Penn Museum: Journey To The City

Client: University of Pensylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Project: Near East Gallery Interpretation Masterplan and Content

Collaborators: Haley Sharpe Design

Penn Museum in Philadelphia has one of the finest archaeological material collections from the world’s first knwn cities in Mesopotamia. Working with exhibition designers, Haley Sharpe Design, we developed the Interpretation Masterplan and narrative for the a new set of galleries showcasing this amazing collection.

In a number of trips over to the States we visited the site and workshopped with the curatorial, collections and education teams. The academic and curatorial team guided us through the collections, which include thousands of clay tablets of cuneiform writing, beautiful temple carvings and the crushed skulls of guards entombed with a dead queen.

Working around the narrative theme Journey To The City, the project became a dynamic discovery of this unique and important chapter in human history. The interpretation masterplan brought together themes that explore the fundamentals of human settlement and society. 

This exhibition showcases and traces some of the connections between the past and present, examining some of the fundamentals of what it means to live in societies across time and giving  unparalleled access to an incredible collection.

In 2018, Tim was invited to speak about the interpretation of cuneiform writing in museums at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.