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 is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
Cameo is a method of carving an object such as an engraved gem, item of jewellery or vessel. It nearly always features a raised (positive) relief image; contrast with intaglio, which has a negative image. Originally, and still in discussing historical work, cameo only referred to works where the relief image was of a contrasting colour to the background; this was achieved by carefully carving a piece of material with a flat plane where two contrasting colours met, removing all the first colour except for the image to leave a contrasting background.
A hoard or "wealth deposit" is an archaeological term for a collection of valuable objects or artifacts, sometimes purposely buried in the ground, in which case it is sometimes also known as a cache. This would usually be with the intention of later recovery by the hoarder; hoarders sometimes died or were unable to return for other reasons before retrieving the hoard, and these surviving hoards might then be uncovered much later by metal detector hobbyists, members of the public, and archaeologists.
The strigil (Latin) or stlengis is a tool for the cleansing of the body by scraping off dirt, perspiration, and oil that was applied before bathing in Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. In these cultures the strigil was primarily used by men, specifically male athletes; however, in Etruscan culture there is some evidence of strigils being used by both sexes. The standard design is a curved blade with a handle, all of which is made of metal.
Apoxyomenos is one of the conventional subjects of ancient Greek votive sculpture; it represents an athlete, caught in the familiar act of scraping sweat and dust from his body with the small curved instrument that the Greeks called a stlengis and the Romans a strigil.
The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England is the study of the archaeology of England from the 5th century AD to the 11th century, when it was ruled by Germanic tribes known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons.
The National Museum of the Union is a history and archaeology museum in Alba-Iulia, Romania.
The Chaourse Treasure is a hoard of Roman silver found in Chaourse, a village near Montcornet, Aisne in northern France in 1883. Dating between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, the treasure is one of the most complete table services to survive from antiquity. This important hoard is now part of the British Museum's collection.
The Lampsacus Treasure or Lapseki Treasure is the name of an important early Byzantine silver hoard found near the town of Lapseki in modern-day Turkey. Most of the hoard is now in the British Museum's collection, although a few items can be found in museums in Paris and Istanbul too.
The Beaurains Treasure is the name of an important Roman hoard found in Beaurains, a suburb of the city of Arras, northern France in 1922. Soon after its discovery, much of the treasure was dispersed, to be sold on the antiquities market. The largest portion of the hoard can be found in the local museum in Arras and in the British Museum.
The Paramythia Hoard or Paramythia Treasure is the name of a Greco-Roman hoard of bronze figurines and other objects found in Paramythia, north-west Greece in the late 18th century. Of the original nineteen objects found in the hoard, fourteen are now in the British Museum
The Sutri Treasure is an important Lombardic hoard found at Sutri, Italy in the late nineteenth century that is currently in the collections of the British Museum in London.
The Bursa Treasure or Brusa Treasure is the name of an early Roman silver hoard found in the city of Bursa, Turkey. Since 1913, the entire treasure has been at the British Museum.
The Tromsø Burial or Tromsø Grave Group is a significant hoard of Viking objects found near Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, in the late nineteenth century. Since 1900, the group has been part of the British Museum's early medieval collection.
The Galloway Hoard, currently held in the National Museum of Scotland, is a hoard of more than 100 gold, silver, glass, crystal, stone, and earthen objects from the Viking Age discovered in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland in September 2014. Found on Church of Scotland land, the hoard has been described by experts as "one of the most significant Viking hoards ever found in Scotland". With years of extensive study and research, scholars are still not certain who buried the hoard, why they did so and whether they were Vikings or Anglo-Saxons. During the Viking Age, Galloway found itself squeezed between two Viking kingdoms and essentially cut off from other Anglo-Saxons in Britain - "Galloway is where these different cultures were meeting. It’s not just Scandinavians, but people from Britain and Ireland as well."
The Boscoreale Treasure is a large collection of exquisite silver and gold Roman objects discovered in the ruins of the ancient Villa della Pisanella at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, southern Italy. Consisting of over a hundred pieces of silverware, as well as gold coins and jewellery, it is now mostly kept at the Louvre Museum in Paris, although parts of the treasure can also be found at the British Museum.
