“It belongs in a museum.” With these words, Indiana Jones, the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist, articulated an association between archaeologists, antiquities, and museums that has a very long history. Indeed, even Jones himself would likely marvel at the historic setting of the world’s first ‘ museum’, and the remarkable woman who is believed to have been its curator, the Mesopotamian princess, Ennigaldi-Nanna.

(C. Leonard Woolley, left and T. E. Lawrence at archaeological excavations in Syria, circa 1912-1914, discovered the first museum curator – Ennigaldi-Nanna)

Ennigaldi-Nanna was the priestess of the moon deity Sin, and the daughter of the Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus. In the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, around 530 BC, a small collection of antiquities was gathered, with Ennigaldi-Nanna working to arrange and label the varied artifacts.

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