British Museum

The British Museum is the world's largest museum of stolen goods, depending on who you ask. Founded in 1753, it was the first public national museum anywhere on Earth, and its collection of eight million objects tells the story of human civilization from two million years ago to the present. The fact that many of those objects were acquired under colonial circumstances makes it as controversial as it is magnificent.

The Rosetta Stone, the museum's most famous object, has been on almost continuous display since June 1802. Found in Egypt in 1799 by Napoleon's soldiers and surrendered to the British in 1801, this slab of granodiorite with the same decree written in three scripts — hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek — unlocked the entire lost language of ancient Egypt. Egypt has been asking for it back for decades.

Then there are the Elgin Marbles — or the Parthenon Sculptures, as Greece prefers. Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, removed roughly half the surviving Parthenon sculptures between 1801 and 1812, shipped them to London, and sold them to the British government in 1816 after a parliamentary inquiry concluded the acquisition was legal. Greece formally requested their return in 1983, and the debate has been running ever since.

The Great Court, redesigned by Norman Foster and opened in 2000, is the largest covered public square in Europe. Its tessellated glass roof, with 3,312 uniquely shaped panes, wraps around the Reading Room where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. The museum receives around six million visitors a year, and admission remains free — though perhaps not everyone agrees the contents were.