Museums Archives - Page 95 of 101

Weekend Roundup

If you would like to try your hand at identifying objects found in an archaeological excavation, the team at the Temple Mount Sifting Project is now soliciting input from those who may have information related to their finds. You can head over to the photo gallery to begin.

Zahi Hawass is back as Egyptian Minister of Antiquities because he learned that “antiquities cannot live away from me.” The nation’s trials have not ended and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is again closed.

The spring season at Tel Burna has wrapped up, and the website now has links to photos and an easier way to donate.

Ferrell Jenkins recently explained the connections of Libya to the New Testament.

G. M. Grena debunks the claims that the earliest depiction of Jesus was found in the lead codices from Jordan.

Gerald Mattingly lectured yesterday afternoon at Lee University on the topic: “Is Anybody Finding
Anything Important Over in Jordan: The Top 10 Discoveries from Transjordan that Relate to the Bible.” Perhaps he will turn the presentation into an article one day.

Iran has cut ties with the Louvre. It’s too bad it’s not the other way around.

Glo users now can access the program on all of their PCs, Macs, iPads and soon iPhones.

Logos has released an updated version of Shibboleth and Mark Hoffman explains why it’s good and when an alternative may be better for you.

Only rarely does one see an original copy of the Survey of Western Palestine maps (26 sheets) for sale. A bookseller in the UK has one listed now, if you act quickly and are ready to part with $3,826 plus shipping. Alternately, you can get an electronic copy for $35 (including shipping) from us. In either case, you’ll benefit from the 160-page index (which we have painstakingly digitized).

HT: Jack Sasson

Tagged Egypt, Jerusalem, Lectures, Museums, Resources, Shephelah, Weekend Roundup

Museums and Cultural Heritage

In an earlier post, we mentioned a dispute between Turkey and Germany over a gate sphinx which had been excavated at the Hittite capital of Hattusa and which is now on display in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism had threatened to withdraw Germany’s permit to excavate Hattusa if Germany did not return the sphinx. Previous requests by Turkey had been rejected, but now it seems Germany is willing to discuss the return of the sphinx. You can read more here.

Iran has “cut ties” with the Louvre, according to this report. The Louvre did not meet a deadline to decide which Persian objects in its holdings it would loan to Iran for exhibition. The same article makes mention of the Cyrus Cylinder which the British Museum loaned to Iran. The Cylinder was supposed to be returned in January, but the British Museum has agreed to extend the loan for an additional three months (see here).

Saudi Arabia has been showing 300 objects, including pre-Islamic artifacts, from its cultural heritage in an international exhibition named “Roads of Arabia.” We made mention of the exhibition here. A lengthy article (for the web, at least) in Aramco World gives some historical background to the exhibition. “Roads of Arabia” has already shown at the Louvre and in Barcelona. According to the article, the exhibition “will visit St. Petersburg, Berlin and Chicago through 2013.” (The map which accompanies the article is interesting. I cannot determine what scheme was used for labeling countries. Some modern states are labeled, such as Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait. Other countries are not labeled, such as Iran and Israel. Turkey is labeled “Minor Asia.”)

HT: Jack Sasson

Tagged Arabia, Museums, Turkey

University of Pennsylvania Museum Exhibition

An article in Archaeology magazine highlights a new exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology entitled Archaeologists & Travelers in Ottoman Lands. The exhibition opened last September and will run through June 26, 2011. Archaeologists & Travelers in Ottoman Lands focuses on the University of Pennsylvania’s Nippur Expedition, and in particular, the lives of three men involved in the excavations of Nippur: Osman Hamdi Bey, John Henry Haynes, and Hermann Vollrath Hilprecht.

Featured are two paintings by Osman Hamdi Bey: “Excavations at Nippur,” which has never before been on public exhibition, and “At the Mosque Door,” which is shown for the first time in one hundred years. Also shown are about 50 photographs by Haynes, whose contributions as an archaeological photographer are only now being recognized, and more than 40 artifacts from the Nippur expedition (1889–1900), including a Parthian “slipper” coffin, Sasanian incantation bowls and glass, and numerous Sumerian cuneiform tablets.

The Nippur Expedition was the first American expedition to the Near East and lasted from 1889–1900. You can read background to the exhibition at the museum’s website and in the article in Archaeology. The exhibition has a companion website here.

For those interested, there is also a book by Bruce Kuklick that tells the story of the Nippur Expedition, Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). It recounts the institutionalization of ancient Near East studies in American universities, the hardships of Middle East fieldwork in the 19th century, and the intramural disputes and posturing of the Nippur Expedition’s staff and researchers. The stories of some key personalities ended tragically, with reputations ruined and careers destroyed. (Kuklick also touches on the role ancient Near East studies played in the secularization of universities, and how many scholars working in these disciplines forsook their religious convictions. “The paradox in the evolution of Near Eastern studies was the manner in which the pursuit of Bible truth might undermine the truth of the Bible.” For him, Christian scholars are a curiosity because they are “a stunning counterexample to easy generalizations about the secularization of higher education in America.”)

Additional photos from the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology can be seen here.

HT: Claude Mariottini

Tagged Museums

Archaeology of Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities has initiated a new program called “Discover! Saudi Arabia” in an effort to promote the tourism industry. It is not easy to travel to Saudi Arabia, ~~though apparently now tourist visas are being issued if you travel with a group organized by a legitimate tour company.~~ [See comments—I am not able to determine whether Saudi Arabia is currently issuing tourist visas or not.]

A major exhibition of archaeological artifacts from Saudi Arabia named “Roads of Arabia” is presently making the museum rounds in Europe. It has already shown at the Louvre and just today completed its run in Barcelona. Eventually, the exhibition will make its way to major U.S. cities. Here is the exhibition description from the Louvre’s website.

This exhibition offers a journey through the heart of Arabia, orchestrated by photographs of the region’s sumptuous landscapes. It takes the form of a series of stopovers in some of the peninsula’s extensive oases, which in ancient times were home to powerful states or which, beginning in the 7th century, became Islamic holy places. The three hundred items chosen, most of which have never left their country of origin before, provide an original panorama of the different cultures that succeeded each other within the kingdom of Saudi Arabia from prehistoric times through the dawn of the modern world.

They reveal in particular the little-known past of a dazzling, prosperous Arabic world now being gradually discovered by archaeologists. Moving Neolithic funerary stelae, colossal statues of the kings of Lihyan (6th – 4th century BC), and silver tableware and precious jewelry placed in tombs testify to the dynamism of this civilization. Despite a hostile natural environment, the inhabitants succeeded in taking advantage of their country’s geographical situation as a crossing point for the roads linking the shores of the Indian Ocean and the horn of Africa to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean world. Early in the first millennium BC this trans-Arabian trade flourished, bringing prosperity to the caravan cities and permeating the local culture with new fashions and ideas from the great neighboring empires.

The second section of the exhibition highlights the role of Arabia as the cradle of Islam. The roads became crowded with pilgrims as well as traders; a first group of exhibits evokes the pilgrim paths and Al-Rabadha, one of the principal stopping-places. Following this road as far as Mecca, a second group comprises a selection of funerary stelae illustrating the evolution of writing and ornamentation between the 10th and 16th century and providing precious information on Meccan society at the time. Muslim sovereigns vied with each other in their generosity towards holy places, with buildings and such ventures into embellishment as this monumental door from the Ka’ba, the gift of an Ottoman sultan.

A review of the exhibition can be read here and a few photos can be seen here.

Finally, Jeffrey Rose just published an article entitled “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis” in the journal Current Anthropology (pdf available here). Rose suggests that in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene the area now known as the Persian Gulf was a large oasis which was watered by the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Karun, and the Wadi Batin rivers. Readers may recall the suggestion that Wadi Batin was perhaps the Pishon River, mentioned in Genesis 2:11 in connection with the garden of Eden. On this latter point, see James A. Sauer, “The River Runs Dry: Creation Story Preserves Historical Memory,” Biblical Archaeology Review 22/4 (1996), pp. 52-57, 64 and the discussion in Barry J. Beitzel, The New Moody Atlas of the Bible (Chicago: Moody, 2009), pp. 88-90 and p. 280, note 16.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Arabia, Museums, Tourism

Weekend Roundup

Iraq
Efforts are underway to resurrect Iraq’s tourism industry. CNN reported in January on conservation work at the site of Babylon, and the Global Heritage Fund has been involved in similar work at Ur. In 2009 and 2010, the Iraqi government reported 165 tourists visited the country.

The online edition of Archaeology magazine has posted a piece entitled “Letter from Iraq: The Ziggurat Endures.” It was written by Michael Taylor, a National Guardsman who visited Ur in May, 2008. There are a few photos of the ziggurat and one of the royal tombs.

Last fall, American archaeologists returned to southern Iraq for the first time in 25 years. A report at PhysOrg outlines the research of Jennifer Pournelle. She is studying the importance of marshland resources, and how proximity to marshlands may have helped determine where ancients cities were founded in southern Iraq. A short video can be seen here.

Egypt
Last Sunday, the Cairo Museum reopened, along with five other museums and all of Egypt’s antiquities sites. On Wednesday night, looters attempted to make off with a 160-ton, red granite statue of Ramses II located at Aswan. Their efforts were thwarted by security personnel (and maybe the size of the statue).

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, has claimed that a 3,200 year-old funerary mask owned by the Saint Louis Art Museum was stolen from Egypt. The mask was discovered in excavations at Saqqara in 1952 and purchased by the museum for half-a-million dollars. The museum has filed suit to prevent seizure of the mask by the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis.

Beginning today and running through September 4, the Tennessee State Museum is featuring a three-part exhibition entitled Egyptian Relics, Replicas & Revivals: Treasures from Tutankhamun. The exhibit brings together objects and replicas from the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Vanderbilt University, and the International Museum Institute of New York.

Admission is free. Details are available at the museum’s website.

Anson Rainey Tributes
A week ago Saturday, Anson Rainey passed away at the age of 81. This past week, the radio program LandMinds produced a four-part tribute to Rainey in which they conducted interviews with Paul Wright of Jerusalem University College, and Yigal Levin and Aharon Demsky of Bar-Ilan University.

Audio of the program can be found here. Biblical Archaeology Review also has a brief note about Rainey’s passing on their website.

Miscellaneous
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae has made available an online edition of the Classical Greek lexicon Liddell-Scott-Jones, with hyperlinks to texts in the TLG database. The lexicon can be found here and an account of its print and digital versions here.

On Monday, March 21, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, Thomas Levy will speak at George Washington University’s Capitol Archaeological Institute in Washington, DC. His lecture is entitled “Quest for Solomon’s Mines: Cyber-Archaeology and Recent Explorations in Jordan,” and will be presented at the Elliott School, 1957 E St. NW, Room 113. Both the lecture and a reception are free and open to the public. Some information is provided here.

HT: Joe Lauer and Jack Sasson

Tagged Egypt, Lectures, Museums, Resources, Tourism

Sphinx of Hattusa

According to an online news article, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Ertuğrul Günay, is pressuring Germany to return a gate sphinx found at Hattusa, even threatening to revoke the German Archaeological Institute’s permit to excavate Hattusa. The Germans have been directing excavations at Hattusa, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, since 1906.

The sphinx in question is presently on display in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. It belongs to a pair of sphinxes from the Sphinx Gate of the Yerkapi rampart at Hattusa. The complementary sphinx is on display in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, Turkey.

Berlin Pergamonmuseum.
This is a copy of the sphinx shown below. The sphinx which is being disputed is not in the photo; it is displayed on the opposite wall behind where the photographer stood. (The photographer is now kicking himself.)

Istanbul Museum of Ancient Orient.
Sphinx from Yerkapi rampart Sphinx Gate at Hattusa. This sphinx complements the one in Berlin.

Turkey has given Germany until the end of July to return the sphinx. Germany has apparently rejected previous requests. The sphinx was taken to Berlin in 1915 to be restored.

Hattusa is an enormous and complex site just on the outskirts of the modern village of Boğazkale (more commonly known by its former name Boğazköy). Hattusa had dozens of temples and a citadel.

The fortifications included various gates with parabolic arches, a massive rampart on the southern end, and casemate walls. The German excavations are currently directed by Andreas Schachner. From 1994-2005, Jürgen Seeher directed the excavations. Seeher is the author of the best guidebook on Hattusa, Hattusa Guide: A Day in the Hittite Capital, 3rd rev. ed. (Istanbul: Ege Yayınları, 2006). It is chock full of photos, plans, and descriptions, and has a fold-out map.

Much of the guide is available online here. If you have the opportunity to visit the site, allow yourself at least one complete day and make sure you have a car and Seeher’s guidebook.

Yerkapi rampart at the south end of Hattusa.

Below center is a postern gate and tunnel and directly above is the Sphinx Gate.

Buyukkale, the Royal Citadel at Hattusa.

HT: Jack Sasson

UPDATE (5/20): Germany has agreed to give the Sphinx to Turkey. Details are here.

Tagged Museums, Turkey