Penn Museum

Haibin Wechsler of the Museum spoke about 2020 being the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac calendar. “A lot of famous writers are rats,” Wechsler said. “Shakespeare is a rat. Truman Capote is a rat. Charlotte Bronte is also a rat.”

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein of Perry World House and Brian Daniels of the Penn Museum spoke about the administration’s threat to strike Iranian cultural sites. “Just the threat is quite amazing, coming from the president of the United States,” said Zeid.

Brian Daniels and Richard Leventhal of the Museum were among the signers of a letter about the administration’s threats of retaliation against Iran by striking cultural sites. “If carried out, this threat would constitute a war crime under international instruments such as the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which the United States has joined,” they and others wrote.

The Penn Museum is bringing 3 boxes of ancient artifacts to the Iraq embassy in Washington, D.C. to be returned to their country of origin. “All the tablets were shipped out to be studied because no one in Iraq at the time could read them,” said the Museum’s Brad Hafford.

Julian Siggers of the Penn Museum spoke about the galleries’ reopening. “The collection is too good for it not to be a public museum,” he said. “This is the first time when you will really be able to see how we’ve opened this museum up, deliberately targeting it for public engagement.”

The Penn Museum’s re-opening celebration takes place this weekend. “What this museum does is tell the story of who we are and where we came from,” said director Julian Siggers. “And we designed our galleries with, very much, that in mind.”

The Penn Museum has confirmed research that identifies Minoan-era Crete as the production site of a variety of vibrant dyes, including red, purple, and yellow.