Museum Day - Yeah, We Saw Some Shit Today!

Berlin is home to more than 170 museums and galleries.  Read that again.  170+  Paris has about 130.  New York has 83 or so.

We went to two today; the Pergamon and the Neues.  These museums are among seven located on Museum Island, on the east side of the city.  Here's a cool relief:

Every building, save for the domed one on the left at the far end, houses a museum.  The domed building is the Berlin Cathedral.

Anyway, the Pergamon and the Neues Museums house some of the most astounding pieces from the ancient world (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, Greece, and Turkey) as well as an entire collection from Islamic societies from the 7th to the 19th centuries.

Pieces like the painstakingly reassembled Ishtar Gate from Babylon and the impossibly delicately carved limestone of the Market Gate of Miletus (an ancient Greek city).  Not to mention the bust of Nefertiti from 1345 BC.  Here you go...you're welcome.

Giant guard bird

Joe and I waiting for our time slot to visit the museum.

A lion gate

Roar!

From southern Mesopotamia and Iran from the 4th to 1st millennia BC.  Intricate work on thousands of columns.  Terracotta pegs, dyed and dried, then hammered into clay pillars in various designs.

Just one of at least a dozen designs.

A depiction of the discovery...giant walls of decorated columns.

Amazing tile work from Babylon

Mostly dragons, horses or bulls, and lions.

This guy!

A spear bearer for the king. 521-486 BC

Huge carved slabs that served as gates or wall coverings.

Zoom in on this one and you'll see a hunting scene. This is an Assyrian piece from 883-859 BC.

Crazy detail.

So, during Nebuchadnezzar the II's rule in Babylon, he built himself a palace.  Fortified to the hilt with a grand esplanade lined with lions, leading up the the entrance gate.  The entire processional way and Ishtar Gate was dug up in pieces (time, wars, vandals, etc. had desecrated, eroded, and torn down the original) and shipped back to Berlin where it was reassembled chunk by chunk.

Model of entrance

You can see where the procession of lions fits.

In the very next room, we were transported to the market in Miletus, an ancient Greek city.  We walked in under the Market Gate (from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD).

Fucking huge!

The Capitals were so fancy!

And the floor...

Check please...

Look at the crazy detail.

Next stop, Islamic antiquities.

This is the Aleppo Room.  It contains the oldest surviving and artistically most valuable painted wall paneling from the Ottoman Empire.  It was created around 1600 for the reception room of a Christian residence in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.  It's absolutely exquisite.

This is the Mshatta Palace facade - from Jordan ,sometime in the 8th century.  The facade was a gift to Berlin from the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1903.  Currently the palace from whence it came lies next to the airport in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Another huge piece.

A prayer niche from Turkey (13th century).

Our final stop was a brief visit to the Neues Museum to see their collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.  It did not disappoint.

This is a wall covering depicting a butchering scene.  It probably was on the back wall of an ancient restaurant called Horus' Hamburger Hut or something.  I love that the artist included a bull's butthole.  Oh, those ancients, they were such cards!

This says, "Ask not what your servants can do for you; ask why haven't they done it yet."

Possibly a partial Tutankhamen bust

This is the museum's crown jewel.  Nefertiti.  She is in amazing condition considering she was rendered around 1345 BC. It's here because it was discovered by a German archaeologist in 1912.  Believe me, Egypt wants her back.  She is so graceful.  If you can enlarge the picture you'll see she has fine wrinkles that simply add to her elegance.  I stared at her for a good 10 minutes.

As we've been going pretty much non-stop we decided to take the afternoon off and maybe take a nap.