The British Museum Is Now Open To Everyone: Take a Virtual Tour and See 4,737 Artifacts, Including the Rosetta Stone

“I met a girl at the British Muse­um once,” a fel­low said to me at a par­ty last week­end. “Her name was Roset­ta. Roset­ta Stone.” A groan­er indeed, but also a reminder of how far we’ve come: where­as you once real­ly would have had to go all the way to the British Muse­um (in Lon­don) to run into good old Roset­ta, now you can get acquaint­ed with her, and 4,633 of the oth­er fas­ci­nat­ing arti­facts of human civ­i­liza­tion held there, with­out even step­ping away from your com­put­er.

The British Muse­um charges noth­ing for admis­sion, of course, but now the inter­net has freed it in the geo­graph­i­cal sense as well.

“The British Muse­um recent­ly unveiled the results of its part­ner­ship with the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute (GCI),” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Kristin Rom­ney, “the world’s largest Google Street View of an inte­ri­or space, cov­er­ing nine floors and 85 per­ma­nent gal­leries of the muse­um.” Have a vir­tu­al walk­through, and you’ll pass dis­plays of about 80,000 notable objects; the high­lights Rom­ney names include the Lewis Chess­men and cat mum­mies, the Elgin Mar­bles, and even archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures of the muse­um itself such as the “the yawn­ing expanse of the museum’s Great Court, the largest pub­lic square in Europe, with ear­ly morn­ing light fil­ter­ing through the 3,312 glass roof panes.”

After you’ve enjoyed this Street View stroll, you’ll sure­ly want to exam­ine some of these items in greater depth. You can do just that at the vir­tu­al exhibits of the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute’s British Muse­um col­lec­tion, where you’ll find high-res­o­lu­tion images of and back­ground infor­ma­tion on 4,737 arti­facts, the Roset­ta Stone includ­ed. Or you can take a close look at a seg­ment of the Elgin Mar­bles, a scene from the Parthenon show­ing “the sacred robe or pep­los of Athena that was escort­ed to the Acrop­o­lis by the pro­ces­sion of the Great Pana­thenaic Fes­ti­val, held in Athens every four years.” Not old enough for you? Then behold the Roy­al Game of Ur, an ear­ly board game of sorts dis­cov­ered in the Roy­al Ceme­tery of the Mesopotami­an city-state of Ur. And even fur­ther illu­mi­na­tion of the ancient world awaits you beyond that, all thanks to this most mod­ern sort of project. You can enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

Vis­it The Muse­um of Online Muse­ums (MoOM): A Mega Col­lec­tion of 220 Online Exhi­bi­tions

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces Includ­ed!

Whit­ney Muse­um Puts Online 21,000 Works of Amer­i­can Art, By 3,000 Artists

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.