Segment: The Ashmolean Museum
Episode: Viking Ep – British Isles Explorer
Air Date: 8th December 2019
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane

The Ashmolean Museum is considered one of Britain’s finest Museums of art and technology.

• Founded in 1683, the museum hosts an extraordinary series of collections ranging from Egyptian Mummies to contemporary art.
• The Egyptian collection is the world’s most important in pre-dynastic sculpture and ceramics outside of Cairo.
• The great Minoan civilization was the first advanced one on European soil, 2700 years before Christ and responsible for some incredible palaces.
• The museum is home to the largest collection from these ancient Cretans people found in Britain.
• Some of the civilisations on display in this museum are 8000 years old.
• The Greek and Roman Gallery is part of the largest surviving portion of the first major collection of classical antiquities in Britain, all collected in the early 17th century by the first great English art collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.
• One of the oldest pubs in Oxford is the Eagle and Child. Its first record is from 1694, but this pub has been claimed to be here since 1650. The private lounge at the back, known as the Rabbit Room, saw a group of the world’s finest writers come together. Known as the “Oxford writers group”, or “the Inklings”, this literary society included J.R.R. Tolkien, the Lewis brothers, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson and others who met here every Tuesday morning for about two decades.