“A More Intimate Knowledge of it All:” The History of Museums

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Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonians, was a traditionalist. As his empire faded, he made desperate attempts to resuscitate its glorious past. Even his own daughter’s name, Ennigaldi-Nanna, was ancient.

Ennigaldi-Nanna served as high priestess of the moon god—an office that had been vacant for some 700 years—but she didn’t stop there. She established a school for aspiring priestesses at the Temple of Ur, and there she built something truly remarkable.

By Soren Brooks

In her reverence for the past, Ennigaldi-Nanna built the first known museum. The site dates to about 530 BCE, and artifacts discovered there were ancient even by Ennigaldi-Nanna’s standards. Bricks from long-gone cities, markers from ancient borders—some of these things had come from the collections of Nebuchadnezzar, and some were excavated by Nabonidus or Ennigaldi-Nanna herself. These artifacts are believed to have undergone conservation procedures in antiquity.

But a room full of relics does not a museum make. Archaeologists came to understand the nature of Ennigaldi-Nanna’s collection when they discovered the exhibit signage. These were clay cylinders with inscriptions in three different languages, all describing the artifacts on display. Clearly, Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum was meant to have educated a diverse range of visitors.

Nabonidus and Ennigaldi-Nanna may have failed to revive their crumbling empire, but in the ruins of that first museum we can see an even greater tradition: the innate human drive to collect, to conserve, and to create a broader understanding of our world. This is the instinct behind every museum in our history, from Ennigaldi-Nanna onward.

Our word ‘museum’ is derived from the Ancient Greek mouseion, ‘seat of the Muses.’ This term was adopted by the Romans as well, and many places across the ancient world were described as such, including the Museum at Alexandria. However, the mouseia were primarily devoted to scholarly dialogue and contemplation—more akin to a university than to a modern museum, or even that of Ennigaldi-Nanna.

Despite this difference in terminology, however, the instinct to collect and display significant objects persisted. The Greek pinakothecas were collections of religious art, and similar temple-galleries have been found in places such as China and Japan. In the Islamic world, religious relics were sometimes displayed at the tombs of martyrs.

The real spark for the evolution of modern museums, however, came around the time of the Renaissance. Consider it a perfect storm—the renewal of interest in arts and culture, as well as the beginning of exploration into the new world, ignited a period of fervid collecting.

At first, these collections were private, confined to rooms in wealthy homes. These rooms, replete with marvelous things, came to be known in German as Wunderkammer—literally, “wonder chambers.” In English, they were called “cabinets of curiosity.”

Perhaps the most famous of these cabinets of curiosity was that of Ole Worm, a 17th-century Danish physician. The Museum Wormianum, as he called it, contained all manner of natural and man-made objects from all over the world, and also included some human remains—mummies, which were filed under ‘minerals,’ and ‘divine monstrosities,’ which included deformed fetuses and a ‘giant skull.’

Despite these eccentricities, the study of Worm’s collection led to legitimate scientific advancements. The theory that narwhal’s horns were actually the horns of unicorns was disproved by a narwhal skull in Worm’s collection.

It was this commitment to learning that drove Worm to collect. As he wrote in a letter, he aimed to “present my audience with the things themselves to touch with their own hands and see with their own eyes, so that they may themselves… acquire a more intimate knowledge of it all.”

Still, access to the Museum Wormianum was limited to Worm’s guests. Over time, however, many cabinets of curiosity throughout Europe were opened to the public. In 1661, the Amerbach Cabinet, a Swiss art collection that featured works by Hans Holbein, was opened to the public as the Kunstmuseum Basel—known as the oldest public art museum in the world.

Similarly, the collection belonging to Englishman Elias Ashmole, who had himself inherited it from a John Tradescant, was opened as the Ashmolean Museum in 1683. The Ashmolean can still be visited today as part of Oxford University’s campus.

This trend of making curiosity cabinets available to the public continued throughout the eighteenth century. In a notable example, the Louvre was established in 1793, less than a year after Louis XVI’s execution, to bring the royal collections to the people. And in the nineteenth century, the museum boom only grew stronger. Between the years 1872 and 1887, some 100 museums opened in England alone.

But even as the modern museum evolves, our instinct for collection stays the same. Over time, however, we have begun to interrogate the ethical ramifications of this golden age of collecting. A famous controversy is that of the British Museum, which was established with the intent of being a ‘universal museum’ that features artifacts from all over the world—often ‘collected’ by means of violent colonialism.

Over time, many of the nations that originally produced these artifacts have petitioned the British Museum for their return. The Museum, however, refuses, stating that they alone have the infrastructure to house these artifacts.

This attitude is demonstrated most notably in the issues of the Parthenon Sculptures and the Benin Bronzes—cultural artifacts from Greece and Nigeria, respectively. Requests to repatriate these artifacts have gone on for decades, and new museums—such as the Acropolis Museum—have been built in their countries of origin. While these new museums provide the infrastructure to steward the artifacts, the British Museum still declines to repatriate them.

Says journalist Insiya Motiwala, “children should be able to view the famous magnificent works of their ancestors in their home country… To keep them in the colonizer’s home is to continue the dark history of exploitation.”

Darker still is the retention and display of human remains—including the toi moko, remains of Maori ancestors. Sometimes described as ‘shrunken heads,’ toi moko are heads preserved to retain the individual’s intricate facial tattoos, or moko. These tattoos are unique to each individual, and often signify events in that person’s life.

Many of these toi moko were taken as ‘curiosities’ in the past—but a contingent of modern Maori people are involved in a landmark effort to repatriate them, which has seen great success.

Repatriation advisory panel chair Sir Pou Temara says “we believe that our ancestors are not resting in peace behind the glass cabinets and in vaults in institutions overseas. We find that repugnant. We hear our ancestors crying out to be returned to New Zealand, and we could feel the satisfaction that they have, in knowing that they were being transported back to where they can rest in peace.”

This is the shadowed underbelly of the human drive to collect: to collect something is to take it. As museums, as well as our own instincts, rise to meet the future, we must remember this. We must remember the people that we are impacting in our search for “more intimate knowledge of it all.”

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