Penn Museum facts for kids
.jpg)
The Warden Garden and Main Entrance to the Penn Museum
|
|
| Established | 1887 |
|---|---|
| Location | 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania United States |
| Type | Anthropology and archaeology |
| Public transit access |  Penn Medicine: SEPTA Regional Rail SEPTA bus: 30, 40, 42, 49, LUCY |
The Penn Museum, also known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is a cool place to explore history! It's an archaeology and anthropology museum located at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can find it in the University City area, right at 33rd and South Streets. It's even close enough for students from Drexel University to visit easily.
The museum is home to over 1.3 million amazing artifacts. It has one of the world's best collections of art from the Middle East and Near East.
Contents
Discovering the Past: Museum History
The Penn Museum started in 1887. This happened after a successful trip to an ancient city called Nippur in what is now Iraq. The university's leader, William Pepper, wanted a special, fireproof building to keep all the cool things found during the dig.
In the past, museums often worked with other countries to share discoveries from their excavations. The Penn Museum did this, which means most of its items have a known history of where they came from. This makes them super valuable for learning about the past! Since it began, the museum's scientists have gone on over 300 expeditions all around the world.
Today, the museum has three floors filled with galleries. You can see items from ancient Mediterranean lands, Egypt, the Near East, Mesopotamia, East Asia, and Mesoamerica. There are also artifacts from the native peoples of Africa and North America. The museum also publishes a magazine called Expedition (ISSN 0014-4738).
Changes and Research at the Museum
Around 2009, the Penn Museum made some changes to how it was organized. Even with these changes, the museum has always stayed committed to its research. It has many active research projects happening on five different continents. Nearly 200 scholars work with the museum, which is more than many other similar places in North America.
The Museum Building: A Closer Look
The museum building itself is a landmark at the University of Pennsylvania. It's built in a style called Arts and Crafts and Eclectic. What you see today is actually only about one-third of a much bigger plan!
The building has some cool features, like a dramatic rotunda (a round hall), several courtyards and gardens, a fountain, and even glass mosaics. A team of architects from Philadelphia designed the museum. The first part was finished in 1899. The rotunda, which holds the Harrison Auditorium, was completed in 1915. Later, more parts were added, like the Coxe Memorial Wing in 1926 for the Egyptian collection, and the Sharpe Wing in 1929. The Academic Wing, with labs and classrooms, opened in 1971. The newest big addition was in 2002, for storing collections.
The Museum Library
The Museum Library started in 1900. It began with a collection of books from a professor named Daniel Garrison Brinton. His library had about 4,098 books, mostly about the native peoples of America and their languages. It also had old manuscripts about Central American languages, many of which are now rare or gone.
The library's collection grew a lot over the years. By 1971, it had over 50,000 books! Today, the library has about 115,000 books and subscribes to many scholarly journals. It's a great resource for anyone studying anthropology and archaeology.
Amazing Collections
.jpg)
The Penn Museum has huge [collections] of items from around the world. These collections are divided into three main types:
- Archaeology: Objects found from digging up ancient sites.
- Ethnology: Items and ideas collected from people living today.
- Physical Anthropology: Human and nonhuman remains used for scientific study.
The museum has eleven permanent galleries where you can see these treasures. They include galleries for Africa, Asia, Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, Rome, and Native American Voices. Many items are not always on display but are used for research or special exhibits.
Ethnology and Archaeology Collections
Africa: A Rich History
The Penn Museum has one of the biggest collections of African objects in the United States. Most of these items were collected between 1891 and 1937. The collection includes objects from all over Africa, especially from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Sierra Leone.
One special part is the collection from Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone. A museum curator named Henry Usher Hall spent seven months there in 1936–1937. He collected textiles, sculptures, tools, and items related to daily life. His notes also tell us a lot about the Sherbro people and other groups living nearby.
The Central African collection has about 3,000 artifacts, mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo. These show the many different art styles from that region. There's also a unique Moroccan collection with clothing, shoes, rugs, and pottery, collected in 1898.
In November 2019, the Penn Museum opened a newly updated African gallery. It features a special dress called "Wearable Literature," designed by Breanna Moore and Emerson Ruffin, which is very popular.
North America: Ancient to Modern
The North American collections have items from twenty thousand years ago to just a few hundred years ago. Some were found during digs in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
For example, in 1896, Frank Hamilton Cushing found amazing wooden masks and tools in the waters off Key Marco, Florida. Because they were underwater, they were incredibly well-preserved! Later, in the 1930s, Edgar B. Howard found some of the oldest items in the collection in the American Southwest. His finds helped identify the Clovis point and showed that humans lived alongside animals like mammoths long ago.
The museum also has about 40,000 items from around 200 different Indigenous nations in North America. Many of these were collected by Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit man who worked as a curator for the museum. Another important person was Frank Speck, a professor who donated many items from the Sub-Arctic region. He also used early audio recording technology to save examples of Creek and Yuchi songs.
Mexico and Central America: Maya and More
The museum's Mesoamerican collections include objects from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica. You can see masks, pottery, and textiles from Guatemala.
A special collection is the Lilly de Jongh Osborne collection of Guatemalan textiles from the 1800s and early 1900s. It has complete outfits for men, women, and children from different villages.
The Penn Museum also led a big excavation at the Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala, from 1956 to 1970. Many important artifacts from this dig are now in the museum, including large stone carvings called stelae. The gallery also shows items from the Aztec, Oaxacan, and Teotihuacano cultures.
In November 2019, a new "Mexico and Central America Gallery" opened. It features art from eight Central American countries. One important item is Stela 14, a ten-foot-tall limestone rock with detailed carvings. A researcher named Tatiana Proskouriakoff helped decode the Mayan hieroglyphics on it, which changed how we understand Maya history!
South America: Diverse Cultures
The museum's South American collections are very diverse, just like the regions they come from. You can find items from the dry coast of Peru, the high Andes mountains, and the Amazon rainforest. The collections include materials from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.
The museum has strong collections from Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, and Peru. Many items were collected by explorers like Max Uhle and William Curtis Farabee. These collections represent many different Indigenous groups, showing their unique cultures and ways of life.
Asia: From China to India
The Penn Museum's Asian collection has nearly 3,000 art objects and artifacts from China, Tibet, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian countries. A large part of this collection focuses on China. Many items were bought or donated, including over 290 porcelain vases and sculptures collected by J. P. Morgan.
Another important Asian collection comes from William and Isabel Ingram Mayer, who traveled across Mongolia and northern China in 1930-1931. Their collection includes small bronze daggers and ornaments made by ancient nomadic peoples. Maxwell Sommerville, one of the first curators, also brought many items from Japan and India, including Kalighat paintings from India.
The Asian Gallery is in the large Harrison Rotunda. It has been showing the Chinese collection since 1915. A central piece is a ceramic statue of a Luohan, which is very old. Also on display are two of the famous six horse panels from Emperor Taizong's Mausoleum in China. These horses were important in Chinese history.
A perfectly round crystal ball, once thought to belong to Empress Dowager Cixi, is also in this gallery. It was stolen in 1988 but thankfully found and returned to the museum in 1991!
Egypt: Ancient Wonders
The museum's collection of Egyptian artifacts is considered one of the best in the world. The Egyptian galleries are full of statues, mummies, and carvings.
One of the most impressive items is a huge 13-ton granite Sphinx of Ramesses II, which is about 3,200 years old! It came from the palace of Pharaoh Merenptah and was found by a museum expedition in Egypt in 1915. The museum also has missing pieces of an important ancient text called the Insinger Papyrus.
Iraq: Treasures of Ur
The museum's collection from the Royal Tombs of Ur is very important. The University of Pennsylvania worked with the British Museum to dig at Ur, an ancient and wealthy city in Sumer. The artifacts from its royal tombs show how rich the city was. You can see crowns, figures, and musical instruments, many decorated with gold and jewels. A famous item is the Bull-headed lyre.
The museum's Babylonian section has almost 30,000 clay tablets written in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform. This is one of the ten largest collections in the world! It has many ancient school tablets and stories, as well as important records from 2900 to 500 BCE.
Physical Anthropology Collections
The Morton Collection
The Penn Museum has a collection of about 1,300 skulls gathered by a 19th-century doctor named Samuel George Morton. The museum received this collection in 1966.
The museum recognizes that the way these human remains were collected in the past was not ethical, and that some of the ideas associated with the collection are harmful. The museum is now actively working to address this history. In 2020, the museum announced it would move the collection into storage. They are also planning to return or rebury the skulls of enslaved people. In 2024, the museum reburied the remains of 19 African-American residents of Philadelphia in Eden Cemetery. The museum is working with communities to make sure these important decisions are handled with care and respect.
See also
- Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World
- The Benghazi Venus
- List of museums with major collections of Egyptian antiquities
Images for kids
-
The Stoner Courtyard at the Penn Museum.
