Photo credit: Mark Hillary, Flickr
Founded in 1683, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, is the world’s oldest university museum. To put it in perspective, the year it first opened, the Ottoman Empire was beginning its steady decline, and a plot had just been uncovered to assassinate Charles II of England. Among the museum’s first treasures was the lantern that Guy Fawkes carried when he was arrested attempting to blow up Britain’s Houses of Parliament, and the mantle that belonged to Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’s father. Today its collection includes contemporary art, Egyptian mummies and the world’s largest collection of Raphael drawings.
