Museum Musings: The Endnotes

A brief history of museums, to go with our video on Music

Image credits:

Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, some extra bits of information from my video about music — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

In that video we looked at the word museum, which comes from the ancient Greek Muses, goddesses of inspiration, referring originally to the temples of the Muses. The most important of these was the Musaeum of Alexandria, founded by either Ptolemy I Soter or Ptolemy II Philadelphus. This Musaeum was really more a centre of higher learning, more analogous to a modern university than a modern museum, and contained the famed Library of Alexandria, the greatest library of the ancient world. The idea of collections of antiquities and other artifacts can be traced back even further to ancient Mesopotamia, to the collection of antiquities compiled by the Babylonian princess Ennigaldi in Ur, modern day Iraq. This collection, seemingly intended for educational purposes, included artifacts from a variety of periods, neatly arranged in rows, with clay tablet labels for each written in three different languages. Sounds a lot like a modern museum, doesn’t it? But the big difference here, and with later iterations of this idea, is that is was a private collection. Indeed when we get into the early modern era, such private collections of artifacts both cultural and natural were very popular, often known as cabinets of curiosities, though often much larger than a simple cabinet. One such cabinet of curiosities known as the Ark and collected by the Tradescant family contained a variety of antiquities and oddities, later further bolstered by the American artifacts and natural specimens collected by botanist and gardener John Tradescant the Younger. Tradescant then either bequeathed to or was swindled out of the family cabinet of curiosities by antiquarian and early Freemason Elias Ashmole, who then in turn bequeathed the collection along with his own collections of manuscripts to Oxford University, which then became the core of what became known as the Ashmolean Museum, the world’s first university museum, and perhaps the first museum in Britain accessible to the public. Europe-wide the first museums open to the public are generally held to date back to Renaissance Italy, specifically the Capitoline Museums in Rome and the Vatican Museums, both kicked off by donations from Popes. The British Museum was founded in 1753 after botanist and physician Hans Sloan bequeathed his collection to the nation, and indeed it’s in the 18th century that many other countries started national collections that we would recognize as modern museums. By the way, Sloan’s other claim to fame was, perhaps, inventing chocolate milk (though there is some debate on this point): Sloan picked up cocoa (cacao?) in Jamaica, but decided to mix it with milk rather than water. As for the word museum itself, it continued for some time to refer to institutions of learning before eventually the modern sense of museum as a collection for public display became the more common meaning.