British Museum Audio Guide: Assyria, Athens and Easter Island

The British Museum holds roughly eight million objects. This tour looks closely at a handful of them. On this walking tour, you'll examine what stone sculptures from Assyria, Greece, Egypt, and Rapa Nui reveal about power, beauty, and who gets to define both. You'll also hear how those same objects ended up in a museum in London.

The tour starts in the Great Court, the museum's glass-roofed central space, before heading into the Assyrian galleries. There, you'll encounter the lamassu – towering winged guardians from the North-West Palace at Nimrud – and the Lion Hunt reliefs from Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh, where a closer look reveals that the hunt was a carefully staged royal performance. You'll also explore a case for locating the legendary Hanging Gardens not in Babylon, but in Assyria.

From there, the tour moves into Room 18, the Parthenon Galleries, where the sculptures raise harder questions about whose bodies were idealised, whose labour went unacknowledged, and how a building funded by an imperial treasury became the ancient world's most celebrated monument. A brief stop at the Rosetta Stone follows before the tour ends at Hoa Hakananai'a, a moai from Rapa Nui – Easter Island – whose carved back tells a story about a seafaring people, a vanished forest, and a belief system that outlasted the conditions that made it possible.

On this tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Spot the rosette bracelet that identifies the Assyrian king in his palace reliefs
• Examine the cage scene in the Lion Hunt, where a worker releases lions directly into the king's arena
• See the back of the Ilissos statue, finished in extraordinary detail despite being hidden from view
• Hear why the centaurs on the Parthenon's south metopes were carved by the same hand as the heroes fighting them
• Learn how Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon sculptures was contested from the moment it happened
• Discover why recent research is revising the story of Rapa Nui's collapse

This is a tour for people who want to look again – at objects they may have walked past before, and listen to what those objects are quietly saying.