The First Museum Was Established By a Babylonian Woman 2,500 Years Ago

The first known museum in history highlights the remarkable achievements of a woman whose vision and innovation helped shape the museums of today.

This very first museum was inside a temple precinct, scented with baked clay and incense, and was run by a woman with an incredible love for history. Around 530 BC, in the shadow of the great ziggurat of Ur, Babylonian princess and high priestess Ennigaldi-Nanna assembled a collection that included objects already ancient in her time. The ziggurat at Ur was a massive stepped temple that was dedicated to the moon god Nanna in the ancient city of Ur, near modern Nasiriyah of Southern Iraq.

The princess arranged all these artifacts so that people could learn from the past rather than just see them as simple objects. Her intent was clear: Ennigaldi knew how to curate stories. Inscribed bricks, royal sculptures, and foundation deposits—pulled from older cities and even older kings—sat together in deliberate groupings, much like the museums of modern times.

How did we come to the conclusion that the first museum was established by a woman?

What gave us such insight into this fascinating world was the signage that was found. During excavations in 1925, archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley stumbled upon these rooms and discovered not just displays but labels. These were drum-shaped clay tags written in multiple languages, including Sumerian. One survives to this day in the British Museum, a fired clay cylinder that replicates an older inscription, identifying and explaining the object’s origin.

We are talking, quite literally, about metadata long before the term existed. This is a crucial piece of evidence, as it shows that the audience mattered to this very first museum created by a woman. Visitors were not left to guess; they were guided and given the chance to understand the intent and logic behind the displays.

Multilingual interpretation was another unique element in Ennigaldi’s gallery, allowing visitors and readers of diverse backgrounds to decode the same story.

Was it truly a museum?

One might wonder, however, whether it is anachronistic to label this a museum. The answer to this is: not really. If a museum is a place that collects, conserves, orders, and interprets objects for learning, then Ennigaldi’s rooms check every box. The ages of the artifacts spanned centuries. This was a deliberate choice that only makes sense if they were meant to be viewed together. Behind the scenes, there is evidence that the people there showed real care: Mesopotamians practiced restoration and archiving long before the Renaissance made the idea fashionable in Europe.

The labels themselves have a fascinating backstory, too. Many were scholarly copies, texts first written by named scribes in the seventh century BC, which were then kept and reused to interpret even older discoveries. In other words, the museum actively participated in local history, showcasing the timeline up to that point. Information moved forward across generations, edited and recontextualized each time, reflecting a foundational principle of museums.

Who was the woman who set it all up?

Ennigaldi was the daughter of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and a ruler famous for his passion for antiquities. Yet the collection at Ur, considered the first museum ever and said to have been established by a woman, helped visitors situate themselves in a long, layered story that made logical sense to them. Audience-aware labels, thematic groupings, and a clear educational purpose were all part of it—elements that feel remarkably modern.

Placing a woman at the very start of museology changes the usual patriarchal narrative, and that is significant. It broadens the frame of who is remembered as a shaper of knowledge, not just a subject of it. When we talk about the “birth of the museum,” we are not obliged to start in fifteenth-century Italy; we can begin in southern Mesopotamia, with a princess-priestess who understood that objects carry memory best when someone actively explains their meanings to people.

Walk into any gallery today, read a caption, and you are following a path first pressed into clay at Ur in what is today’s troubled Iraq. The core idea has not changed at all: use things that are carefully chosen, contextualized, and shared, and you can define national identity and spark understanding among the masses. Museums, at their best, are time machines with labels. They ask us not simply to look but to think: Who made this, why was it preserved, and what thread connects us to those hands?

Ennigaldi’s answer was simple: gather what matters, explain it clearly, place old voices in conversation, and let your visitors stitch themselves into the story. As the founder of the first museum, this remarkable Babylonian princess set a model that, two and a half millennia later, remains a solid set of guidelines for any curator.