British Museum Audio Tour: Rosetta Stone to the Parthenon Marbles

The British Museum holds more than 8 million objects spanning every inhabited continent and nearly every era of human history. Are you ready to explore?

On this self-guided tour, you'll move through the museum's most celebrated galleries, from Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to Anglo-Saxon England and Classical Greece. You'll also discover how seemingly unrelated objects are connected across space and time.
The tour starts in the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, Norman Foster's spectacular glass-roofed atrium. From there, you'll explore the Enlightenment Gallery, where the museum's origins are tied to an Irish physician's collection of 71,000 objects bankrolled by Jamaican sugar plantations. You'll encounter Aztec turquoise mosaics, an Easter Island ancestor statue at the centre of an ongoing repatriation debate, Tang Dynasty tomb figures glazed in three vivid colours, and the mummified remains of Henutmehyt, a wealthy Egyptian priestess buried with enough food for one final meal.
You'll handle a replica of the Rosetta Stone before confronting the real thing, then stand before the colossal bust of Ramesses II, whose head was ripped from his body by both French and English collectors. The tour ends in the Parthenon Galleries, home to sculptures prised from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin – beautiful, contested, and still at the centre of one of archaeology's great debates.

On this 2.5-hour, you'll have a chance to:

• Examine the Standard of Ur, a 4,500-year-old decorated box depicting scenes of war and feasting from ancient Iraq
• Read the oldest Latin writing by a woman – a birthday invitation scratched onto a wooden tablet at Hadrian's Wall
• See the Sutton Hoo Helmet, its gold-backed eye designed to evoke the one-eyed god Woden by firelight
• Trace the origins of writing through clay tablets, cylinder seals, and the world's oldest beer rationing record
• Gaze upon Aztec turquoise treasures, including a human skull and sacrificial knife covered in turquoise and lignite mosaic
• Spot the Lewis Chessmen – 12th-century ivory pieces that inspired Harry Potter's living chess set
• Marvel at the Mildenhall Treasure, 34 pieces of Roman silver tableware used as Christmas dinnerware in 1942!

Few museums on earth can rival this collection – download the tour and make the most of every free minute inside.