A Museum Founded Around a Discovery

The Israel Museum opened in 1965, considerably later than many national museums elsewhere in this atlas, and its founding was directly shaped by the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries of the preceding two decades. The museum's Shrine of the Book, a building whose distinctive white dome was designed to evoke the lids of the clay jars in which some scrolls were found, was constructed specifically to display the scrolls and opened alongside the wider museum, giving the institution an architectural centerpiece built around a single set of texts rather than added to an existing general collection.

Unlike several national institutions covered in this atlas, the Israel Museum is legally an independent nonprofit foundation rather than a government department, funded through a combination of state support, philanthropic donation and its own revenue, a structure common among major museums outside directly state-run systems. Its broader collections, covering archaeology, Jewish ceremonial art, and international fine art, developed around the Shrine of the Book core over the following decades, making the scrolls display the founding nucleus of what later grew into a full national museum rather than one gallery within an older institution.