The World's Oldest Museum

Have you ever thought about what archaeologists 1,000 years from now will think when they dig up artifacts of our lives? If civilization, or even mankind itself, can hold out that long, they may be quite confused. Imagine that they dug up a museum and dated the structure to the 21st century. The museum holds artifacts dating to, say, 1,000 BCE, but will the future archaeologists know that? It's happened already that archaeologists find collections of artifacts that are much older than their location would indicate. But one ancient collection stands out because it was a real museum with even more ancient artifacts properly labeled and dated. And it was run by a woman.

Ennigaldi-Nanna was a priestess and a princess of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. She was also an archaeologist and a museum curator, establishing her museum of artifacts around 530 BCE in Ur (modern Iraq). Her displays dated back as far as 2,000 BCE! The museum was discovered in 1925, and has yielded a treasure trove of ancient information. Ennigaldi, who was way ahead of her time, labeled her finds in three languages, including Sumerian, which modern language experts can translate. After the collapse of the Sumerian kingdom, the museum was lost and the practice of labeling artifacts fell out of use for another couple of thousand years. Read about Ennigaldi-Nanna's unique museum at Messy Nessy Chic.