The Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683. Our world famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time.
We are open every day, 10am–5pm. Admission is free.
Membership gives you unlimited access to exhibitions, members-only previews and curator-led talks and tours, a members’ magazine and events handbook sent to your door, as well as discounts across our shop, restaurant and café.
Join us today – your support helps keep our permanent collections free.
About 9,000 years ago this human skull was covered with plaster and the eye-sockets inlaid with cowrie shells, perhaps to represent the dead individual. This is how the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon interpreted the skull when she excavated it along with a group of six others at Jericho in 1953. If correct, it would make this the oldest portrait in the Ashmolean Museum.
