"…a recreation, an education experience,
a monument to humanity's struggle to rise from the muck and the goo,
and get an upper hand over its environment …"

[David Mamet, The museum of science and technology story'in Five Television Plays, New York (1990)]

Such is the purpose of a modern museum. In Mamet's fictional, behind-the-scenes account of museum life, historical characters come alive at night in a twilight world between fantasy and reality and illustrate the ironies of museum celebrations and omissions - of industrial and cultural decline, destructive technological progress and marginalised cultures. 'Ze building is a monument to science…to orderly understanding, and an affront to all ze ravages of Time…it has some weight', declaims one German U-boat radio operator to the hero. In another corner are the boomerang-throwing Potawantamies.

Mamet, of course, is not referring specifically to the British Museum here but the 'weight' that is now conferred upon major museums is due in no small part to the path-breaking role of the British Museum, which recently celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

Meaning ascribed to museum collections and their objects has changed over time. Museums of science, technology, natural history, of civilisation have become emblematic of modernity and rational knowledge, their majestic architecture, part cathedral, part stately home, and their neat displays of objects organised along taxonomic and/or evolutionary principles. When did the idea arise that museums and their exhibitions could be viewed as technologies themselves for self-improvement and a means for promoting an orderly understanding of the natural world? The answer lies in the 18th and 19th century, when Britain rose to prominence as an industrial nation and imperial power.

Before that time, displays of natural objects were epitomised by the 'cabinets of curiosities' brought back from the voyages of discovery of the 16th and 17th century which were shown to the wealthy classes. The cabinets were designed to amaze the viewer with each object telling its own story. The impetus behind much of this lay in men's piety and superstition that valued the rare or peculiar - a prized horn from a unicorn, unusually shaped stones, monstrosities of nature. Perhaps most famous of these was 'Tradescant's Ark,' a collection of items that came to form the basis of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. The Tradescants were gardeners to various 17th century aristocrats and also to Charles I. Between them they amassed plants, flowers, shells and relics that could take a visitor a whole day to peruse.

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