Today I met Hans Sloane who celebrates his 350th birthday today in The British Museum. The museum's origins lie in Sloane's collection. I pictured him beside his bust in the Enlightenment gallery. Here you can find the museums earliest exhibits, amongst them some curiosities like the mummy of a mermaid. It actually is a dried monkey sewn onto a fish tail. Sloane told me that he chose to present such items to teach people that one can easily be fooled and how important science is. From all over the world he brought home some medicine, too. He treated his patients with chocolate, grounded mummie fingers or human skull.
After I took his picture, I visited the highlights of the collection of today. It's full of riches like the Rosetta Stone which helped to decode hieroglyphs, sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens (the so called "Elgin Marbles"), a very fine selection of Egyptian mummies, the Royal Game of Ur (one of the earliest known board games), a 1.2 million years old handaxe from Tanzania, and the oldest known sculpture of a couple in love (11,000 years old; found in Judea), just to mention a few. I left the museum at 8.29 pm in the very last minute before closing time.
Since 2000 the museum offers another superlative. The glas-and-steel curved roof designed by Norman Foster covers the Great Court which is the biggest covered square in Europe.
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