What Was the First Museum?
The roots of museums reach back thousands of years. From Mesopotamian princesses to Renaissance aristocrats, humans have long been drawn to collect, preserve, and display the material traces of their world. But exactly how old is this tradition? And which institution deserves the title of the first museum in history?
An Ancient Princess’s Collection
The earliest evidence of what we might recognize as a museum comes from the city of Ur, in modern-day Iraq. Once a flourishing port on the Euphrates River and the heart of ancient Sumerian civilization, Ur is also remembered as Abraham’s hometown in the Bible.
In the 1920s, British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley led excavations at Ur, uncovering treasures that dazzled the public: gold and lapis-inlaid jewelry, royal tombs, and evidence of elaborate funeral rites. Then, in 1924, Woolley stumbled upon something quieter but no less revolutionary.
Inside the ruins of a palace, he and his team found chambers belonging to Ennigaldi-Nanna, daughter of King Nabonidus, the last ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Among the rubble lay a puzzling collection: an inscribed black boundary stone from 1400 BCE, fragments of a king’s statue from 2250 BCE, bronze figurines, and clay tablets dating centuries earlier. The items spanned more than a millennium of Mesopotamian history.
What tied them together was a small clay drum inscribed in four languages. The text identified the origins of one of the objects and explained how it had been unearthed. To Woolley, this was unmistakably a museum label — the first known to history. He concluded that Ennigaldi had curated a collection of antiquities, deliberately displayed for their historical value.
Little is known about her motives, though her father was fascinated by the past and even conducted excavations himself. Ennigaldi also served as a priestess of the moon god Sin and may have overseen a scribal school for elite women. Whether motivated by scholarship, religion, or royal prestige, her collection, assembled around 530 BCE, stands as the earliest known public museum.
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Museums in the Ancient Mediterranean
The idea of gathering and displaying objects wasn’t unique to Mesopotamia. In the Greek and Roman worlds, temples often doubled as repositories of offerings, art, and plundered treasures. Sculptures also decorated public gardens, forums, and bathhouses.
The Museum of Alexandria, founded in the third century BCE, was another important milestone in the history of museums. Despite its name, this mouseion — literally a shrine to the Muses — resembled more of a research institute than a gallery. Attached to the famous Library of Alexandria, it housed scholars, lecture halls, and dining rooms rather than artifacts. Still, the institution’s prestige meant that later Europeans revived the word “museum” to describe their own collections.
Curiosity Cabinets
After Ennigaldi’s experiment, it took nearly 2,000 years before anything resembling a museum emerged in Europe. During the Renaissance, wealthy European nobles, merchants, and scholars began assembling “cabinets of curiosity” or “wonder rooms.” These eclectic collections brought together fossils, coins, artworks, scientific instruments, and exotic artifacts from voyages abroad.
The goal was encyclopedic: to contain the world’s marvels in miniature. Visitors might marvel at a stuffed dodo, a mummy’s hand, or a carved gem, all jumbled together without concern for taxonomy. John Tradescant, a gardener to English royalty, famously opened his home and garden in South London to display such a collection, later catalogued and published as the Musaeum Tradescantianum.
These cabinets were largely private, their accessibility subject to the whim of the owner. Yet they laid the foundation for the idea that collections could be displayed for education as well as prestige.
The Birth of the Public Museum
The leap from private collections to public institutions occurred from the 15th through 18th centuries. A turning point came in 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated ancient bronze sculptures to the people of Rome. This gift formed the nucleus of the Capitoline Museums, which officially opened in 1734 and are often considered the first truly public art museums.
Another watershed was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Built to house the collections of the wealthy antiquary Elias Ashmole and the Tradescant family, it opened its doors in 1683 and is frequently cited as the first modern museum. Its displays included antiquities, coins, zoological specimens, and the (now-lost) body of the last dodo seen in Europe.
By the mid-18th century, museums were firmly established. The British Museum, founded in 1753 from the collection of Irish physician and naturalist Hans Sloane, institutionalized the model: publicly accessible repositories dedicated to collecting, preserving, and classifying the world’s knowledge. The Louvre, transformed into a national museum during the French Revolution in 1793, underscored the museum’s political as well as cultural significance.
The First Museum
So, what was the first museum? The answer depends on how you define “museum.” If we mean the first known collection curated for historical interest and accompanied by labels, the title belongs to Princess Ennigaldi’s collection in Ur. If we mean the first public institution designed to grant ordinary people access to cultural treasures, the Capitoline Museums of Rome claim the honor. And if we mean the first modern museum in the European sense — systematic, educational, and encyclopedic — the Ashmolean in Oxford stands out.
Each reflects a different stage in humanity’s enduring desire to preserve the past and make meaning from material culture. The museum has never been a single invention, but rather a recurring impulse across time: the need to gather objects, organize them, and invite others to see what stories they tell. In that sense, the first museum may not be a place at all, but an idea that keeps resurfacing whenever people try to make sense of history through things.
