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115-420: The map describes this region as having been visited by Europeans in the 11th century. Although it was presented to the world in 1965 with an accompanying scholarly book written by British Museum and Yale University librarians, historians of geography and medieval document specialists began to suspect that it might be a fake as soon as photographs of it became available, and chemical analyses have identified one of

230-528: A 20th century fake." Despite the reveal of the map's forged origins, Clemens stated that the map would remain at the Beinecke Library, as it had "become an historical object in and of itself." British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history , art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works

345-683: A London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster . During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities , and not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II , for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan , Egypt , Greece , Rome ,

460-453: A buildings committee was set up to plan for expansion of the museum, and further highlighted by the donation in 1822 of the King's Library , personal library of King George III's, comprising 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets , maps, charts and topographical drawings . The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke , was asked to draw up plans for an eastern extension to the museum "... for

575-535: A codex, in historical notes organised and published posthumously in 1926. Neither the catalogue entry nor Pérez Pastor's description mentioned the presence of a map. It is known that Enzo Ferrajoli, who offered the Vinland manuscript for sale in 1957, was convicted of having stolen manuscripts from the Cathedral Library of La Seo, Zaragoza, in the 1950s. Separately, Floyd also observed that the creator of

690-483: A diagram of the Raxon or Toleta of Marteloio , a navigational technique that enabled sailors to calculate how to return to their intended course after being blown off-course. The next eight pages contain seven local and one Europe-wide Portolan charts . The ninth page contains a circular world map measuring 24 cm in circumference. The final page illustrates a Ptolemaic world map based upon Ptolemy 's first projection with

805-559: A display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of previously unknown lands. The bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems , coins, prints and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation; but Montagu House became increasingly crowded and decrepit and it

920-453: A location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, which was later converted into the present day Buckingham Palace , on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location. With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. At this time,

1035-610: A major part of Sir John Evans 's coin collection, which was later sold to the museum by his son J. P. Morgan Jr. in 1915. In 1918, because of the threat of wartime bombing, some objects were evacuated via the London Post Office Railway to Holborn, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and a country house near Malvern . On the return of antiquities from wartime storage in 1919 some objects were found to have deteriorated. A conservation laboratory

1150-687: A million books, opened in 1857. Because of continued pressure on space the decision was taken to move natural history to a new building in South Kensington , which would later become the British Museum of Natural History . Roughly contemporary with the construction of the new building was the career of a man sometimes called the "second founder" of the British Museum, the Italian librarian Anthony Panizzi . Under his supervision,

1265-732: A mistaken theory about the ink around McCrone's emphasis on the chromium-rich black particle, having obtained unpublished data on the similar particles in Möller's report. Olin published a paper that identifies the anatase in the Vinland Map ink as being truncated bi-pyramidal rather than rounded crystals (however, this is not vastly different from the McCrones' 1974 description of the crystals as "smooth, rounded rhomb shapes"). Radiocarbon dating , begun in 1995 by physicist Douglass Donahue and chemists Jacqueline Olin and Garman Harbottle, placed

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1380-523: A mix of parchment and paper sheets, with initial capitals left blank, which turned out to be the missing link; the wormholes showing that it had formerly had the map at its beginning and the Relation at its end. All traces of former ownership marks, except for a small part of a bright pink stamp which overlapped the writing on folio 223 of the Speculum , had been removed, perhaps to avoid tax liability for

1495-566: A number of recently discovered hoards which demonstrated the richness of what had been considered an unimportant part of the Roman Empire. The museum turned increasingly towards private funds for buildings, acquisitions and other purposes. In 2000, the British Museum was awarded National Heritage Museum of the Year . Today the museum no longer houses collections of natural history , and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of

1610-576: A price later stated to be about $ 300,000) and donate it to the university if it could be authenticated. Recognizing its potential importance as the earliest map unambiguously showing America, Mellon insisted that its existence be kept secret until a scholarly book had been written about it. Even the three authors of the book were chosen from among the small number of people who had seen the map before Mellon bought it—two British Museum curators and Marston. Only one of them, Raleigh Ashlin Skelton , keeper of

1725-405: A rounded crystalline form manufactured for use in pale pigments since the 1920s, indicating that the ink was modern. They also confirmed that the ink contained only trace amounts of iron, and that the black line remnants were on top of the yellow, indicating that they were not the remains of a penciled guide-line, as the British Museum staff had speculated. A new investigation in the early 1980s, by

1840-484: A team under Thomas Cahill at the University of California, Davis , using Particle-Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) found that only trace amounts (< 0.0062% by weight) of titanium appeared to be present in the ink, which should have been too little for some of McCrone's analyses to detect. The Cahill team acknowledged, however, that titanium was the only element within their technique's measurement capability which

1955-547: Is a characteristic building of Sir Robert Smirke , with 44 columns in the Ionic order 45 ft (14 m) high, closely based on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene in Asia Minor . The pediment over the main entrance is decorated by sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott depicting The Progress of Civilisation , consisting of fifteen allegorical figures, installed in 1852. The construction commenced around

2070-569: Is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. Established in 1753, the British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge. In 2023, the museum received 5,820,860 visitors, an increase of 42% from 2022. It was the most popular attraction in the United Kingdom according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA). At its beginning,

2185-763: The Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas . On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his royal assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library , assembled by Sir Robert Cotton , dating back to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library , the collection of

2300-510: The Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (1939) and late Roman silver tableware from Mildenhall , Suffolk (1946). The immediate post-war years were taken up with the return of the collections from protection and the restoration of the museum after the Blitz . Work also began on restoring the damaged Duveen Gallery. In 1953, the museum celebrated its bicentenary . Many changes followed:

2415-589: The Coins and Medals office suite, completely destroyed during the war, was rebuilt and re-opened, attention turned towards the gallery work with new tastes in design leading to the remodelling of Robert Smirke's Classical and Near Eastern galleries. In 1962 the Duveen Gallery was finally restored and the Parthenon Sculptures were moved back into it, once again at the heart of the museum. By

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2530-532: The Duke of Blacas 's wide-ranging and valuable collection of antiquities. Overseas excavations continued and John Turtle Wood discovered the remains of the 4th century BC Temple of Artemis at Ephesos , another Wonder of the Ancient World . The natural history collections were an integral part of the British Museum until their removal to the new British Museum of Natural History in 1887, nowadays

2645-709: The Earls of Oxford . They were joined in 1757 by the "Old Royal Library", now the Royal manuscripts , assembled by various British monarchs . Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf . The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to

2760-502: The McCrone Research Institute , visited Yale to take new microsamples from the map, partly to check his earlier results, and partly to apply new techniques. Photomicrographs taken at 1 micrometer intervals through the thickness of ink samples demonstrated that the manufactured anatase particles were not just sticking to the surface as Cahill's criticisms had implied, and Fourier transform spectroscopy identified

2875-538: The Natural History Museum in South Kensington . With the departure and the completion of the new White Wing (fronting Montague Street) in 1884, more space was available for antiquities and ethnography and the library could further expand. This was a time of innovation as electric lighting was introduced in the Reading Room and exhibition galleries. The William Burges collection of armoury

2990-624: The Natural History Museum in 1881. Some of its best-known acquisitions, such as the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone , are subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as

3105-706: The Oxus Treasure . In 1898 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed the Waddesdon Bequest , the glittering contents from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor . This consisted of almost 300 pieces of objets d'art et de vertu which included exquisite examples of jewellery, plate, enamel, carvings, glass and maiolica , among them the Holy Thorn Reliquary , probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry . The collection

3220-678: The Speaker of the House of Commons . The board was formed on the museum's inception to hold its collections in trust for the nation without actually owning them themselves, and now fulfil a mainly advisory role. Trustee appointments are governed by the regulatory framework set out in the code of practice on public appointments issued by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. The Greek Revival façade facing Great Russell Street

3335-414: The ligature æ ; this was almost unknown in later medieval times (a simple e was written instead), and although the ligature was revived by Italian humanist scholars in the early 15th century, it is found only in documents of deliberately classicising humanist minuscule produced by Italian scribes, and never in conjunction with a Gothic style of script such as is seen in the map. Another point calling

3450-415: The 1430s by Italian mariner Andrea Bianco , but others found some of the similarities and differences very strange—the map cuts off Africa where Bianco's map has a page fold, but distorts shapes, and includes major revisions in the far east and west. The most surprising revision is that, unlike, for example, the famous Cantino World Map , the Vinland Map depicts Greenland as an island, remarkably close to

3565-529: The 1960s, was claimed in 1996 to be worth $ 25,000,000. In 2004, Kirsten A. Seaver published Maps, Myths, and Men: The Story of the Vinland Map , a wide-ranging review of the arguments and evidence presented to that date. Seaver was hailed as the Vinland map's "most thorough and outspoken critic in recent years" for her "exemplary interdisciplinary study". She also theorized that the forger could have been Father Josef Fischer (1858–1944), an Austrian cartographer and Jesuit scholar. However, subsequent research into

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3680-509: The 1965 official book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation , was notable for its exclusion of most of the evidence against the map's authenticity, concentrating instead on vindications by George Painter, and Thomas Cahill with colleague Bruce Kusko (in which they claimed specifically that they had not analyzed the loose particles they took from the map at the time of their PIXE research), but it did reprint an essay written in 1989 by

3795-565: The 1966 Conference tended to disagree with Witten's assessment that the map captions had been written by the same person as the Speculum and Relation texts. This had also been a major reason why the British Museum had rejected the map in 1957, the Keeper of Manuscripts having detected elements of handwriting style not developed until the nineteenth century. Complaints were made at the Conference that no scientist had been permitted to examine

3910-568: The 1970s, the museum was again expanding. More services for the public were introduced; visitor numbers soared, with the temporary exhibition "Treasures of Tutankhamun " in 1972, attracting 1,694,117 visitors, the most successful in British history. In the same year the Act of Parliament establishing the British Library was passed, separating the collection of manuscripts and printed books from

4025-482: The 20th century manufactured anatase in the Vinland Map ink could have got into genuine medieval ink. The first was chemist Jacqueline Olin, then a researcher with the Smithsonian Institution, who in the 1970s conducted experiments which produced anatase at an early stage of a medieval iron-gall ink production process. Examination of her anatase by a colleague, mineralogist Kenneth Towe, showed that it

4140-462: The 20th century. Skelton wondered also whether the revisions in the far east were meant to represent Japan —they seem to show not only Honshu , but also Hokkaido and Sakhalin , omitted even from Oriental maps in the 15th century. In addition, the text uses a Latin form of Leif Ericson 's name ("Erissonius") more consistent with 17th-century norms and with transmission through a French or Italian source. The Latin captions include several usages of

4255-474: The American architect John Russell Pope , it was completed in 1938. The appearance of the exhibition galleries began to change as dark Victorian reds gave way to modern pastel shades. Following the retirement of George Francis Hill as Director and Principal Librarian in 1936, he was succeeded by John Forsdyke . As tensions with Nazi Germany developed and it appeared that war may be imminent Forsdyke came to

4370-709: The British Library to a new site at St Pancras, finally achieved in 1998, provided the space needed for the books. It also created the opportunity to redevelop the vacant space in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court – the largest covered square in Europe – which opened in 2000. The ethnography collections, which had been housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind at 6 Burlington Gardens from 1970, were returned to new purpose-built galleries in

4485-567: The British Museum . The British Museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport through a three-year funding agreement. Its head is the Director of the British Museum . The British Museum was run from its inception by a 'principal librarian' (when the book collections were still part of the museum), a role that was renamed 'director and principal librarian' in 1898, and 'director' in 1973 (on

4600-532: The British Museum Library (now part of the British Library ) quintupled in size and became a well-organised institution worthy of being called a national library, the largest library in the world after the National Library of Paris . The quadrangle at the centre of Smirke's design proved to be a waste of valuable space and was filled at Panizzi's request by a circular Reading Room of cast iron, designed by Smirke's brother, Sydney Smirke. Until

4715-433: The British Museum. This left the museum with antiquities; coins, medals and paper money; prints and drawings; and ethnography . A pressing problem was finding space for additions to the library which now required an extra 1 + 1 ⁄ 4 miles (2.0 km) of shelving each year. The Government suggested a site at St Pancras for the new British Library but the books did not leave the museum until 1997. The departure of

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4830-482: The Danish team later joined with others to perform microanalyses of the remaining piece from the 1995 carbon dating sample. They found a significant quantity of monostearin ( Glycerol monostearate ) which is commonly used in the food and pharmaceutical industries, with additional aromatic compounds. It was thought that if it was not purely localised contamination from handling by somebody using something like hand lotion, it

4945-452: The Museum's map collection, had significant expertise relevant to the problems posed by the map. (His colleague George Painter , the first person to whom Davis had shown the map in 1957, was brought in for the transcription and translation of the Relation .) The secrecy almost completely ruled out consultation with specialists. Witten did his best to help during this period, not only answering

5060-584: The South Wing with its great colonnade, initiated in 1843 and completed in 1847, when the Front Hall and Great Staircase were opened to the public. The museum is faced with Portland stone , but the perimeter walls and other parts of the building were built using Haytor granite from Dartmoor in South Devon, transported via the unique Haytor Granite Tramway . In 1846 Robert Smirke was replaced as

5175-557: The UK. In 1816 these masterpieces of western art were acquired by the British Museum by Act of Parliament and deposited in the museum thereafter. The collections were supplemented by the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia , Greece in 1815. The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from Mary Mackintosh Rich, the widow of Assyriologist Claudius James Rich . In 1802

5290-437: The Vinland Map had evidently made use of an 18th-century engraving of the 1436 Bianco map by Vincenzio Formaleoni (1752–97), since the Vinland Map reproduces several of Formaleoni's copying errors. He argued that this furnished a new and decisive proof that the map is inauthentic. Floyd's book appeared in 2018 under the title, A Sorry Saga: Theft, Forgery, Scholarship... and the Vinland Map . As controversy has swirled around

5405-399: The Vinland Map is actually based not on Bianco’s 1436 map, but on a printed facsimile map made in 1782. Floyd discovered this by noting mistakes in the 1782 map that were replicated on the Vinland map, but could be found nowhere else." Furthermore, the map has been studied at the Beinecke Library using new technology. "In the case of the Vinland map we were able to prove... [the map] was clearly

5520-739: The antiquities displays. After the defeat of the French campaign in the Battle of the Nile , in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculptures and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs. Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt , British consul general in Egypt, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, laid the foundations of

5635-667: The architect Sydney Smirke , opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult the museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras . Today it has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre. With the bookstacks in the central courtyard of the museum empty, the demolition for Lord Foster 's glass-roofed Great Court could begin. The Great Court, opened in 2000, while undoubtedly improving circulation around

5750-438: The authors' questions, but offering suggestions of his own. After years of study, the proofs of the book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation , were ready by the end of 1964, and Mellon donated the map to Yale. The book was published, and the map revealed to the world, the day before Columbus Day , 1965. Many academic reviewers of The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation took the opportunity to point out evidence that called

5865-420: The best ways to preserve it. Among other findings, this study confirmed that the two halves of the map were entirely separate, though they might have been joined in the past. A few months earlier, Kirsten Seaver had suggested that a forger could have found two separate blank leaves in the original "Speculum Historiale" volume, from which the first few dozen pages appeared to be missing, and joined them together with

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5980-747: The binding strip. On the other hand, at the International Conference on the History of Cartography in July 2009, Larsen revealed that his team had continued their investigation after publishing their original report, and he told the press that "All the tests that we have done over the past five years—on the materials and other aspects—do not show any signs of forgery". The formal report of his presentation showed that his work ignored rather than contradicted earlier studies. For example, he experimented only with artificial wormholes, and did not follow up

6095-671: The block on which the museum stands. The architect Sir John James Burnet was petitioned to put forward ambitious long-term plans to extend the building on all three sides. Most of the houses in Montague Place were knocked down a few years after the sale. Of this grand plan only the Edward VII galleries in the centre of the North Front were ever constructed, these were built 1906–14 to the design by J.J. Burnet, and opened by King George V and Queen Mary in 1914. They now house

6210-433: The collection occupies room 2a. By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's collections had increased to the extent that its building was no longer large enough. In 1895 the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding the museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around the west, north and east sides of the museum. The first stage was the construction of the northern wing beginning 1906. All

6325-719: The collection of Egyptian Monumental Sculpture. Many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection , much of it Roman sculpture, in 1805. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin , ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803 removed the large collection of marble sculptures from the Parthenon , on the Acropolis in Athens and transferred them to

6440-423: The conference, noted that German researcher Richard Hennig (1874–1951) had spent years, before the Vinland Map was revealed, fruitlessly trying to track Jelić's phrase down in medieval texts. It seemed that either Jelić had seen the Vinland Map and promised not to reveal its existence (keeping the promise so rigidly that he never mentioned any of the other new historical information on the map), or that he had invented

6555-419: The correct shape and orientation (while Norway , of which Greenland was just a colony, is wildly inaccurate) although contemporary Scandinavian accounts—including the work of Claudius Clavus in the 1420s—depict Greenland as a peninsula joined to northern Russia. For practical purposes, Arctic sea ice may have made this description true, and Greenland is not known to have been successfully circumnavigated until

6670-659: The courtyard with the East Wing ( The King's Library ) in 1823–1828, followed by the North Wing in 1833–1838, which originally housed among other galleries a reading room, now the Wellcome Gallery. Work was also progressing on the northern half of the West Wing (The Egyptian Sculpture Gallery) 1826–1831, with Montagu House demolished in 1842 to make room for the final part of the West Wing, completed in 1846, and

6785-472: The current owner, Venetian library Biblioteca Marciana , separated the pages for individual exhibition. To confirm his authorship of the atlas, Bianco added to the first page a signature flag with the text "Andreas Biancho de Veneciis me fecit M cccc xxx vj". Roughly translated, this reads "Made by me Andreas Biancho in Venice, 1436." Andrea Bianco also collaborated with Fra Mauro on the Fra Mauro world map of 1459. The first page, or Tavola 1 , shows

6900-411: The discovery of the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960), bound in a slim volume with a short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartarorum (usually called in English the Tartar Relation ), and was unsuccessfully offered to the British Museum by London book dealer Irving Davis on behalf of a Spanish-Italian dealer named Enzo Ferrajoli de Ry. Shortly afterwards, Ferrajoli sold

7015-427: The few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts and David Garrick 's library of 1,000 printed plays. The predominance of natural history, books and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton 's "first" collection of Greek vases . From 1778,

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7130-425: The first full-time in-house designer and publications officer were appointed in 1964, the Friends organisation was set up in 1968, an Education Service established in 1970 and publishing house in 1973. In 1963, a new Act of Parliament introduced administrative reforms. It became easier to lend objects, the constitution of the board of trustees changed and the Natural History Museum became fully independent. By 1959

7245-561: The first to apply PIXE to ink analysis, nobody at the time could explain the difference between the Cahill and McCrone figures. Attempting to reconcile the conflicting results, the Cahill team suggested that the high concentrations found by McCrone were due to a combination of contamination from modern dust, and poor sample selection (i.e. choosing contaminant particles like those in the split); however, they also chose not to publish or publicise Möller's loose particle study. The accumulation of large amounts of PIXE data from other laboratories around

7360-417: The former owner (although as historian Kirsten Seaver noted many years later, stamps on random book pages indicate institutional, not private ownership). Yale was unable to afford the asking price and was concerned because Witten refused to reveal the provenance of the map, ostensibly because of the former private owner's tax concerns. Yale contacted another alumnus, Paul Mellon , who agreed to buy it (for

7475-414: The independent British Library . The museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artefacts representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library. The Round Reading Room , which was designed by

7590-412: The ink's binder as gelatin, probably made from animal skin. In July 2002, using Raman spectroscopy , the presence of significant quantities of anatase in the map ink was confirmed by British researchers Katherine Brown and Robin Clark, and the remaining traces of black pigment in the ink were found to consist essentially of soot-type carbon. Various scientists have formed their own theories to explain how

7705-428: The ink, further tests, starting with a detailed chemical analysis, were needed to confirm whether the lines were drawn after it soaked into the parchment. In 2008, Harbottle's attempt to explain a possible medieval origin for the ink was published, but he was shown by Towe and others to have misunderstood the significance of the various analyses, rendering his theory meaningless. The expanded 30th anniversary edition of

7820-422: The largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House, and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson , employed the former student of Carl Linnaeus , Daniel Solander , to reclassify

7935-444: The major ink ingredients as a 20th-century artificial pigment. In 2018, after several investigations and many years of debate, specialists at Yale declared that the latest scientific and historical research had conclusively established that it was a modern forgery. The map remains in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as part of its collection. The Vinland map first came to light in 1957 (three years before

8050-452: The map almost since its acquisition, authorities at Yale University chose not to comment on the authenticity of the parchment document. In 2002, Yale librarian Alice Prochaska commented that "We regard ourselves as the custodians of an extremely interesting and controversial document…and we watch the scholarly work on it with great interest." However, in 2011, Yale's Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Paul Freedman , did express his view that

8165-433: The map and its companion documents in all the years of study since 1957. Skelton's scientific colleagues at the British Museum made a short preliminary examination in 1967 and found that: In 1972, with new technology becoming available, Yale sent the map for chemical analysis by forensic specialist Walter McCrone whose team, using a variety of techniques, found that the yellowish lines contain anatase (titanium dioxide) in

8280-474: The map was "unfortunately a fake". At the 2018 Vinland Map Symposium, Yale conservation scientist Richard Hark revealed the results of new global chemical analyses of the Map and the Tartar Relation, which established, among many other things, that the ink lines of the Map contain varying amounts of anatase "consistent with modern manufacture". So too do two small patches on the first page of the Tartar Relation, where

8395-578: The map's authenticity into question was raised at the 1966 Conference: that one caption referred to Bishop Eirik of Greenland "and neighboring regions" (in Latin, "regionumque finitimarum"), a title known previously from the work of religious scholar Luka Jelić (1864–1922). An essay by British researcher Peter Foote for the Saga Book of the Viking Society (vol. 11, part 1), published shortly after

8510-477: The map's authenticity into question. So a year later, a Vinland Map Conference was held at the Smithsonian Institution , during which further significant questions were asked, particularly of Witten. However, the proceedings were not published for another five years. There were questions about the actual content of the map. Witten had pointed out that it bore strong resemblances to a map made in

8625-438: The mid-19th century, the museum's collections were relatively circumscribed but, in 1851, with the appointment to the staff of Augustus Wollaston Franks to curate the collections, the museum began for the first time to collect British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory , branching out into Asia and diversifying its holdings of ethnography . A real coup for the museum was the purchase in 1867, over French objections, of

8740-527: The museum became a construction site. The King's Library , on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handed over in 1827, and was described as one of the finest rooms in London. Although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1840, the museum became involved in its first overseas excavations , Charles Fellows 's expedition to Xanthos , in Asia Minor , whence came remains of

8855-492: The museum in 2000. The museum again readjusted its collecting policies as interest in "modern" objects: prints, drawings, medals and the decorative arts reawakened. Ethnographical fieldwork was carried out in places as diverse as New Guinea , Madagascar , Romania , Guatemala and Indonesia and there were excavations in the Near East , Egypt, Sudan and the UK. The Weston Gallery of Roman Britain, opened in 1997, displayed

8970-458: The museum trustees a loan of £200,000 to purchase from the Duke of Bedford all 69 houses which backed onto the museum building in the five surrounding streets – Great Russell Street, Montague Street, Montague Place, Bedford Square and Bloomsbury Street. The trustees planned to demolish these houses and to build around the west, north and east sides of the museum new galleries that would completely fill

9085-526: The museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport . Like all UK national museums, it charges no admission fee except for loan exhibitions. Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities , the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum". Its foundations lie in the will of the Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753),

9200-522: The museum was largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane . It opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House , on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being

9315-710: The museum's architect by his brother Sydney Smirke , whose major addition was the Round Reading Room 1854–1857; at 140 feet (43 m) in diameter it was then the second widest dome in the world, the Pantheon in Rome being slightly wider. The next major addition was the White Wing 1882–1884 added behind the eastern end of the South Front, the architect being Sir John Taylor . In 1895, Parliament gave

9430-558: The museum's collections of Prints and Drawings and Oriental Antiquities. There was not enough money to put up more new buildings, and so the houses in the other streets are nearly all still standing. Andrea Bianco The Bianco World Map is a map created by Andrea Bianco , a 15th-century Venetian sailor and cartographer who resided on Chios . This map was a large piece of a nautical atlas including ten pages made of vellum (each measuring 26 × 38 cm). These vellum pages were previously held in an 18th-century binding, but

9545-667: The museum, dated 31 January 1784, refers to the Hamilton bequest of a "Colossal Foot of an Apollo in Marble". It was one of two antiquities of Hamilton's collection drawn for him by Francesco Progenie, a pupil of Pietro Fabris , who also contributed a number of drawings of Mount Vesuvius sent by Hamilton to the Royal Society in London. In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated

9660-612: The museum, was criticised for having a lack of exhibition space at a time when the museum was in serious financial difficulties and many galleries were closed to the public. At the same time the African collections that had been temporarily housed in 6 Burlington Gardens were given a new gallery in the North Wing funded by the Sainsbury family – with the donation valued at £25 million. The museum's online database had nearly 4,500,000 individual object entries in 2,000,000 records at

9775-470: The natural history collection according to the Linnaean system , thereby making the museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians. In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled by George III, and Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During

9890-600: The observation made at the 1966 Conference, that live bookworms were a known tool of the fake antiquities trade. Similarly, he claimed that the anatase in the ink could have come from sand used to dry it (the hypothetical source of the sand being gneiss from the Binnenthal area of Switzerland ) but his team had not examined the crystals microscopically, and Kenneth Towe responded that this was an essential test, given that crystal size and shape should clearly distinguish commercial anatase from anatase found in sand. Members of

10005-417: The origin of the parchment somewhere between 1423 and 1445. The initial results were confusing because the unknown substance the British Museum had found across the whole map, effectively ignored by later researchers who were concentrating on the ink, turned out to be trapping tiny traces of fallout deep within the parchment from 1950s nuclear tests . Although there was none of this 1950s substance on top of

10120-486: The original book dealer Laurence Witten. He stated that, when the McCrone investigation concluded the map to be a forgery in 1974, he was asked by Yale to reveal its provenance as a matter of urgency, and to discuss the possible return of Mr Mellon's money. He replied that he had no idea where the map came from, beyond Ferrajoli (who was convicted of theft shortly after the sale, and died shortly after release from prison). On

10235-471: The original iron-gall ink appears to have been erased and replaced. Raymond Clemens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, considers that the latest historical and scientific research proves "beyond a doubt" that the Vinland map "was a forgery, not a medieval product as it claimed to be." In a March 2019 article, Clemens highlights the fact that "historical investigations by John Paul Floyd have revealed that

10350-502: The phrase as a scholarly description, and the Vinland Map creator copied him. In practice, because Jelić's work had gone through three editions, Foote was able to demonstrate how the first edition (in French) had adopted the concept from the work of earlier researchers, listed by Jelić, then the later editions had adapted the anachronistic French scholarly phrase "évêque régionnaire des contrées américaines" into Latin. Handwriting experts at

10465-469: The proposed Picture Gallery was no longer needed, and the space on the upper floor was given over to the Natural history collections. The first Synopsis of the British Museum was published in 1808. This described the contents of the museum, and the display of objects room by room, and updated editions were published every few years. As Sir Robert Smirke 's grand neo-classical building gradually arose,

10580-576: The provenance of the Vinland map documents (see below) suggests that they are unlikely to have spent any time in Fischer's possession. Robert Baier, a forensic handwriting analyst, examined the map text and correspondence of Fischer, and his opinion was that "they are not the same writer." In 2005 a team from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts , led by René Larsen, studied the map and its accompanying manuscripts to make recommendations on

10695-675: The provenance of the documents. According to one of these sources (an exhibition catalogue), a 15th-century manuscript volume containing books 21-24 of the Speculum Historiale and C. de Bridia's Historia Tartarorum was lent by the Archdiocese of Zaragoza for display at the 1892–93 Exposición Histórico-Europea (an event held in Madrid, Spain to commemorate the voyages of Columbus). Floyd noted that Spanish priest and scholar Cristóbal Pérez Pastor also reported having seen such

10810-481: The public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element, and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library. The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House , as

10925-526: The reception of the Royal Library , and a Picture Gallery over it ..." and put forward plans for today's quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and work on the King's Library Gallery began in 1823. The extension, the East Wing, was completed by 1831. However, following the founding of the National Gallery , London in 1824,

11040-665: The separation of the British Library). A board of 25 trustees (with the director as their accounting officer for the purposes of reporting to Government) is responsible for the general management and control of the museum, in accordance with the British Museum Act 1963 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 . Prior to the 1963 Act, it was chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury , the Lord Chancellor and

11155-537: The start of 2023. In 2022–23 there were 27 million visits to the website. This compares with 19.5 millions website visits in 2013. There were 5,820,860 visits to the museum in 2023, a 42% increase on 2022. The museum was the most visited tourist attraction in Britain in 2023. The number of visits, however, has not recovered to the level reached before the Covid pandemic. A number of films have been shot at

11270-469: The subject of the money, he said he could not pay it all back because he had paid agreed shares of his profit to Ferrajoli and to another dealer who had introduced him. For his part, Mellon did not ask for the return of any money. The essay also revealed that Witten had, on Ferrajoli's recommendation, met with Irving Davis after buying the map volume in 1957. Regardless of the controversy, the map, which had been valued for insurance purposes at over $ 750,000 in

11385-572: The tombs of the rulers of ancient Lycia , among them the Nereid and Payava monuments. In 1857, Charles Newton was to discover the 4th-century BC Mausoleum of Halikarnassos , one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World . In the 1840s and 1850s the museum supported excavations in Assyria by A.H. Layard and others at sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh . Of particular interest to curators

11500-510: The view that with the likelihood of far worse air-raids than that experienced in World War I that the museum had to make preparations to remove its most valuable items to secure locations. Following the Munich crisis Forsdyke ordered 3,300 No-Nail Boxes and stored them in the basement of Duveen Gallery. At the same time he began identifying and securing suitable locations. As a result, the museum

11615-508: The volume, for $ 3,500, to American dealer Laurence C. Witten II , who offered it to his alma mater , Yale University . It was initially treated with suspicion, partly because wormholes in the map and the Relation did not match. In spring 1958, however, Witten's friend Thomas Marston, a Yale librarian, acquired from London book dealer Irving Davis a dilapidated medieval copy of books 21–24 of Vincent of Beauvais 's encyclopedic Speculum historiale ("Historical Mirror"), written in two columns on

11730-615: The while, the collections kept growing. Emil Torday collected in Central Africa, Aurel Stein in Central Asia, D. G. Hogarth , Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence excavated at Carchemish . Around this time, the American collector and philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan donated a substantial number of objects to the museum, including William Greenwell 's collection of prehistoric artefacts from across Europe which he had purchased for £10,000 in 1908. Morgan had also acquired

11845-518: The world in the ensuing decades was sufficient by 2008 to show that the Cahill figures for all elements in the inks of the map and its companion documents are at least a thousand times too small, so the discrepancy is due to a problem with their work. The McCrone team had also made mistakes, though none as fundamental as Cahill's. Revisiting his notes in 1987 to draft a detailed reply to the abbreviated public version of Cahill's report, Walter McCrone chose

11960-403: The wrong sample to illustrate a "typical" black ink particle, selecting one which had been found only loosely attached to the ink. By focusing on this contamination, rich in chromium and iron, he gave Cahill the opportunity to re-emphasise his case in an essay for an expanded version of the 1965 official book, a few years later. In 1991, McCrone, then director and senior research microscopist with

12075-640: Was a room originally intended for manuscripts, between the Front Entrance Hall and the Manuscript Saloon. The books remained here until the British Library moved to St Pancras in 1998. The opening of the forecourt in 1852 marked the completion of Robert Smirke 's 1823 plan, but already adjustments were having to be made to cope with the unforeseen growth of the collections. Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke 's Round Reading Room , with space for

12190-523: Was able to quickly commence relocating selected items on 24 August 1939, (a mere day after the Home Secretary advised them to do so), to secure basements, country houses , Aldwych Underground station and the National Library of Wales . Many items were relocated in early 1942 from their initial dispersal locations to a newly developed facility at Westwood Quarry in Wiltshire . The evacuation

12305-416: Was apparent that it would be unable to cope with further expansion. The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British Ambassador to Naples , who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts to the museum in 1784 together with a number of other antiquities and natural history specimens. A list of donations to

12420-631: Was bequeathed to the museum in 1881. In 1882, the museum was involved in the establishment of the independent Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society) the first British body to carry out research in Egypt. A bequest from Miss Emma Turner in 1892 financed excavations in Cyprus. In 1897 the death of the great collector and curator, A. W. Franks , was followed by an immense bequest of 3,300 finger rings , 153 drinking vessels, 512 pieces of continental porcelain, 1,500 netsuke , 850 inro , over 30,000 bookplates and miscellaneous items of jewellery and plate, among them

12535-633: Was in the tradition of a Schatzkammer such as those formed by the Renaissance princes of Europe. Baron Ferdinand's will was most specific, and failure to observe the terms would make it void, the collection should be placed in a special room to be called the Waddesdon Bequest Room separate and apart from the other contents of the Museum and thenceforth for ever thereafter, keep the same in such room or in some other room to be substituted for it. These terms are still observed, and

12650-499: Was likely to be the unidentified post-1950 chemical soaked into the parchment. Their microscopic examination confirmed that the parchment had been treated very roughly at some time, with 95% of fibres damaged. In June 2013, it was reported in the British press that a Scottish researcher, John Paul Floyd, claimed to have discovered two pre-1957 references to the Yale Speculum and Tartar Relation manuscripts which shed light on

12765-461: Was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence. In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors. New mezzanine floors were constructed and book stacks rebuilt in an attempt to cope with the flood of books. In 1931, the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen offered funds to build a gallery for the Parthenon sculptures . Designed by

12880-454: Was significantly more concentrated in the ink than on the bare parchment (other elements such as iron and zinc were found concentrated in some inked samples, but only a minority). One member of the team, Gregory Möller, also analyzed loose particles retrieved from the split down the middle of the map by a different method, finding that most of them were rich in titanium (though a few black particles were rich in chromium and iron). Because they were

12995-478: Was the eventual discovery of Ashurbanipal 's great library of cuneiform tablets , which helped to make the museum a focus for Assyrian studies . Sir Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), a trustee of the British Museum from 1830, assembled a library of 20,240 volumes, which he left to the museum in his will. The books arrived in January 1847 in twenty-one horse-drawn vans. The only vacant space for this large library

13110-576: Was timely, for in 1940 the Duveen Gallery was severely damaged by bombing. Meanwhile, prior to the war, the Nazis had sent a researcher to the British Museum for several years with the aim of "compiling an anti-Semitic history of Anglo-Jewry". After the war, the museum continued to collect from all countries and all centuries: among the most spectacular additions were the 2600 BC Mesopotamian treasure from Ur , discovered during Leonard Woolley 's 1922–34 excavations. Gold, silver and garnet grave goods from

13225-459: Was very different from the neat, rounded crystals found in the Vinland Map and modern pigments. Towe himself, a clay specialist, briefly considered the possibility that the anatase could have come from clay, where it is present in trace amounts, but on checking McCrone's data found no significant traces of clay minerals. Shortly before the Raman analysis was published, historian Douglas McNaughton based

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