I have just caught up with the posts from Giles Hudson and David Dawson
about the oldest museum in the world.

It is all a matter of how you define a museum.  Giles can be fairly secure
in assuming that the Old Ashmolean Building at Oxford, opened in 1683, is
the oldest surviving museum building, which was built for the purpose by a
corporate body for the public.  The Museum of the History of Science now
occupying the premises, however, was founded in 1924 and opened the
following year.

If you consider the first public collections open to the public in the
present tradition of museums, then displays were being prepared to exhibit
arms and armour to the public in the Tower of London as early as the 1660s,
for which - like the Ashmolean - an entrance fee was charged.

This, of course, ignores the existence of private collections in many parts
of Europe which were available for public visiting, certainly from the
fifteenth century, and which in due course were to contribute so much to
the collections of the new publicly-owned museums.

As far as the Ptolemaic museum at Alexandria is concerned this seems to
have been more a prototype university than a museum, as understood today. 
David rightly, however, draws attention to the archaeological evidence,
dating to the sixth century BC,  from Ur 'of the Chaldees' which may
reasonably be interpreted as a small museum adjacent the school there.

For those interested, all this is developed further in an international
review in _The Manual of Curatorship_ (2nd edition, Museums Association &
Butterworth- Heinemann, 1992), and the entry on Museums in the
_Encylopaedia Britannica_ and _Britannica Online_. 

Geoffrey Lewis

e-mail: [log in to unmask]