Ancient history museums existed in ancient history
Keep in mind, as I once heard it put, Cleopatra is chronologically closer to Pizza Hut than she is to the pyramids. In ancient Mesopotamia (even thousands of years before her) there were already civilizations thousands of years old. Having a deep respect for the depths of time, Mesopotamians gave a huge amount of respect and prestige to antiquities. Rulers would send out state archeologists to dig through ruins to try to find specific artifacts. They would also loot artifacts and portable monuments in war. These relics would be put on display in buildings for the public to see as a show of the prestige of the king. It is literally an ancient history museum, just done by people who looked at their subject matter in a mystical rather than scientific way.
The Mesopotamians literally worshipped idols, viewing their statues as literal deities. Once some lord (I don't recall who) took the Babylonian's stupid statue that had these hands they had to touch to get a new king, and he had the hands melted off so nobody could fulfill the ritual. People took stuff like this extremely seriously, and a common goal in warfare was to steal their titulary deity (the idol) so that you could hold it hostage. The concept of the Tabernacle in the Old Testament is basically the same thing, they didn't have a physical idol but in that same vein of thinking they had a temple (a tent) in which to house the spirit of their God. There was a literal-mindedness about God residing in the tent. When the Mesopotamian city-state would be sacked, it was customary to have a dirge dedicated crying about the gods abandoning your city and how miserable it is etc etc. The Book of Lamentations is the ancient Jewish version of that for when it happened to Jerusalem. Lots of ancient Jewish stuff is like that, it's just their version of what other people were doing around them. Jews didn't see the world so much in terms of their God being real and everybody else's being fake so much as they saw it as that they had their God and everybody else has their gods.
Ancient Egyptian pyramids were frequently robbed by their own government. Building pyramids turned out, real quickly, to be extremely costly to the economy and were driving the country into the ground. This lead to pressures to economize on them. Sometimes Pharaohs just hijacked earlier tombs for themselves. One thing they would do was send secret agents to go burglarize their own pyramids so they could fence earlier generation's treasures to pay for new ones, or to use the funerary goods directly. On occasion these people would get caught and the government would either give them a slap on the wrist or they'd throw them under the bus, depending. The
For something completely different, the Belgian Congo was in fact a completely independent nation called the Congo Free State ruled by Leopold in personal union with Belgium but not in any way shape or form a legal part of Belgium. Leopold's direct control was the main reason the region was raped so heavily of its resources (treated like a cash cow to just exploit as fast as possible) and it ended in Belgium annexing the state out from under him.
There is exactly one instance I know of of a republic holding a personal union with another state, and that is France, in which the President is by law one of two Princes of Andorra (a diarchy in which an ecclesiastical and a secular prince share the role of head of state).
Edit: Another one, in the Old West there was a restaurant chain called Harvey Houses that cooperated with the railroads. Harvey Houses would import women waitresses (who had to be educated and of good moral character) who'd live in dormitories, tightly run so everybody could get their meal in thirty minutes, and with coordinated menus between stations so you would not be served the same food twice in a row. The Harvey Houses were incredibly ahead of their time, operating like a modern day fast food chain while serving fine dining and doing so in a world where you could still get scalped by Geronimo.
