8 US Museums with World-Class Ancient Civilization Collections

A recent guide showcases eight remarkable US museums renowned for their ancient civilization collections, demonstrating that one need not travel abroad to appreciate world history. The University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), established in 1919 by James Henry Breasted with funding from John D. Rockefeller, contains 350,000 artifacts, such as a 40-ton lamassu and the mummy of Meresamun. The Penn Museum in Philadelphia, founded in 1887, is home to the largest sphinx in the Western Hemisphere, weighing 13 tons and depicting Ramses II. Other notable institutions include the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, which opened in 1933 and features 4,000 years of antiquities.