From the Nile to the Euphrates: Creating the Harvard Semitic Museum Date: Friday, December 5, 2014 (All day) See also: Exhibition Location: Harvard Semitic Museum This exhibition celebrates the vision of the Harvard Semitic Museum’s founder, David Gordon Lyon (1852–1935). Professor Lyon assembled a rich collection of antiquities from the Semitic cultures of the ancient Near East, including the Holy Land, and created the museum to inspire visitors to discover and explore Semitic contributions to world civilization. The exhibition tells the intriguing story of the museum’s nineteenth-century beginning and features Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, ancient Palestinian pottery, Egyptian funerary art, and ethnographic treasures, along with Lyon’s own travel and excavation photographs.