The Tradescant collection was a seventeenth-century wonder: antique coins, books, engravings, geological specimens, zoological oddities, and the famous dodo. Ashmole, a scholar, antiquary, and -- less admirably -- a man who secured the collection through a legal dispute with Tradescant's widow, donated it to Oxford with two stipulations: a permanent lecturer in anthropology must be appointed, and a building must be provided for the collection alone. The university obliged, constructing a building on Broad Street sometimes attributed to Christopher Wren or Thomas Wood. Naturalist Robert Plot became the first keeper. The Ashmolean was not only Britain's first public museum but the world's second university museum, after the Kunstmuseum Basel, which the University of Basel had established in 1661.

By the nineteenth century, the Broad Street building was inadequate for a collection that had grown far beyond Ashmole's original gift. Charles Robert Cockerell designed the present neoclassical building on Beaumont Street, which opened in 1845. The facade, with its grand portico of Ionic columns, faces the Randolph Hotel across the street and announces, in stone, the seriousness of what lies inside. The old building on Broad Street became the Museum of the History of Science. Today, the Ashmolean's collections span from predynastic Egyptian artefacts and Minoan frescoes to Renaissance paintings, Islamic art, and Chinese ceramics. The museum was comprehensively refurbished in a 39-million-pound project completed in 2009, with new galleries for Egypt and Nubia unveiled in 2011.

The depth of the Ashmolean's collection is staggering for a museum of its size. Among the antiquities are the Alfred Jewel -- a ninth-century gold, enamel, and rock crystal artefact believed to have been commissioned by Alfred the Great -- and the Parian Marble, a Greek chronicle carved in the third century BC that provides crucial dates for ancient history. The art collection includes works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Turner, and Picasso. The museum holds what may be the finest collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings in existence, along with an outstanding collection of prints. Recent additions include galleries of nineteenth-century art redisplayed in 2016. The breadth is the point: this is a museum where a visitor can move from an Egyptian mummy to a Stradivarius violin to a Cezanne landscape without leaving the building.

The Ashmolean sits at the heart of Oxford's museum quarter, alongside the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, and -- through the Museum of Natural History -- the Pitt Rivers Museum behind. Admission is free. On a quiet Tuesday afternoon in term time, the galleries can be nearly empty, allowing an intimacy with the objects that larger national museums rarely permit. The building itself repays attention: Cockerell's interior spaces, flooded with natural light from overhead lanterns, create a sequence of rooms that feel less like exhibition halls than the private library of a particularly well-travelled mind. Which, in a sense, is exactly what the museum has always been -- a collection that began with the curiosity of two gardeners and their patron, and grew to encompass much of human civilisation.