ABSTRACT
Myths, as Chapter 4 demonstrated, are integral to an understanding of the ways in which nations are imagined and expressed within museums. Common types of origins myths in museums can be found across the world. The following are just a representative sample: a God-chosen people, the concept of glorious beginnings located within a brave foundational moment, a remembrance of endurance, suffering and stoicism, the idea of racial purity, a long memory rooted in a great civilisation, a great destiny, historical continuity, the world mission, the nation as a family and as a mother, its uniqueness, its moral superiority, its democratic inheritance, its championing of freedoms, its role in protecting civilisation, its homogeneity, its diversity, the peasantry or the popular classes cast as the soul of the nation and the repository of its basic values and the narrative of the golden age followed by trauma and humiliation, with a later return to former glory, changed but essentially the same.
