British Museum

Founded in 1753 around the personal collection of physician Sir Hans Sloane, the British Museum was the first national museum in the world to be free and open to "all studious and curious persons" — a founding principle it still holds to, with no charge for general admission over 270 years later. The neoclassical building on Great Russell Street, completed in the 1850s, now houses roughly eight million objects, of which only a fraction is ever on display at once.

The collection's headline pieces draw the crowds for good reason: the Rosetta Stone, whose parallel Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic text unlocked the reading of ancient Egyptian; the Parthenon Marbles, removed from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s and still the subject of an ongoing repatriation dispute with Greece; and the Sutton Hoo ship-burial treasure, Britain's own answer to Tutankhamun's tomb. Beyond the highlights, entire wings are devoted to Assyria, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Asia and the Islamic world — genuinely enough to fill several separate visits.