The British Museum Friends (BMF) is a registered
charitable organisation in the
UK with close links to the
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 is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, and was set up in 1968. It provides funding in the form of
grants to the British Museum in order to support the educational objectives of the Museum including to allow the Museum to acquire new items and collections, and assists with financing research programmes, conservation, and new technologies throughout the Museum.
[The British Museum Friends website]
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Acquisitions
Acquisitions supported by the BMF include the Nimrud Ivories, the Warren Cup
The Warren Cup is an ancient Greco-Roman silver drinking cup decorated in relief with two images of male same-sex acts. It was purchased by the British Museum for £1.8 million in 1999, the most expensive single purchase by the museum at that ...
, the Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant is a medieval astrolabe believed to date from 1388, and which was found in an archaeological dig at the House of Agnes, a bed and breakfast hotel in Canterbury, Kent, England in 2005.
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quad ...
, the Burney Relief
The Burney Relief (also known as the Queen of the Night relief) is a Mesopotamian terracotta plaque in high relief of the Isin-Larsa period or Old- Babylonian period, depicting a winged, nude, goddess-like figure with bird's talons, flanked by ...
, a Mycenaean terracotta group of three dancers in a ring, the gold mancus of Coenwulf, the Ringlemere Cup
The Ringlemere Gold Cup is a Bronze Age vessel found in the Ringlemere barrow near Sandwich in the English county of Kent in 2001.
Description
The body of the cup was created by hammering a single piece of gold, with the handle cut from a flat ...
, the Vale of York Hoard
The Vale of York Hoard, also known as the Harrogate Hoard and the Vale of York Viking Hoard, is a 10th-century Viking hoard of 617 silver coins and 65 other items. It was found undisturbed in 2007 near the town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, ...
and two very rare gold coins of the Roman Emperor Carausius found in the North Midlands in 2007.
Other acquisitions funded in whole or in part by the Friends during 2008–9 include the Chettle Park Hoard
Chettle is a small village and civil parish in the county of Dorset in southern England. It lies northeast of Blandford Forum. It is sited at the head of a gently sloping valley on the dip slope of the chalk formation called Cranborne Chase. ...
and twelve Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
papyri from Roman Egypt from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (, mo ...
.
American Friends of the British Museum
The American Friends of the British Museum (AFBM) was set up in 1989 as a not-for-profit organisation whose principal purpose is raising awareness and financial support for the British Museum. Since its founding, American Friends of the British Museum has contributed over $30 million to support a variety of projects at the British Museum, including:
* The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court
* Special exhibitions
* Scholarly symposia
* Acquisitions
* Staff positions in the curatorial and education departments.Mission of the AFBM
See also
*
Friends of the British Library
The Friends of the British Library is a registered charitable organisation in the UK with close links to the British Library. It provides funding in the form of grants to the British Library in order to allow the Library to acquire new items a ...
References
External links
The British Museum Friends website*
{{DEFAULTSORT:British Museum Friends
British Museum
Educational charities based in the United Kingdom
Organizations established in 1968
1968 establishments in the United Kingdom