The Oriental Institute - #oi100

Both a pioneering interdisciplinary research center and a world-renowned museum, the OI aims to understand, reveal, and protect the earliest civilizations. One hundred years ago, James Henry Breasted founded the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago with a radical idea: he insisted that who we are—how we live as humans together—began not in Greece or Rome, but rather in complex civilizations that emerged in a region he vividly named “The Fertile Crescent.” Breasted’s legacy of intellectual and technological innovation lives on at the OI today—in transformative research and fieldwork, and in a world-renowned museum. As we seek a better understanding of our own time, the OI’s insights—which started with a determination to look where others didn’t—continue to offer us new ways of thinking about what connects us and why.