Allard Pierson

About

The Allard Pierson Museum is the archaeological museum of the University of Amsterdam. It is situated at the Oude Turfmarkt 127 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Artifacts from the ancient civilizations of ancient Egypt, the Near East, the Greek World, Etruria, and the Roman Empire are curated and exhibited in this museum.

Allard Pierson: The name of the Allard Pierson Museum derives from the first professor of classical archaeology at the University of Amsterdam, Allard Pierson (1831–1896). This former clergyman was invited in 1877 to occupy the chair of Aesthetics, Art History, and Modern Languages at the newly founded university. His passion for antiquity, fuelled by his travels to the Mediterranean area, led to his assembling a collection of plaster casts from 1877 to 1895.

Founding: The second professor of archeology at the University of Amsterdam, Jan Six, had a large personal collection of books and antique objects. At his death in 1926, the university had an interest in acquiring his collection. In 1932, Pierson's son Jan Lodewijk established the Allard Pierson Foundation in order to make the antiquities collection available for research and teaching. The collection...