If “every traveller is necessarily the hero of his own story,” as the Scottish novelist John Galt observed in 1812, then so is every culture. The encyclopedic museum as we know it, like the academic disciplines of art history and archaeology that underpin it, first flourished in the 19th century. Intentionally or not, it has tended to convey a particular worldview, described by the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne as a “unilinear path, leading from Athens to Rome, and from Rome to London, Paris, or Heidelberg … Everything else outside of it is a curiosity.” There is a center and a periphery. All roads and grand marble staircases lead to us.