The Bible in the British Museum

The links between archaeology and the Bible have fascinated generations of archaeologists and biblical scholars who seek documentation of events narrated in the Bible. The British Museum's collections include numerous inscribed objects, scripts and pictorial reliefs which provide such evidence. There is, for example, a Babylonian clay tablet which records Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC, as narrated in the book of Jeremiah. The Bible in the British Museum features over 70 such 'documents', mainly from western Asia, with some examples included from Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor, dating from the period of the Patriarchs to the New Testament times, c.2000 BC to c.AD 100. The author transliterates and translates the ancient texts, which include cuneiform, Aramaic and Hebrew, and discusses the contribution they make to our knowledge of the culture and history of biblical times. Each object is illustrated in black and white.