What’s in a name? Musings on ‘Museums’

Although museums may feel ubiquitous to us today, appearing across the world and in many shapes and sizes, the words we use to describe them are far from universal.

Given the familiarity many of us have with museums, we can certainly be excused for not stopping to think about the name we give them, in English ‘museum’. Many languages have similar words, with a shared etymology (or origin) being the Ancient Greek term Μουσεῖον (museion), meaning ‘a seat/place of the Muses’.

In Greek mythology, the Muses were goddesses of the arts, literature and science, thought to inspire poetry and myth. The name and number of Muses did vary depending on time and location, for example Disney’s Hercules has five Muses – and famously that film is 100% historically accurate!

In the Classical period, around the 5th century BC, nine Muses were named: Calliope, Clio, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia and Urania. Later in the Hellenistic period of Greece, they began to be associated with specific areas of knowledge, such as Calliope and epic poetry, or Urania and astronomy (one of the more predictable links!).

Also, during the Hellenistic Period in Egypt, Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II established the Mouseion of Alexandria, including the famous Library of Alexandria, as a research institution dedicated to the Muses. This term then became ‘museum’ in Latin, and now many modern languages use terms for museums that share that etymology. A few examples are museo in Spanish, musée in French or muzium in Malay.

The spread of these terms is closely tied to the global expansion of European museum models during colonialism, exporting not only museums as institutions but also the terminology behind them. Such colonialism also impacted the ways in which knowledge was created and shared in Indigenous societies, as museums were used as part of a wider method of control, exerting power in an attempt to ‘civilise’ local populations. However, as we have explored in our course, if we use indigenous models of cultural preservation, we can acknowledge and see the many ways outside of Western museums that cultural heritage has been established through time.

While terminology often came with the colonial institutions, the linguistic legacy was uneven with some countries adopting the European terms whereas others created new terms based on their own language:

• For example, the Arabic word for museum, مَتْحَف , which can be transliterated as matḥaf, means ‘place of many rarities or unique/precious gifts’.

• Many South Asian countries use more localised terminology such as the Bengali জাদুঘর (Jādughara) meaning ‘magic house’ or the Hindi संग्रहालय (saṅgrahālay) meaning ‘a collection place’.

• In East Asian languages like Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin, the term for a museum is a compound word, such as 博物館 or 博物馆, based on compounds meaning ‘broad/extensive’ + ‘objects’ + ‘building’, conveying a meaning of ‘building of many objects’.

By looking at how different languages and their linguistic framing for museums, could we begin to consider if those concepts are reflected in institutions? Is the focus on collections, on knowledge, on rarity or divinity? These linguistic differences may provide an insight into distinct cultural approaches and understandings of what a museum is for.

Katy Lawrence is currently a student on the MA Museum Studies program at the University of Leicester. Author's note: Whilst I have attempted to confirm these translation and etymologies, I acknowledge that I am not an expert on some of the languages mentioned in this article and if I have made mistakes please do let me know as I would be happy to make any changes.