The Experience
If you called its 12-ton Egyptian sphinx “one in a million,” you’d be right: It is just one in a collection of nearly a million objects at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, one of the world’s finest archaeological/anthropological museums.
During the last century, the museum sponsored more than 350 worldwide scientific expeditions, which yielded most of the artifacts here, including Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets (the world’s oldest writing), Egyptian mummies, a crystal ball once owned by China’s Dowager Empress, an Apache tipi, and 4,500-year-old jewelry from the Royal Cemetery at Ur (in modern-day Iraq).
The classical galleries of Greek, Etruscan and Roman treasures has just reopened after a $3 million renovation; other noteworthy galleries cover ancient Canaan and Israel, Egypt, Africa, Buddhism, native Alaskans, and Polynesia.
History
The University of Pennsylvania Museum was founded in 1887 as an attraction for visitors when the University relocated from central Philadelphia to open land in West Philadelphia. There had been a small collection of antiquities at the university, and these, combined with others gathered on a late-19th-century expedition to Iraq, formed the basis for the museum.