Calling Ancient World Museums – Share your Visitor Figures and Collections Data!

2008-03-22 03-23 Boston 088 Museum of Fine Arts

Are you a museum director, curator, employee, scholar, fan or friend of someone in the know? We want to hear from you! We’re working on an ambitious new project at Heritage Key to list the world’s top 100 ancient world museums by visitor and collection numbers.

In the future we’ll have interactive maps, lists of the greatest artefacts in each museum and much more, as the list becomes the world’s most comprehensive chart of the planet’s biggest ancient world institutions.

Why should I nominate my museum?

Just look at others: the Art Newspaper’s art museums list and the Times’ 100 Companies list have become institutions in their field, and have brought a huge amount of public awareness to their respective fields. Our project is a celebration of museums: we want to get the world passionate about the ancient world – and get more people flocking to museums everywhere.

Information required

Many of the largest museums make the info we need publicly available, but to be considered for our list museums need to let us know a few important things:

  • Visitor figures dating back to 2007. If the museum is part of a wider group of museums (eg the Smithsonian museums, many of which hold no ancient artefacts) just tell us numbers for the one museum.
  • The total number of ancient artefacts in the museum’s collection. If you’re unsure about what ‘ancient’ is, take a look at Jon’s blog here.
  • The total number of these artefacts currently on display in the museum.

We need all three of these figures for your museum to be inaugurated on our list, which promises to be a spectacular and unprecedented database of the world’s greatest ancient world museums and artefacts. If you have access to the above info let us know as soon as possible via our contact email, or .