Musaeum

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The Musaeum at Alexandria (Greek: Μουσείον της Αλεξάνδρειας), which included the famous Library of Alexandria,^[1] was an institution apparently founded by Ptolemy I Soter or, perhaps more likely, Ptolemy II Philadelphus^[2] at ancient Alexandria in Egypt which remained supported by the patronage of the royal family of the Ptolemies. Such a Greek Mouseion was the home of music or poetry, a philosophical school and library such as Plato's Academy, also a gallery of sacred texts.^[3] Mouseion, connoting an assemblage gathered together under the protection of the Muses, was the title given to a collection of stories about the esteemed writers of the past assembled by Alcidamas, an Athenian sophist of the fourth century BCE.

Though the Musaeum at Alexandria did not have a collection of sculpture and painting presented as works of art,^[4] as was assembled by the Ptolemies' rival Attalus at Pergamon, it did have a room devoted to the study of anatomy and an installation for astronomical observations. Rather than simply a museum in the sense that has developed since the Renaissance, it was an institution that brought together some of the best scholars of the Hellenistic world, as Germain Bazin compared it, "analogous to the modern Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton or to the Collège de France on Paris."^[5]

Strabo gives an account of the Musaeum as it was in his day:

"The Mouseion is also part of the palaces, possessing a peripatos^[6] and exedra^[7] and large oikos, in which the common table^[8] of the philologoi, men who are members of the Mouseion, is located. This synodos has property in common and a priest in charge of the Mouseion, formerly appointed by the kings, but now by Caesar."^[9]

The edited versions of the Greek literary canon that we know today, from Homer and Hesiod forward, exist in editions that were collated and corrected by the scholars assembled in the Musaeum at Alexandria.

This original Musaeum or Institution of the Muses was the source for the modern usage of the word museum. In early modern France it denoted as much a community of scholars brought together under one roof as it did the collections themselves. French and English writers referred to these collections as a "cabinet" as in "a cabinet of curiosities." A catalogue of the 17th century collection of John Tradescant the elder and his son of the same name, which was the founding core of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was published as Musaeum Tradescantianum: or, a Collection of Rarities. Preserved at South-Lambeth near London by John Tradescant, 1656.

The classic period of the Musaeum did not survive the purge and expulsion of most of the intellectuals attached to it in 145 BCE, when Aristarchus of Samothrace resigned his position; at any rate, the sources that best describe the Musaeum and library, Johannes Tzetzes and others, all Byzantine and late, do not mention any further directors.^[10]

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[edit] References

• Canfora, Luciano, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, 1987. (The only modern history.)
• Lee, "The Musaeum of Alexandria and the formation of the 'Museum' in eighteenth-century France," in The Art Bulletin, September 1997.

[edit] Notes