The Museum August Kestner is a museum in Hanover with a rich collection of applied art. Inaugurated in 1889, the museum was born from the collection of August Kestner, who lived for 36 years in Rome, sent on behalf of the city of Hanover. In Rome, Kestner brought together as a private collector a considerable number of Egyptian and Greco-Roman art and other artistic works. After his death, his grandson, Hermann Kestner, received the collection with the task of delivering it to his hometown of Hanover and making it accessible to the public. The seat of the museum was a Neo-Renaissance building which, due to the bombings of the war, has now been incorporated into a modern structure with a glass-concrete facade . Inside you can still find parts of the staircase and side wings and almost the entire entrance facade of the original building of the first museum of 1889.

The museum's collection is divided into different collection areas: ancient and Egyptian cultures, design and numismatics. The Egyptian collection offers an insight into ancient Egyptian art and culture in the period from the 4th millennium BC to the Roman-Christian era. A large collection of reliefs, especially from the Amarnese period, and sculptures, steles, vases, amulets, papyri, objects for funerary equipment illustrate daily life, religion and the cult of the dead. The classical cultures of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean area and the Middle East shape the 'Ancient Cultures' collection. Statuettes in bronze and terracotta, everyday objects - such as glasses, clay lamps and bronze tools - are evidence of life in the Mediterranean region since 1500 BC. until 500 AD. The gem collection is one of the largest in Germany. Finally, with around 100,000 pieces, the museum's coin collection is the largest of its kind in Northern Germany. It transmits 2600 years of monetary history starting with the oldest coins of ancient Greece. It also includes coins from the Roman Republic and the Imperial Era, as well as lead seals and coins from the Byzantine Empire. On the medieval coins, the bracts and coins of the area of today's Lower Saxony should be emphasized. Special features are also the collections of ancient Greek coins from Olympia and German coins from the 19th century.