Shiva, Angkorian period, Bakheng style, Musée Guimet-Paris

The Guimet Museum (French: Musée national des Arts asiatiques-Guimet or Musée Guimet) is a museum of Asian art located at 6, place d'Iéna in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France. It has one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia.

The museum which was first located at Lyon in 1879 and was handed over to the state and transferred to Paris in 1885,^{[citation needed]} was founded by Émile Étienne Guimet, an industrialist. Devoted to travel, Guimet was in 1876 commissioned by the minister of public instruction to study the religions of the Far East, and the museum contains many of the fruits of this expedition, including a fine collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain and many objects relating not merely to the religions of the East but also to those of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. One of its wings, the Panthéon Bouddhique, displays religious artworks.

From December 2006 to April 2007, the museum harboured collections of the Kabul Museum, with archaeological pieces from the Greco-Bactrian city of Ai-Khanoum, and the Indo-Scythian treasure of Tillia Tepe.

Shiva ( /ˈʃɪvə/; Sanskrit: शिव Śiva, meaning "auspicious one") is a major Hindu deity, and is the destroyer god or transformer among the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of the primary aspects of the divine. God Shiva is a yogi who has notice of everything that happens in the world and is the main aspect of life. Yet one with great power lives a life of a sage at Mount Kailash. In the Shaiva tradition of Hinduism, Shiva is seen as the Supreme God. In the Smarta tradition, he is regarded as one of the five primary forms of God. Followers of Hinduism who focus their worship upon Shiva are called Shaivites or Shaivas (Sanskrit Śaiva). Shaivism, along with Vaiṣṇava traditions that focus on Vishnu and Śākta traditions that focus on the goddess Shakti, is one of the most influential denominations in Hinduism.