The Harvard Semitic Museum is reimagining its grand third-floor atrium gallery, featuring the arts of ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). This first installment showcases newly fabricated casts from the ancient scenes that once adorned Mesopotamian palace walls. Meticulously created by museum curators and Harvard students, these relief sculptures show how the ancient kings commemorated their military triumphs and civic achievements. Opening Saturday, December 16 in the Harvard Semitic Museum.

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology will celebrate its 150th anniversary year by opening All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology. Unveiled within a beautifully restored 4th floor gallery, this new exhibition will feature an astonishing array of over 600 objects from Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, many on display for the very first time. Together they will be woven into a compelling narrative tracing the early history of the museum’s collections and the birth of American anthropology as envisioned and shaped by the museum’s second director Frederic W. Putnam. On view at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

Harvard has a rich history of scholarly contributions to the various natural, physical, and social sciences. Time, Life, & Matter features many important instruments that helped make those contributions possible. Highlights of the exhibit include multitude of stories told in part by such items as a geometric sector designed by Galileo, electrical experimentation apparatus purchased on Harvard's behalf by Benjamin Franklin, a suite of clocks illustrating the development of modern synchronized time-keeping, medical apparatus designed, in part, by Charles Lindbergh, and the artifacts of top-secret research conducted during World War II. On view in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.