31134 Hildesheim
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The Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum combines two formerly separate museums under one roof. The City Museum (“Städtisches Museum”) was initiated in 1844 by citizens of Hildesheim and opened in 1845. It was later renamed Roemer-Museum in honour of Hermann Roemer (1816–1894), one of its founders and subsequently one of its directors. The Pelizaeus-Museum opened in 1911 and goes back to an endowment by merchant Wilhelm Pelizaeus (1851–1930). While the collections of the Pelizaeus-Museum mainly consist of important holdings of art from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity, the comprehensive collections of the Roemer-Museum cover a very wide range including city and regional history as well as natural history, art history, and ethnology.
The ethnographic collections comprise about 12,000 objects from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. The most renowned collections are those from China (Ming and Qing dynasties) and pre-Hispanic South America. The collections from Africa and Oceania have a focus on the regions of the former German colonies, but they also include objects from the other European colonies as well as from independent states.