Penn Museum is getting its biggest makeover in 118 years
Soaring, 40-foot portal and columns of a temple from the palace of Merenptah will be displayed intact for first time. Rendering by Tom Fricker (Fricker Studio) and Carl Peterson (Brightman Designs). The Penn Museum is internationally famous for its incomparable collection of mummies and architectural elements from ancient Egypt (not to mention its sphinx), its dazzling artifacts from the Royal Tomb of Ur in the Middle East, and for its Mayan writing on stone shafts and tablets, some of the oldest carved in the Western hemisphere. It is less congenially known for displaying these objects in some of the darkest, hottest, and timelessly static galleries known to humankind.