British Museum

The British Museum in Bloomsbury, London, was founded by Act of Parliament in 1753, built on the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane, and opened to the public in 1759. It holds some eight million objects from across human history, including the Rosetta Stone and one of the world's largest collections of cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia.

Among its Mesopotamian objects are small clay masks of the face of Humbaba, including an Old Babylonian example (c. 2000–1700 BCE) excavated at Ur by Leonard Woolley, the forest guardian slain by Gilgamesh. His face was imagined as made of coiled intestines, and Babylonian diviners used such models when reading omens in the entrails of sacrificed animals, comparing the patterns they saw to the monster's face.

The museum's library of tablets from Nineveh, excavated in the 19th century, also includes the Babylonian flood tablet that George Smith recognized in 1872.