The British Museum in London is one of the world's largest and most important museums of human history and culture. It has more than seven million objects from all continents. They illustrate and document the story of human culture from its beginning to the present. As with all other national museums and art galleries in Britain, the Museum charges no admission fee.

The British Museum set up in 1753 and opened in 1759. It was the first museum in the world to be open to everyone. The museum gradually grew over the next two hundred years. It has nearly six million visitors a year and is the third most popular art museum in the world.

The history of the British Museum began with the Irish born British physicist Hans Sloane, who died aged 93 in 1753. During his life, he had collected important things from all around the world. When he died, he did not want his collection to be split up between his relatives. He sold his collection to the parliament of King George II. By the time he died, Sloane had collected over 80,000 objects from all over the world including Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Americas.The collection was mostly books and manuscripts.

The government looked at possible places to build the new museum, including Buckingham House. Eventually a building called Montagu House was chosen. The Museum opened on the 15th of January 1759.

Because of its extremely large size the Museum's collection is split into many parts, called departments. The departments have changed many times over the years. They are sometimes merged together, split into smaller departments or renamed and changed altogether.

The British Museums department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan is one of the biggest collections of Ancient Egyptian art.They cover Egyptian and Sudanese history from around 10000 BC all the way to the 12th century AD.Around 150 of the objects in the Egyptian department were part of the first collection which was given to the Museum by Hans Sloane .

 In 1801 the British defeated the French, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, at the battle of the Nile. After the battle, British forces took lots of Ancient Egyptian artifacts from the defeated French. The department continued to get bigger, paying for archaeologists to go to Egypt and Sudan.