Penn Museum
One of the world's great archaeology museums, hiding in plain sight in West Philly.
The Penn Museum — formally the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology — is one of the oldest and most significant archaeology museums in the United States. Founded in 1887 and housed in a gorgeous Mediterranean Revival building on Penn's campus, it holds nearly a million objects collected from excavations across Egypt, Mesopotamia, the ancient Near East, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. This is a serious research institution with serious collections: not a replica in sight, just the real thing, accumulated over more than a century of fieldwork.
The experience rewards slow looking. The Egyptian galleries hold a 3,000-year-old sphinx — one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere — that was once displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The Mesopotamian galleries feature artifacts from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, including gold headdresses and lyres of extraordinary craftsmanship. The museum also has strong collections from ancient Greece and Rome, sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous North America. The rotunda, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, is spectacular on its own terms.
The Penn Museum sits at the corner of 33rd and South Street in University City, right on the edge of Penn's campus. It's walkable from 34th Street Station on the Market-Frankford Line and from 30th Street Station. Crowds are generally light compared to what you'd find at a comparable collection in New York or Washington — which is honestly baffling, but great news for you. Admission is reasonably priced, and Penn students and Penn affiliates get in free. Give yourself at least two to three hours; serious visitors will want half a day.