Museum of the Art of the Eastern Peoples

a museum in Moscow, founded in 1918 (until 1925, Ars Asiatica; between 1925 and 1962, the Museum of Eastern Cultures). The museum’s collection, which totals more than 30,000 items, includes ancient, medieval, and contemporary art from the Soviet Far East and other Eastern countries—Middle Asia, the Caucasus, and Transcaucasia, as well as the countries of the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Works of art by the peoples of northern and tropical Africa are also in the museum’s collection. Among the articles on exhibition are Parthian rhytons from Nisa (Turkmenia, second century B.C.), unique examples of Iranian pottery (12th—13th century A.D.), miniatures of the manuscript Babur nama (India, 16th century), porcelain from the Ting-chou workshops (China, tenth-12th century), engravings by well-known Japanese artists (18th and 19th centuries), and pictures by Soviet artists (including M.S. Sar’ian, U. Tansyk-baev, and T.T. Salakhov).