Elgin Marbles in the context of "Melina Mercouri"

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 the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. Established in 1753, the British Museum was the first public national museum. In 2023, the museum received 5,820,860 visitors. At least one group rated it the most popular attraction in the United Kingdom.

At its beginning, the museum was largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. Some of its best-known acquisitions, such as the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, are subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims.

Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean such as the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt, and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures such as Ancient Persia (Iran). Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest.

A person who studies antiquities, as opposed to just collecting them, is often called an antiquarian.

The Lapiths (/ˈlæpɪθs/; Ancient Greek: Λαπίθαι, Lapithai, sing. Λαπίθης) were a group of legendary people in Greek mythology, who lived in Thessaly in the valley of the Pineios and on the mountain Pelion. They were believed to have descended from the mythical Lapithes, brother of Centaurus, with the two heroes giving their names to the races of the Lapiths and the Centaurs respectively. The Lapiths are best known for their involvement in the Centauromachy (Ancient Greek: Κενταυρομαχία, romanized: Kentauromachía), a mythical fight that broke out between them and the Centaurs during Pirithous and Hippodamia's wedding.

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine, PC FSA Scot (/ˈɛlɡɪn/ ELG-in; 20 July 1766 – 14 November 1841), often known as Lord Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman, diplomat, and collector, known primarily for the controversial procurement of marble sculptures (known as the Elgin Marbles) from the Parthenon and other structures on the Acropolis of Athens.

A metope (/ˈmɛtəpi/; Ancient Greek: μετόπη) is a rectangular architectural element of the Doric order, filling the space between triglyphs in a frieze, a decorative band above an architrave.In earlier wooden buildings the spaces between triglyphs were first open, and later the free spaces in between triglyphs were closed with metopes; however, metopes are not load-bearing part of a building.Earlier metopes are plain, but later metopes were painted or ornamented with reliefs. The painting on most metopes has been lost, but sufficient traces remain to allow a close idea of their original appearance.

In terms of structure, metopes were made out of clay or stone. A stone metope may be carved from a single block with a triglyph (or triglyphs), or they may be cut separately and slide into slots in the triglyph blocks as at the Temple of Aphaea. Sometimes the metopes and friezes were cut from different stone, so as to provide color contrast. Although they tend to be close to square in shape, some metopes are noticeably larger in height or in width. They may also vary in width within a single structure to allow for corner contraction, an adjustment of the column spacing and arrangement of the Doric frieze in a temple to make the design appear more harmonious.