believe we need to examine and confront the deeds of previous generations, and his book appeared while I was grappling with similar dilemmas about Sloane’s predecessor as President of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton.

This is the best up-to-date book for beginners learning to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the most beautiful written language. They are not an alphabet. It is a complex system. The authors have it organized in sections that make it easier to understand the basics, and to read actual ancient texts on Egyptian artifacts. 

The mother of all coffee-table books. Fabulous photos by Araldo de Luca, who’s famous for shooting Tut’s personal effects in ways that show them at their stunning best. And text written by T.G.H. James, long-time keeper of the department of ancient Egypt at the British Museum and one of the great authorities on the teenage king and his era. If I’m stuck on a gnarly detail about some of King Tut’s stuff, I turn here. I get information that I can trust, and images that allow me to see the tiniest of evocative details.

After getting a general idea of what Regency England was like, I recommend this slim little book produced in connection with the British Museum. It’s mostly reproductions of famous pictures and drawings, but for me it made the streets of London come alive. It’s great to read about the famous theaters at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, but so much better to see what they looked like at the height of their fame. And it saves you the cost of a trip to the British Museum!

Unlike the Homerian epics, Gilgamesh has been studied by scholars since only the late 19th century. (David Damrosch’s The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh details its fascinating discovery among a box of cuneiform shards in the British Museum.) Yet this Babylonian epic predates the Odyssey by over a millennium and relates a hero’s journey even more formidable. While Odysseus just wants to get back home, Gilgamesh seeks immortality itself. Bloody battles with giants, marathon sex with goddesses, heartbreaking love between two men, and the universal human quest to reconcile ourselves with death—Gilgamesh has it all.

Thomas Williams was project curator for the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend, held at the British Museum in 2014. In this tremendously readable account of Viking Britain from the late eighth to the end of the tenth century he interweaves first-person narrative, evocative prose, and more conventional historical and archaeological discussion to provide a new form of Viking history. Williams demonstrates how the Vikings have shaped British society, and how our perception has been shaped by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris.

My interest in the Vikings initially arose out of seeing the Lewis Chessmen at the British Museum, they have such interesting faces, full of life and mystery. For me, the chessmen are the reason for my writing journey and in this small and perfectly formed book is the story of their discovery on the Isle of Lewis and their journey to the present day.

Written by the marvelous storyteller Irving Finkel who is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages, and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum – which is something of a mouthful (check out his YouTube videos).

It is an easy read that transports a person back into time, wondering who the chessmen belonged to, why did they end up on a Scottish beach and what do those funny little carved characters make of it all? 

Numismatics has a huge role to play in helping tell the story of Roman Britain, not only from a chronological perspective, but also because the types and quality of the coinage tells us much about the nature of the province and empire in a given period. Here the British Museum’s Sam Moorhead has written a masterful account of this key aspect of the archaeology of Roman Britain. 

Like Sassoon, Owen entered the war as a “dreamy” youth interested in literature and art. Unlike Sassoon, though — whom Owen idolized — Owen did not survive the war. He was killed in action on November 4, 1918, a week before the war ended.

Owen wrote all of the poems for which he is remembered between August 1917 and September 1918. His experience of the war turned him from “ a very minor poet to something altogether larger,” writes C. Day Lewis. “…It was a forced growth, a revolution in his mind which, blasting its way through all the poetic bric-a-brac, enabled him to see his subject clear — ‘War, and the pity of War.’ The subject made the poet: The poet made the poems, which radically changed our attitude toward war.”

The hallmarks of Owen’s poetry are his compassion for the frontline soldier and the precision and clarity with… show more.

London’s British Museum, with its massive and diverse collections, is world famous and the story of its foundation and early years in the eighteenth century sheds light on the histories of collecting, knowledge, and exploration. More than twenty essays were assembled to celebrate the opening of the Enlightenment Gallery in the King’s Library after years of research and refurbishment. These essays draw readers into the people, the objects, and the ideas that shaped this important and influential institution. The book is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photographs of paintings and statues, coins, fossils, china, and much more—a wonderful way to grasp the museum’s stupendous holdings and also to understand better the controversies it has engendered.