Museums of Oxford

Note: all images taken by myself unless otherwise noted.

The Ashmolean Museum

This is the University of Oxford's museum of art and archaeology, founded by Elias Ashmole (1617 - 1692) who gifted his collection to the University. It opened as Britain's first public museum, and the world's first University museum, in 1683 (more detailed information at Ashmolean.com). The original museum building is now the History of Science Museum.

True to form I have seen my early love of the ancient Classical Greek & Roman world slowly metamorphosis into a love of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age, specifically the period from about 4000 bce to the end of the Bronze Age that occurred roughly between 1200 & 1150 bce. 

Sumerian culture developed in the area south of the close confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, in what is now southern Iraq.  One of their greatest contributions to humanity was the gift of writing, known to us as cuneiform. The name cuneiform is a coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped". It took the invention of pottery in order for there to be a medium upon which early writing was applied. There is general agreement that writing was developed before 3200bce and continued in use until 1st century ce when the general use of Latinised alphabetical scripts became the norm.

Early examples of writing are somewhat simplistic, but within a few hundred years cuneiform developed into a highly complex and structured writing system that not only outlived it's Sumerian origins, but continued to be used by the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Luwians, the Hurrians, the Mitani, and the Babylonians, just to name some of the many Bronze Age cultures who adopted the Sumerian writing system and applied it to their own spoken languages. A modern analogy would be the way Latin script we use to write English is also used for French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Turkish etc.

Enough with the lecture. Let's see some 3000 to 4500 year old artefacts.

Sumerian Kings list

The main artefact I wanted to see was the Sumerian Kings List. I was not disappointed. It has two columns down each side and lists the legendary Kings before the deluge and then those after the deluge. One of the post deluge names is that of Gilgamesh, making him one of the first real rulers we have epigraphic evidence for.

This particular version dates to the late Assyrian period. The original was created around 1700 - 1800 BCE.

A copy of the golden mask of Agamemnon found by Schleimann whilst digging at Mycenae in Greece

The History of Science Museum

In 1931, Albert Einstein was invited to give a series of three lectures at Oxford. The blackboard he used in the second lecture was saved for prosperity. It is on show within this museum