If your primary exposure to historical museums is the Box Office hit series “Night in the Museum”, then a trip to the Oriental Institute Museum of Chicago is sorely due. The entrance itself is an ode to the past, a beveled stone archway draped in vines and creepers and inset with two elaborately carved wooden doors. Lamassu, a winged hybrid between a bull and a human, serenely looks upon visitors from his vantage point 16 feet above ground against stone weighing 40tons. The relief is the center of attraction in one of only three locations worldwide with a reconstruction of an Assyrian Palace, the site in Chicago mirroring the cavernous chambers of King Sargon II from 700BC. The next check-point of a museum tour would be The Joseph and Mary Grimshaw Egyptian Gallery, where you can greet King Tutankhamen of Luxor, the tallest ancient Egyptian statue in the west, as part of the largest collection of Egyptian trinkets and artifacts in the US. For an even further dial back on the time machine, visit the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery where hints to human life from 80,000 BC are put on display.

Hosted in the various lecture halls and exhibit spaces are public lectures by the excavators of history themselves from the affiliated Oriental Institute. Special exhibits by visiting groups detailing the investigative process and real time updates on projects scattered throughout the Middle East never fail to surprise and amaze visitors while they’re here. At the Oriental Institute Museum, these objects are more than just material possessions discarded by time but a conduit for the tales of our ancestors who have so much still left to tell us.