In Ryan Cougler's 2018 blockbuster hit film Black Panther, the supervillain, Eric Kilmonger, goes to a fictional museum, clearly very closely based on a very real museum.

The Museum of Great Britain, which is the British Museum.

While there, he meets with curator of African art.

Kilmonger challenges a curator on her introduction of one of the African objects,

asserting that, quote,

it was taken by British soldiers in Benin,

but it's from Oconda, a fictional African nation in the film,

and it's made of vibranium, a fictional metal.

He further astonishes the curator when he casually says that he will

take it off her hands. The curator declares, these items aren't for sale. Killmonger then asks,

how do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it?

Like they took everything else?

While superhero movies are known for pretty outlandish plot lines oftentimes, in this case,

not that far off at all. In the mid-19th century, the British really did loot hundreds of pieces

of important cultural history from the Kingdom of Benin after a bloody siege.

And those objects remain in the British Museum to this day. And they are far from the only ones.

Currently, its permanent collection of more than 8 million works is the largest in the world.

Since its foundation in 1753, the British Museum has sought to be something more than a collection of dusty books and specimens where scholars might come to look something up, but where the average person would never go.

Thanks to donations from wealthy patrons, it was able to grow and grow and grow until it became one of the richest repositories of cultural and scientific knowledge

in the world, featuring everything from natural specimens taken from far-off ecosystems

to ancient sculptures. And that knowledge has been shared with many, many people. Just last year,

in 2025, the museum received nearly 6.5 million visitors, making it the second most

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