Venice National Archaeological Museum *1523 by the Cardinal Domenico Grimani
(writer : jotsna jari )
The history of museumsis, in effect, the history of the collection and classification of objects.
💙 COLLECTING IN HISTORY :
Collections have a longer history than do museums.
Collecting began with the earliest human societies,and there were established collecting traditions in Africa,Arabia and Asia long before collecting developed inEurope.
Ancient collections were assembled for a variety of purposes, including for prestige, as economichoards, and to promote group loyalty.
One of the oldestdocumented collections dates from ca. 530 BCE in theancient Sumarian city of Uruk, located in present-day Iraq,about 120 miles north of Basra. Excavations of atemple site there by C.L. Woolley and his colleagues inthe early 1900s unearthed a collection of antiquities datingback to 2000–2500 BCE that included a boundary stone, a
mace head, fragments of a statue, a clay foundation cone,and clay tablets. The objects were documented by inscriptions on a clay drum cylinder on which a scribe hadrecorded that they were “found in the ruins of Ur, the workof Bur-Sin, King of Ur, which while searching for the
ground plan [of the temple] the governor of Ur found, andI saw and wrote out, for the marvel of beholders.”
By the third millennium BCE, there were extensivecollections in the Sumarian state archives at Ebla, and by
the second millennium in Mesopotamia, collections of oldinscriptions were being used to teach scribes how to make
records.
During the Shang dynasty in China (ca. 1600–1025 BCE), gold and bronze artifacts were collected; by the time of the Tang dynasty (CE 618–907), collecting had become very popular among the ruling elite.
In what is now Iraq, Nebuchadnezzar (605–562 BCE) acquired a
large private collection that included antiquities and natural history specimens, and Nabonidus (555–539 BCE) of
Babylonia kept collections of antiquities and natural history objects.
Tuthmosis III (1504–1450 BCE) of Egypt
had an extensive collection of art, antiquities, flora, andfauna from Asia. In an Egyptian tomb, a fossil sea
urchin from the Eocene was found that was inscribed inhieroglyphs with the date, name of the collector, and locality where it was collected.
Art collecting was anancient Greek custom, associated with the exhibition of
paintings and sculptures in the entrance peristyles andporches of temples in an area known as thepinakotheke or picture gallery.
Wealthy Roman citizenscollected paintings and objects that were considered to be“unusual and curious.” Several private collections ofexotic sea shells have been found during the excavationof the ruins of Pompey, and collections of fossils havebeen found in ancient Greek and Roman cities, as well ascollections of precious stones, decorative objects, andantiquities.
Oldest Museum :- Shōsō-in
The oldest continuously functioning museum in the world is probably the Sho¯so¯in at the To¯dai Temple in Nara, Japan, founded in the eighth century,which still exhibits secular and sacred artworks.