WHILE siting the Alexandria or the Ur examples, one often ignores the
massive library and the artifact collection dating back to circa 300 BC at
one of the first fully established international residential universities
in the world
at Nalanda and later at Taxila in India
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On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Geoffrey Lewis wrote:

> 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]
>
>