Museum

Come in. Entry is free.

Above you, beneath the cavernous roof of the domed lobby, towers the skeleton of an enormous dinosaur. Turn to the gallery on the left and there are magnificent pieces of art to marvel at, painted hundreds of years ago. To the right, fragments of vanished civilisations glisten behind glass. Somewhere upstairs, in a starlit planetarium, a film explains the entire history of the universe in a few wonder-filled minutes.

And, all around you, are nine Greek goddesses.

The Muses.

In Greek mythology, they presided over poetry, music, history, tragedy, comedy, dance, astronomy and other realms of art and learning. And from them came the Greek mouseion: literally, a place of the Muses.

Not, originally, a place for putting old things out neatly, just to look at.

A mouseion was a place devoted to the Muses and to the intellectual and creative pursuits they inspired. And nowhere was that idea realised more spectacularly than in ancient Alexandria.

Its great Mouseion, of which the legendary Library formed a part, brought scholars together to read, write, debate, teach and investigate the world around them. Literature, mathematics, astronomy, medicine: this was a place at the vanguard of discovery, alive with people trying to understand the world and chart previously unexplored parts of the map of human knowledge.

Our modern museum came much later. In Renaissance Europe, collectors assembled cabinets of curiosities filled with art, antiquities, specimens and strange objects gathered from across the world. Then, in 1683, Oxford’s Ashmolean opened its doors, one of the earliest public museums of the kind we’d begin to recognise today.

But the Muses never left.

We may go to museums to encounter what came before us, but like those ancient scholars, we don’t just look backwards.

We stand before a painting and it changes how we see. We gaze up at the bones of a creature that walked the Earth millions of years ago and feel deep time. We read the words of someone living long ago, in a different time and place, but immediately understand how they feel. We examine objects once held by hands thousands of years before our own and, occasionally, even get to hold them ourselves.

With a pair of those white gloves on, of course.

And often, what has already been discovered, created and understood makes us wonder what might come next.

So next time you walk into a museum, remember:

You are about to walk among the Muses.

- the word collector, behind the counter

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