Current Exhibitions
Houses of Ancient Israel
The Houses of Ancient Israel: Domestic, Royal, Divine offers a view of life in an ancient Near Eastern agricultural society. The exhibit contains a full scale replica of an ancient Israelite home. The exhibit is arranged in terms of the buildings - the houses - associated with the different levels of that society: family dwelling, palace and temple.
Monuments from Mesopotamia
This gallery is closed for renovations and exhibition development.
This exhibition consists of a wonderful collection of Mesopotamian casts, including the Laws of Hammurabi, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, and the Stela of Esarhaddon, offering a truly unique opportunity for visitors to experience these ancient works of art all in one gallery.
Ancient Cyprus: The Cesnola Collection
In 1865, General Luigi de Palma Cesnola, a naturalized Italian American, became the United States' consul to Cyprus, and while there, he began to acquire antiquities. While Cesnola's excavations on the island in the 1860-70s were, frankly, treasure hunts, he did draw attention to the rich antiquity of the land. When he left Cyprus, he took with him thousands of objects, which formed part of the original collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
In 1995, the museum acquired, in a three-way exchange with the Stanford University Museums and the Harvard University Art Museums, a portion of the famous Cesnola collection which Stanford had purchased from the Met. The museum's collection comprises over 1300 ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, stone, glass, and metal objects from Cyprus, dating from ca. 2300 BCE to 700 CE.
The Cesnola Online Collection has been taken offline for maintenance