The Penn Museum transforms understanding of the human experience. This is our mission, one that we carry out every day in our galleries, labs, field sites, programs, and classrooms. Since its founding in 1887, the Museum has been a place of discovery. We house and care for a collection of more than one million objects from around the world, many of them excavated by Penn archaeologists—from artifacts that reveal our first existence on earth to the largest Sphinx you can see in the western hemisphere. We invite you to immerse yourself in these objects and their stories, and discover your place in the great arc of human history.