What Comes After the British Museum?

In 1802, a marble procession of horses, humans, and gods was chiseled and sawed off the pediments where they had long watched over Athens, and marched overland to the port of Piraeus to begin a forced odyssey from which they have not yet returned. In Alexandria, at about the same time, a slab of igneous rock etched with Greek and hieroglyphics was packed onto a 40-gun ship and made to brave the waves of the Mediterranean. Later, a colossal pair of winged lions floated on rafts down the Tigris to Baghdad and eventually sailed out of the Persian Gulf, around Africa’s cape, and into the Atlantic. In 1868, a giant, heavy-browed head undertook an even longer journey, voyaging all the way from Polynesia to London, to converge with these other ancient travelers inside a single building called the British Museum.

When the British Museum opened its doors to the public in 1759, it was a new thing in the world. Scholars of museology have since given