Assam State Museum

The Assam State Museum in central Guwahati is one of Northeast India's oldest museums, established in 1940. Located near Dighalipukhuri Tank on GNB Road, it showcases the cultural and historical heritage of Assam and the Northeast. Its collections include ancient sculptures, stone and copper inscriptions, coins, manuscripts, tribal crafts, textiles, and natural history exhibits, offering a comprehensive overview of the region's archaeology, ethnography, and art history.

Visitors can expect a multi-gallery museum complex set around a central lawn near Dighalipukhuri in central Guwahati. Inside, galleries display stone sculptures from ancient Assam, terracotta, woodwork, miniature paintings, manuscripts on sanchi bark, coins, arms, tribal dioramas, textiles and ethnographic objects. The museum is housed in several halls with archaeological, epigraphy, sculpture, natural history and village life sections that can be explored on foot with interpretive labels.

Established in 1940 by the Kamarupa Anusandhan Samiti (Assam Research Society) and inaugurated by Sir Robert Reid, then Governor of Assam. It was founded to preserve and display antiquities and artifacts of the ancient Kamarupa kingdom and later Assam, and is one of the oldest museums in Northeast India. The museum's archaeological collections trace the history of Assam from prehistoric to medieval and Ahom periods.

The museum preserves and presents the diverse cultural heritage of Assam and Northeast India, including Hindu and Buddhist sculptures, Ahom dynasty relics, tribal art, textiles, crafts and manuscripts. It serves as a major centre for understanding Assamese ethnography, art history and living traditions of various indigenous communities of the region.