MIM (musée) Musée des minéraux - Beyrouth 01

The Mim Museum is a private museum in

Beirut Beirut, french: Beyrouth is the capital and largest city of Lebanon. , Greater Beirut has a population of 2.5 million, which makes it the third-largest city in the Levant region. The city is situated on a peninsula at the midpoint o ...

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to Lebanon–Syria border, the north and east and Israel to Blue ...

. The museum displays more than 2000

mineral In geology and mineralogy, a mineral or mineral species is, broadly speaking, a solid chemical compound with a fairly well-defined chemical composition and a specific crystal structure that occurs naturally in pure form.John P. Rafferty, ed. (2 ...

s, representing 450 different species from 70 countries, and is considered one of the most significant private collections of minerals in the world. It opened in 2013. MIM (musée) Musée des minéraux - Beyrouth 02

MIM (musée) Musée des minéraux - Beyrouth 02

The museum also hosts an exhibition of marine and flying

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s from Lebanon.

History

The MIM mineral collection was put together from 1997 by Salim Eddé, chemical engineer and co-founder of the computer company Murex4. In 2004, he decided to make his collection accessible to the public and designed the first museum of its kind in Lebanon. Eddé presented the idea to Father René Chamussy, rector of the Saint Joseph University, who adopted it and reserved for the collection 1,300 m2 in the basement of a building then under construction on the campus near the

National Museum of Beirut The National Museum of Beirut ( ar, متحف بيروت الوطنيّ, ''Matḥaf Bayrūt al-waṭanī'' or French: Musée national de Beyrouth) is the principal museum of archaeology in Lebanon. The collection begun after World War I, and the m ...

. During the next ten years, Eddé continued to build up his collection, assisted by Jean-Claude Boulliard, curator of the Sorbonne collection. The inauguration of the museum, built on the personal funds of the collector, finally took place in October 2013. File:Mim emerald.jpg, Large, di-hexagonal prismatic crystal of 1,390 carats uncut with a deep green color. It is transparent and features few inclusions in the upper 2/3, and is translucent in the lower part. File:Mimodactylus.png, Fossil of ''

Mimodactylus ''Mimodactylus'' is a genus of mimodactylid pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous of what is now Lebanon. Discovery and naming In the ''Lagerstätte'' of Hjoula, ten kilometres inland from the port of Byblos, commercial fossil h ...

'', a

pterosaur Pterosaurs (; from Greek ''pteron'' and ''sauros'', meaning "wing lizard") is an extinct clade of flying reptiles in the order, Pterosauria. They existed during most of the Mesozoic: from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 ...

from

Hjoula Hjoula ( ar, حجولا) is a municipality in the Byblos District of Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate, Lebanon. It is 70 kilometers north of Beirut. Hjoula has an elevation of between 920 and 1,100 meters above sea level. Hjoula has a total land area o ...

named after the museum File:MIM (musée) Musée des minéraux - Beyrouth 03.jpg, The stone at the top and in the middle is a Baryte from Morocco. It is nicknamed by the mim museum "Blue Cedar"

References

External links

Mim Museum Facebook page
Museums in Beirut Mineralogy museums {{Lebanon-museum-stub

History

See also

References

External links