mesogeios:

The Latin word museum (Greek: mouseion) has had a variety of meanings through the centuries. In classical times it signified a temple dedicated to the Muses, those nine sprightly and pleasantly amoral young goddesses who watched over the welfare of the epic, music, love poetry, oratory, history, tragedy, comedy, the dance, and astronomy. The most famous museum of that era was founded at Alexandria about the 3rd century BC by Ptolemy Soter (“Preserver”) and was destroyed during various civil disturbances in the 3rd century AD. The Mouseion of Alexandria had some objects, including statues of thinkers, astronomical and surgical instruments, elephant trunks and animal hides, and a botanical and zoological park, but it was chiefly a university or philosophical academy—a kind of institute of advanced study with many prominent scholars in residence and supported by the state. The museum and the great international library of papyrus rolls and other writings collected by Alexander the Great were housed in the royal quarter of the city known as the Bruchium. Euclid headed the mathematics faculty and wrote his Elements of Geometry there. Archimedes, Appolonius of Perga, and Eratosthenes were only a few of the noted scientists and scholars who lived in the king’s household and made use of the library, lecture halls, covered walks, refectory, laboratories for dissection and scientific studies, and botanical and zoological gardens. Bearing in mind that musing and amusement are interrelated and reflect pondering and deep thought as well as diversion and entertainment, it is no surprise that museums have long been considered to be places of study as well as repositories of collections. Didier Maleuvre’s engaging description of a museum emphasizes the pondering of objects in an exhibit or collection quite apart from a museum’s didactic program: 

“[T]he museum does give free time—freedom to loiter and tarry, to indulge the long double-take, the retracing of steps, the dreamy pause, the regress and ingress of reverie, the wending progress that is engagement. It is a tempo of consciousness disarming to modern audience conditioned to fear open-ended silence as a forerunner to boredom.”

—Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums