Penn Museum | Penn Today

Susan Radov leads a tour of the China Gallery with sculptures in the background

A tour of the ancient world—in Mandarin

The Penn Museum offers tours of its exhibits in Mandarin, increasing cross-cultural access to its invaluable assemblage of objects on display, the only known museum in Philadelphia with regularly scheduled tours in the language.

a 4,000-year-old model of a rowing boat featuring 16 figures

Egypt on display

Penn Museum opens a new Ancient Egypt exhibition to display artifacts and their conservation during its Building Transformation project.

Penn Museum preserves a little bit of Egypt for display during renovation

The Penn Museum’s Jennifer Wegner and Julian Siggers spoke about the new, temporary exhibit, “Ancient Egypt: From Discovery to Display.” The display, designed to resemble an archeological lab, “was an opportunity for us to bring the public to see how a gallery unfolds,” said Siggers.

A prehistoric city with homes, earthen mounds, and pathways

Marking the winter solstice, from Neolithic times to today

For millennia, people have marked the winter solstice with rituals and celebrations—and they continue to do so today. Penn Museum anthropologists Lucy Fowler Williams and Megan Kassabaum discuss both ancient and contemporary customs associated with attending to the shortest day of the year.

Bumpin' Uglies DJs at a Crawl Out Thursday party

Penn Museum programming revamped

With building renovations underway, the Penn Museum has freshened up its roster of fun things to do.

Unlocking the mystery of a 2,000-year-old child mummy

The Penn Museum, in collaboration with CHOP, conducted a CT scan on an Egyptian child mummy with hopes of learning more about the ancient remains. “She looks like she's the size of a 2-year-old, but her skeletal development, the growth of her teeth and bones, is more like a 5-year-old,” the Museum’s Samantha Cox said. “Maybe a type of dwarfism.”

A new take on the 19th-century skull collection of Samuel Morton

After unearthing and analyzing handwritten documentation from scientist Samuel Morton, doctoral candidate Paul Wolff Mitchell drew a new conclusion about the infamous 19th-century collection: Though Morton accurately measured the brain size of hundreds of human skulls, racist bias still plagued his science.

Fire at the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, on September 2, 2018. Photo by Felipe Milanez

Collective grief over loss from Brazil’s National Museum fire

Members of the Penn Museum’s archeological community discuss the devastation felt over the destruction of an invaluable piece of world history.

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