[10] Evans found that the keeper and the vice-chancellor (Benjamin Jowett) had managed to lose half of the Ashmole collection and had converted the original building into the Examination Rooms.

Charles Drury Edward Fortnum had offered to donate his personal collection of antiques on condition that the museum was put on a sound footing.

[11] A donation of £10,000 from Fortnum (£1.44 million as of 2025) enabled Evans to build an extension to the University Galleries and move the Ashmolean collection there in 1894.

[citation needed] After the various specimens had been moved into new museums, the "Old Ashmolean" building was used as office space for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Since 1924, the building has been established as the Museum of the History of Science, with exhibitions including the scientific instruments given to Oxford University by Lewis Evans, amongst them the world's largest collection of astrolabes.

[16] In 2000, the Chinese Picture Gallery, designed by van Heyningen and Haward Architects, opened at the entrance of the Ashmolean and is partly integrated into the structure.

This second phase of major redevelopment now allows the museum to exhibit objects that have been in storage for decades, more than doubling the number of coffins and mummies on display.

[24] This development allowed for the return to the Ashmolean of the Great Bookcase, designed by William Burges, and described as "the most important example of Victorian painted furniture ever made.

The department also has an extensive collection of antiquities from Ancient Egypt and the Sudan, and the museum hosts the Griffith Institute for the advancement of Egyptology.

[46] Upcoming planned exhibitions include: Major exhibitions in recent years include: Beginning in 1973, the position of Keeper was superseded by that of Director: On 31 December 1999, during the fireworks that accompanied the celebration of the millennium, thieves used scaffolding on an adjoining building to climb onto the roof of the museum and stole Cézanne's landscape painting View of Auvers-sur-Oise.

[94] In 2024, the museum agreed to return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of the Hindu poet and saint Thirumangai Alvar that it had purchased at an auction at Sotheby's in 1967, after the Indian High Commission in the United Kingdom filed a claim stating that the item was stolen from a temple in Tamil Nadu in 1957.