Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870, when the New York State Legislature granted it an Act of Incorporation on the 13th of April of that year. The museum first opened to the public on the 20th of February 1872, housed in a building at 681 Fifth Avenue.
In fiscal year 2025, the Met received 5,727,258 visitors, making it the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
The Temple of Dendur is a large sandstone Egyptian temple given to the United States in 1965 after the Egyptian government dismantled it to save it from rising waters caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. It was assembled in a dedicated wing at the Met in 1978 and is displayed partially surrounded by a reflecting pool, illuminated by a wall of windows overlooking Central Park.
The oldest items in the museum are flint bifaces in the Arms and Armor department, dating to 700,000-200,000 BCE. The Egyptian collection also contains a set of Acheulian flints from Deir el-Bahri that date to between 300,000 and 75,000 BCE, part of the Lower Paleolithic period.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing houses the Met's collection of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. It is named for Michael Rockefeller, the son of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who died while collecting works in New Guinea. The wing opened to the public in 1982 and holds more than 11,000 pieces across 40,000 square feet.
The largest gift in the museum's history was a $125 million donation from Oscar L. Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, received in November 2021. In exchange, the Met named its modern and contemporary art galleries after the Tangs, and by 2024 had raised $550 million toward the renovation of what is now called the Tang Wing.