The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, has strong claims to be the oldest surviving institutional museum open to the public, yet, it is also the private museum of the University of Oxford. Over the centuries a continuing pattern of generous benefaction has accumulated astonishing collections in the university, and those in the fields of art and archaeology are concentrated in the Ashmolean. They range in time, from finds seven or eight thousand years old to 20th-century masterpieces.