Museum Guide

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European Museums

Our armchair tour of museums around the world with holdings in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East continues this month.

Austria

Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Cultural History)

Galleries are devoted to objects of daily life, mummies, writing and sealing in Egypt and the Near East, animal worship (including statuettes, mummies and written documents) and to specific periods (prehistory, Nubia, Hyksos). One large room focuses on mummies and the mortuary cult. The Near Eastern collection (called “oriental” in European usage) concentrates on antiquities from Yemen, including many South Arabian inscriptions.

Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany)

Ägyptisches Museum (Egyptian Museum)

Of the roughly 7,000 items in the collection, about 600 are displayed chronologically. Included are flint arrowheads and knives, granite and alabaster maceheads, amulets and pottery from the Prehistoric period; alabaster and limestone vessels and ivory gaming pieces, small vessels and cosmetic utensils from the Early Dynastic period; funerary statues from the Old Kingdom period; the nearly complete funeral equipment of the priest Herishefhotep (c. 2000 B.C.) and highly polished ivory and mica pottery and carvings from the Upper Nubian village of Kerma, all from the Middle Kingdom period; and limestone reliefs, ostraca, bronze vessel stands, scarabs and mummies from the New Kingdom period. Also on view are antiquities from the Late Dynastic, Greek-Roman and Christian periods.

Staatslische Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museum; known as the Pergamon Museum)

Jericho was not the only city where the walls came tumbling down. When the Berlin Wall was opened last fall, one of the happy results was easier access to one of the world’s most important collections of Near Eastern antiquities. The museum gets its unofficial name from its most famous holding, the massive, restored altar from the ancient Greek city of Pergamum. The museum also boasts the Ishtar Gate, with brightly painted tiles taken from the ruins of ancient Babylon’s processional street; Anatolian, Assyrian and Sumerian artifacts; and beautiful mosaics.

Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)

Ägyptisches Museum (Egyptian Museum)

All periods, from the Prehistoric to the Roman, are represented by items ranging from the minor arts to sculpture and architecture. A particular focus is the Amarna period (c. 1350–1330 B.C.). The museum owns the world-famous bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, wife of the “heretic king” Akhenaten, and the head of Nefertiti’s mother-in-law, Queen Tiye.

Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek (National Antiquities and Gem and Statue Collection)

The collections are housed in two neighboring locations. Greek and Roman sculptures are displayed at the Glyptothek, Königsplatz 3, while the Antikensammlungen, at Königsplatz 1, houses Etruscan art, Greek vases and Greek and Roman bronzes, terra-cottas, jewelry and glass.

France

Musée du Louvre (The Louvre)

One of the world’s leading museums. The Oriental Antiquities Department presents a panorama of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, with an especially rich section devoted to Mesopotamia, Sumer and Akkad. The museum houses items recovered during various French-led excavations, notably at Khorsabad, Ras-Shamra (ancient Ugarit), Mari and Telloh. Among the world-famous holdings are the Code of Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.), a conical stele of hard, black stone covered with Akkadian cuneiform script containing a compendium of common law; the stele raised in 2270 B.C. by Naram-Sin, ruler of Akkad, to commemorate his victory over the peoples of the Zagros mountains; and a calcite statue of the Sumerian administrator Gudea holding a vase flowing with water and fish.

The Egyptian Antiquities Department was founded in 1826 by Jean-Francois Champollion, the decipherer of hieroglyphics. Notable holdings include the limestone stele (c. 3000 B.C.) of King Wadji, the so-called Serpent King; “The Squatting Scribe,” a painted limestone figure, rush pen in hand and papyrus spread over his 057lap, discovered at Saqqara (c. 2500 B.C.); and a painted limestone relief from the tomb of Seti I (1318–1298 B.C.) depicting the goddess Hathor holding out to the sovereign her necklace charged with protective fluid.

The Louvre also holds two statues that, together with Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” have, more than anything, made the Louvre world famous: “The Winged Victory of Samothrace” (late-third—early-second century B.C.) and the “Venus of Milo” (late-second century B.C.).

Great Britain

National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (Liverpool Museum)

A museum sleeper, not known by most travelers, this museum has one of the largest collections in England (about 40,000 objects) of Near Eastern, Egyptian and Mediterranean antiquities. The Near Eastern holdings include items from Ur, Jericho, Hacilar and Luristan. Jordan: Treasures of the Desert Kingdom, an exhibit of items on loan from Jordan, France and major British collections, will run from March 27, 1991 to September 8, 1991. The Egyptian holdings range from the Predynastic period to the Coptic period and is particularly strong on Middle Kingdom material from Beni Hasan. Items from Cyprus include sculpture, terra-cottas, pottery and metalwork, many from the museum’s excavations at Kouklia-Palaepaphos. Also represented are Minoan, Mycenaean, Geometric and Greek antiquities, as well as the Ince Blundell Classical Marbles, the largest British collection outside London.

University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The Gallery of World Prehistory includes a survey of the prehistory of the Mediterranean area and of Predynastic Egypt. There is also a section on ancient Palestine, with materials from Jericho.

Fitzwilliam Museum

In 1823 strongman-turned-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni presented the University of Cambridge with the colossal sarcophagus lid of Ramesses III which he had recovered from the Valley of the Kings at Thebes. This gift continues to dominate the museum’s ancient art galleries. The Near Eastern displays include a relief of Ashurnasirpal II from the north-west palace at Nimrud; a hoard of gold Palestinian jewelry from Tell el-Ajjul; ivories from Nimrud; Mesopotamian seals; a stele from Arslan Tash showing a Syrian bearing tribute (eighth century B.C.); and a Samaritan inscription from a synagogue at Neapolis (Nablus) quoting Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”

Egyptian antiquities on display include tomb-models from Beni Hasan and relief fragments from Amarna.

British Museum

One of the great institutions in the world, with permanent displays of artifacts from prehistoric times to the present day. The Near Eastern collection is best known for the relief sculptures from Nimrud and Nineveh, including scenes of Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish. There are also thousands of cuneiform tablets, most notably the Babylonian account of the flood and the text in which Cyrus of Persia states how he liberated people, including the Jews in Babylon, from their oppressors. Other famous items in the collection are artifacts from the Royal Cemetery at Ur (c. 2500 B.C.) and a reconstructed Bronze Age tomb from Jericho.

A major attraction of the Egyptian holdings is the famed Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), the basalt slab with a bilingual inscription in three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek) that provided the key for deciphering hieroglyphs. The museum also holds some of the Amarna letters (14th century B.C.), colossal statues, papyri, tomb furniture, paintings and mummies.

The museum boasts one of the world’s most impressive classical collections, including Cycladic figurines (2800–2300 B.C.), red and black figure Greek vases, sculptures from the Parthenon (447–432 B.C.) and the Portland Vase (c. 27 B.C.–14 A.D.).

Ashmolean Museum

The oldest museum in the United Kingdom (founded 1683), the Ashmolean’s Near Eastern collections, covering Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine, were largely acquired during the 19th century from excavations such as those of Sir Flinders Petrie in Egypt and later as gifts through the Egypt and Palestine Exploration Funds. One of the museum’s oldest items is a Pre-pottery Neolithic (c. 7000 B.C.) plastered skull with cowrie shell eyes from Jericho. A major attraction is the only Egyptian building in Britain, the recently restored “Shrine of Taharga.” Built about 680 B.C. within the Temple of Amon-Re at Kawa in the Sudan the shrine was discovered in 1930/31 and re-erected in the Ashmolean in 1936.

European Museums

Our armchair tour of museums around the world with holdings in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East continues this month.