Short answers, pulled from the story.
One of the oldest known museums is Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, built by Princess Ennigaldi in modern Iraq at the end of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The site dates from around 530 BC and contained artifacts from earlier Mesopotamian civilizations.
The word museum comes from Latin and originally from the Ancient Greek mouseion, a place or temple dedicated to the muses, the patron divinities of the arts in Greek mythology. It referred especially to the Musaeum at Alexandria, built under Ptolemy I Soter about 280 BC.
The Capitoline Museums on the Capitoline Hill in Rome are widely considered the world's oldest public museum. Their origins trace to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated ancient bronze sculptures to the people of Rome, and they officially opened to the public in 1734 under Pope Clement XII.
The Louvre opened in Paris in 1793 during the French Revolution as France's first public museum. It gave free access to the former French royal collections for people of all stations and status for the first time, three days each ten-day decade of the French Republican Calendar.
As of 2009, funding for U.S. museums broke down into government support at 24.4 percent, private charitable giving at 36.5 percent, earned income at 27.6 percent, and investment income at 11.5 percent. Corporate giving accounted for just 5 percent of total funding.
NAGPRA is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990. It requires museums and federal agencies to identify, inventory, and return Native American human remains and associated funerary objects to lineal descendants, tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.
Over 15,000 museum employees are now represented by unions at more than 50 art museums in the United States, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. In 1971, staff at New York's Museum of Modern Art formed PASTA, the first union of professional employees at a privately financed museum.