To celebrate our return from the summer holidays, this month we will inaugurate three new columns. Our first ‘new’ columnist, although a familiar face to some of you, is Elina Sairanen, our in-house museologist and Mathqaf’s co-founder. Elina’s column is centred around museums and museology – her two great passions. If you have a museological conundrum, please do not hesitate to reach out as Elina will cover these questions in her monthly piece. Now, let’s get to the inaugural question. 

What’s the World’s Oldest Museum?

It is a pleasure to introduce my monthly column, Ask a Museologist, to you. We begin with a rather fundamental question: what’s the world’s oldest museum?

My short yet not very helpful answer: it depends on how we comprehend the word museum. In our 21st century understanding of the term, highlighting museums’ role in the service of society and acquiring, conserving, researching, communicating and exhibiting our tangible and intangible heritage, museums are a fairly young phenomenon dating back to the Enlightenment. However, if we widen our understanding of museums and consider some of the acts associated with them, for instance, study, scholarship, contemplation, display and collecting, their history can be traced much further back in time. 

In tracking down museums’ (or museum-like spaces’ and proto-museums’) different functions throughout history, the etymology of the term becomes helpful. The English museum has classical origins in Greek and Latin. The Greek mouseoin denoted the ‘seat of the Muses’, the nine inspirational goddesses of literature, science and the arts, and designated a philosophical institution or a place of contemplation. Although the ideals of scholarship, study and to an extent contemplation, too, are present in our current understanding of museums’ functions, the Greek mouseoin did not fully represent museums in the way we understand them today. Quite similarly, the Latin museum was used in Roman times to refer to places of philosophical discussion and less to spaces where objects were organised and displayed. The term museum revived in 15th century Europe as it came to describe the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, although it referred to the concept of comprehensiveness rather than denoted a building. By the 17th century, a museum illustrated collections of curiosities – a popular pastime amongst the Renaissance princes and other members of the nobility. During this time, the notions of collecting and displaying were intrinsically linked to the museum concept, yet access to these princely collections or studiolos and Wunderkammern was strictly restricted to the privileged few. Finally, by the 18th century, the term museum denoted an institution established to display and preserve a collection to the public. From contemplation, study and scholarship to collecting, displaying and preserving, and finally, to the inclusion of the public, we have arrived at the modern museum concept which in the 21st century aims to rest on the principles of inclusion, access, and authenticity.

This somewhat simplified history of the term museum highlights an important point at the heart of any discussion related to museums: our understanding of museums, which essentially derives from the functions we attribute to museums, is ever-changing. Museums are not static yet constantly evolving – the very idea behind museums is remodeled.

After this brief interlude into the history of museums and the different functions museums have carried out in the course of history, let’s go back to the original question: what’s the world’s oldest museum? 

The answer is not absolute, but there is a consensus amongst archaeologists and museologists that the world’s first museum was located in Ur (modern-day Dhi Qar governorate of southern Iraq), dating from 530 BC. The Ennigaldi-Nanna Museum, eponymously named after its founder and curator Princess Ennigaldi, the priestess of the moon deity Sin and the daughter of King Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the world’s first known archaeologist. This museum dedicated to Mesopotamian antiquities was discovered in 1925 during an excavation led by Leonard Wooley. His team found a collection of artefacts from different times and places, neatly organised and labelled, in a Babylonian palace. 

The extraordinary thing about this collection of artefacts was that the objects originated from a variety of different geographical areas and historical settings ranging between around 2100 BCE to 600 BCE, assembled together, arranged side by side – and they even came with ‘museum labels’ – clay cylinder drums with labels in three different languages including Sumerian. Arguably, Ennigaldi’s father, an antiquarian and antique restorer, could have passed her his appreciation towards ancient artefacts and their caretaking to her daughter. Some of the examples of restoring and preserving artefacts at this museum include a statue of an early king, Shulgi of Ur, which had been carefully restored to preserve the writing it contained. Similarly, a Kassite boundary stele, a kudurru, a written document used to mark boundaries and make proclamations dating from around 1400 BCE, was displayed with a ‘terrific curse’, according to Woolley, on anyone who would remove or destroy the record it contained. 

Displaying, arranging and grouping objects as well as preserving and restoring them and communicating details about them through object labels were the cornerstones of Ennigaldi’s museum practice. These acts are also unmistakably crucial aspects of our 21st century museography. It is fascinating to think how ‘modern’ Ennigaldi’s approach was, and how much the concept of a museum then changed between 530 BC and the 18th century. 

If you are wondering about the second oldest museum in the world, some suggest it is the Museum at Alexandria with its renowned library founded by Ptolemy I Soter in the 3rd century BCE, although the institution resembles more of a university than an entity to preserve and interpret heritage – but that discussion is something for the future. 

You might also ponder now, but what about the oldest museum in our modern understanding of the term, what would that be? Of the modern museums, the oldest is the Capitoline Museums in Rome, officially opened in 1734, and the first museum in the world to be visited by the public. There are much older collections that later came to constitute the nuclei of various public museums, for instance, the Louvre, but at first the access to these collections was restricted to the ruling classes.

That’s it for this month. If you have any museological questions or enigmas, please do reach out – I will do my best to answer them all.