‘The Ghosts Are Everywhere’: Can the British Museum Survive its Omni-Crisis?

The British Museum has a new director, and he has a big job to do. After years of controversy over returning certain artifacts to their home countries and a museum staff member who stole thousands of pieces, the BM has an image problem. Can this huge, unwieldy organization—that does not even know everything contained in its labyrinth of storage rooms—turn over a new leaf?

In the Egyptian galleries on the first floor, near some particularly beautiful ancient tomb paintings lush with images of date and palm trees, you might see a high set of locked doors. Behind them is a disused gallery, the upper reaches of its walls painted with modern reproductions of ancient Egyptian mourning scenes. The decoration is apt: this is now a storage place for human remains. On a table, when I visited last summer, skulls had been laid out for medical and forensic anthropology students visiting from the US. “We were talking through kind of the signs and features that we can see on the bones that tell us that they had leprosy,” explained bioarchaeologist Rebecca Whiting, an enthusiastic young curator with a floral shirt, dangly earrings and a black manicure. The room is also the resting place of 50 medieval corpses, donated to the museum by the Sudanese government after a cemetery was cleared during the building of a dam 20 years ago. (The museum has strong links with Egypt and Sudan, and offers training and research fellowships to colleagues from both countries.) The corpses’ hair, eyelashes, the warp and weft of their clothes, sometimes even their tattoos, are still visible.