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This year is the museum’s 250th anniversary and to mark the occasion Royal Mail is publishing six stamps to illustrate the beauty and diversity of its collections.
Rarely, if ever, has a stamp collection spanned such a breadth of geography and time.
The stamps feature faces that cover the continents of the world - from the magnificent kingdom of ancient Egypt to the isolation of Easter Island, a volcanic rock in the South Pacific.
They range in time from 900 BC to 1550AD, a span of two and a half millennium. And they bring us both the ferocity of Alexander the Great - ‘The Conqueror of the Ancient World’ – and the serenity of the goddess Parvati, glorified in Indian literature as a mediator in the conflicts of heaven.
Looked at side by side, the six faces on the stamps present a dramatic and challenging look to the viewer. Such is the expertise of photographer Graeme Montgomery, that all six treasures appear to be of a consistent size. In fact the biggest, the Easter Island figure, is a full four times bigger than the bronze of Parvati. The actual stamp design was created by Simon Elliott of Rose Design..
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