Museums are essentially phoney. Few of their objects were made for them but rather to be owned, used, enjoyed and traded. They were not meant to be wrenched from their context by fair means or foul, then put in a glass case or buried in giant state hoards, most of them never again to see the light of day.
The British Museum is such a beloved institution that no one ever asks what it is about. Little is about Britain – instead it has at least 8m mostly archaeological objects gathered from across the globe, barely 1% of which are on show. The fact that a few hundred of these appear to have vanished is hardly surprising. Nor is it shattering, given that no one seems to have known the objects ever existed.
