Jason Williams, age 13, of Burlington, Vt., for his question:
WHEN WAS THE FIRST MUSEUM STARTED?
A museum is an institution that holds collections of art objects, historic items or scientific material that is saved and displayed for the pleasure of the general public. The word comes from the Greek word "mouseion," which was a temple of Muses, the goddess of arts and sciences.
As early as 300 B.C. the word was used for a library and research center in Alexandria, Egypt.
Temples in ancient Greece were places where beautiful ornaments of gold, silver or bronze were displayed, along with collections of statues, vases and paintings. The general public often had a chance to see the collections.
Palaces and temples in China and Japan before A.D. 1000 had impressive collections of art objects.
During the 1400s and 1500s European explorers brought back lots of treasures from the Far East and from the Americans. Many of the items were displayed in cabinets that lined the walls of long, narrow rooms called galleries. The collections were called "cabinets."
During the 1500s and 1600s, royal families hired craftsmen and artists to create art objects and furnishings which they displayed in their private galleries.
The first public museum started in 1683 at oxford University in England. Called the Ashmolean, it featured rare or strange objects collected by an English scholar named Elias Ashmole.
The demand for more museums grew during the 1700s as people started to believe that education should be provided for one and all.
The British Museum in London was founded in 1753. It has a fine collection of manuscripts, plant specimens and curiosities. The collections had in the past belonged to kings and noblemen.
Starting in 1750, the French royal art collection was put on display in the Palais de Luxembourg from time to time for the public to view. After the French Revolution in 1795, the collections were moved to the Louvre, which had become a public museum in 1793.
The first museum to open in the American colonies was the Charleston Library Society. It opened in 1773 and featured objects that were related to South Carolina's natural history.
An artist named Charles Wilson Peale opened a museum in his Philadelphia home in 1780. Portraits of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other American Revolution luminaries were shown along with mineral and animal specimens.
A Massachusetts banker named George Peabody left a great deal of money to Harvard and Yale Universities in 1860 for the purpose of starting science museums.