Museums Archives - Page 98 of 100

Thieves Loot Theft Exhibit

In a display of what might be called ironic chutzpah, burglars broke into an Ashdod museum this week and stole silver coins from the Hellenistic period and other archaeological finds that were part of an exhibit called “Antiquities Thieves in Israel.”
The exhibit, at the Korin Maman Museum, displayed artifacts that the Israel Antiquities Authority had previously recovered from antiquities thieves. Now it seems the authority will have to begin its hunt all over again.
The burglars neutralized the alarm system Tuesday night and stole a bronze spear, two gold earrings, some pottery and the silver coins, which feature the image of Alexander the Great.
“It’s one of the weirdest things that ever happened here,” said a museum employee. “Someone actually went and stole the robbers display.”

The complete story is here. The Jerusalem Post story is here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Museums, New Exhibits

Archaeological Museum Tour by iPod

You can now tour the Lynn H. Wood Archaeological Museum in Collegedale, Tennessee, with audio narration provided by William Dever and Michael Hasel, according to this month’s issue of DigSight. The 52-minute tour takes the visitor through the museum’s 16 display cases. Hasel, the museum curator, says, “I’ve traveled to dozens of museums all over the world, and I haven’t encountered another museum that uses iPods for their tours . . . I think we’re using cutting-edge technology.” The iPod displays photos of the artifacts to assist the visitor in identifying what is being described.

The newsletter also announces that the personal library of William Dever has been placed at Southern Adventist University. The library catalog is available online at library.southern.edu.

Next on the schedule for the Museum Lecture Series at SAU is K. Lawson Younger, speaking on “Aramean Astral Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries.” The lecture will be given on March 17, 2010 at 7:30 in the Lynn Wood Hall Chapel.

Tagged Lectures, Museums, Technology

Athens Acropolis Museum Opens

The long-awaited New Acropolis Museum in Athens opened this weekend after years of delay. The Greeks say they didn’t “build it for the British,” but they intend it to be a strong argument for the return of the Elgin Marbles. From the New York Times:

The museum, which cost $200 million and sits near the base of the Acropolis with a direct view of the Parthenon, is one of the highest-profile cultural projects undertaken in Europe in this decade.
Intended as “the ultimate showcase of classical civilization,” Mr. Samaras said, it was built to promote tourism and, like any large, government-financed museum, to stir national pride. But it was also meant, not incidentally, to spark discomfort in another country in the European Union.
“We didn’t build this for the sake of the British,” Mr. Samaras said in an interview, adding at once, “but look around: does this not negate the argument that Athens has no place good enough to house the Parthenon Marbles?”…
The new museum, 226,000 square feet of glass and concrete designed by the New York architect Bernard Tschumi, replaces the old Acropolis Museum, a small 1874 building tucked into the rock of the Acropolis next to the Parthenon. The design, introduced in 2001, was meant to be completed in time for the 2004 Olympics, but dozens of legal battles — many having to do with some 25 buildings that were demolished to make room for it — delayed the process for years.
Even now, not all Athenians are happy with the building, wedged in as it is among apartment buildings in a middle-class residential district. “It is as if a titanic U.F.O. landed in the neighborhood, obliterating all of its surrounding structures,” said Nikos Dimou, a prominent Greek author.
The museum has five floors (including two basement levels that will not be open at first), which provide space for 4,000 artifacts, 10 times the number displayed in the old building. On the first level a glass floor offers visitors close-up views of an early Christian settlement, dating from the 7th to 12th centuries, that was discovered under part of the future building’s footprint during excavations in 2002.

The Times article includes a slideshow with nine photos.

HT: Explorator

Tagged Greece, Museums

Baghdad National Museum, Virtually

You can now visit the Baghdad National Museum online. The Italian creators have done a terrific job. Ansa.it has the story:

The treasures of Baghdad’s National Museum went online for the first time Tuesday as Italy inaugurated the Virtual Museum of Iraq as part of an ongoing cultural collaboration between the two countries.
Looted during the United States-led invasion in 2003, the Baghdad Museum partially reopened in February after six years but the website is designed to make its most important artefacts accessible to everyone.
The site (www.virtualmuseumiraq.cnr.it), in Arabic, English and Italian, offers visitors the chance to walk through eight virtual halls and admire works from the prehistoric to the Islamic period, while videoclips reconstruct the history of the country’s main cities.
”It’s not a simple container of the objects in the museum but a real virtual journey, created for the general public and the scientific community, across 6,000 years of Mesopotamian history,” said Italy’s National Research Council Director Roberto De Mattei.
Among the artefacts on display in the Sumerian hall of the virtual museum is the famous Warka Mask, a marble head of a woman from Uruk dated to 3,400-3,100 BC, which, as with many of the works, visitors can rotate to get an almost 360 degree view.
In the Assyrian hall visitors can also admire colossal limestone statues of human-headed, winged bulls called lamassu, dated to the eight and ninth centuries BC, that guarded the ancient cities of Nimrud on the River Tigris and Dur Sharrukin, modern-day Khorsabad.

The story continues here.

HT: Explorator

Tagged Museums

Mosaic Museum Opens at Good Samaritan Inn

The Jerusalem Post reports on a new museum that has opened at the traditional Inn of the Good Samaritan.

The Museum of the Good Samaritan, which is located on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road near Ma’aleh Adumim, was officially opened Thursday evening after a nine-year archeological excavation at the site.
The official dedication of the NIS 10 million museum, which displays mosaics from the West Bank and Gaza, coincided with US President Barack Obama’s long-touted Middle East speech in Cairo in which he reached out to the Muslim world….
The site, known as the Inn of the Good Samaritan, received its name in the Byzantine period when it was identified with the inn mentioned in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament.
The site lies on the upper end of the ascent on the main road from Jericho to Jerusalem, which pilgrims followed when traveling from the Galilee and Transjordan to the Holy City.
Over the last decade, archeologists have uncovered remains dating back to the Second Temple period at the site.
During the Byzantine period, the site was revived as a way station for Christian pilgrims, and an inn was constructed that included a large church, a cistern, residential quarters, and a fortress to protect pilgrims from brigands.
In the Crusader period, with the expansion of pilgrimage to Jericho and especially to baptismal sites on the Jordan River, the inn was renovated and a fortress erected above it to guard the road to Jerusalem.
The structure housing the museum was built in the Ottoman period as a guard post, which remained in use until recently.
The mosaics on display at the museum were discovered in the West Bank and Gaza and belong to Jewish and Samaritan synagogues – including a mosaic from a Gaza synagogue – as well as churches.

The full story is here.

Traditional Inn of the Good Samaritan with Jerusalem in the distance

Tagged Judah, Museums, New Exhibits, Samaria

The Israel Museum Renovation

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is in the midst of a $100 million renovation and the Jerusalem Post has an update on the transformation. Here are some snips:

There are two main aspects to the renewal project. The first is to create a completely new approach from the entrance of the museum to the center of the museum campus. To do this, the museum has hired New York architect James Carpenter, who has worked on a variety of high-profile projects, such as the new Hearst headquarters (which involved saving the original facade of an existing building), the podium light wall of the Seven World Trade Center building in New York, a proposed multi-use sports enclosure for the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the Madison Square Garden renovation…. This second main aspect of the campus renewal – the reconstruction of the original museum complex from within – has been taken up by Tel Aviv-based Zvi Efrat of Efrat-Kowalsky Architects. Efrat, who is also the head of the architecture department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, has created a central circulation point from which all the museum’s main exhibit wings – Archeology, Judaica and Jewish Ethnography, Fine Arts, and Temporary Exhibitions – are accessible on the same level. To achieve this internal redesign without, in Snyder’s words, "increasing the breadth of the existing envelope," the museum is being gutted from the inside, its exhibit halls are reconfigured, and a number of connecting passages are being added. The key to the project, though, is turning an area previously dedicated to internal museum service activity into exhibition spaces, resulting in an additional 9,290 sq.m. of gallery space that does not involve expanding the museum campus…. One of the final touches to the renewal project was a revamping of the museum’s central outdoor plaza, raising two-thirds of it by a meter to improve its position as a vista point, and to split its length to make it more human-sized. The east side will lead to the underground passage that connects with the museum entrance, and the west side will open up on a wide staircase that feeds into the Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden, making it more central to the campus.

The TimeOnline has a story about the new Egyptian gallery at the British Museum in London. (HT: Explorator)

Tagged Jerusalem, Museums, New Exhibits