Museums Archives - Page 99 of 101

Weekend Roundup

The “Jesus Trail” is the subject of an article in last month’s issue of Christianity Today. The author and his photographer son (the pictures in the print magazine are great) walked the trail and talked politics and religion with the people they encountered. The “Jesus Trail” runs from Nazareth to Capernaum.

Photographs of Jerusalem in the early 1900s from the collection of Hannah and Efaim Degani are described and displayed in this YnetNews article.

The wife of the founder of the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is profiled in this Jerusalem Post article. Batya Borowski reflects on the museum, her husband, and her early years in Mandatory Palestine.

Israel is minting gold 20 NIS coins depicting the symbol of Jerusalem. The one-ounce coins are for sale for approximately $1,467.

Tagged Galilee, Jerusalem, Museums, Weekend Roundup

Weekend Roundup

Where are all the biblical texts between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex (10th century)?

James Charlesworth has dubbed this “The Period of Great Silence.” Recently, however, scholars identified that two fragments, located oceans apart, belong to a single text of Exodus 15 from the 6th-8th centuries. The fascinating story is featured in this week’s Jerusalem Post Magazine.

The Economist has an article on polynomial texture mapping, which allows scientists to study ancient objects by a careful use of photography and lighting from different angles. The result is that you can see features not otherwise observable. I’ve seen it in action and it is phenomenal.

Leon Mauldin has started a new blog featuring photos from his recent Turkey and Greece trip.

Criticism of Jerusalem archaeologists is not new, but at least this Reuters article has interviewed both sides.

A rocket hit the archaeological site of Ur in Iraq this week.

There’s a half-price sale now for John Beck, The Land of Milk and Honey: An Introduction to the Geography of Israel, 2006 ($21 at Amazon, now $10 from the publisher). I haven’t read the book, but you can see a 6-page pdf sample at the website.

A couple of good Zondervan resources are now 50% off until April 15. The Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament is available for $125 and the Zondervan
Encyclopedia of the Bible is for sale for $140. You must use source code 980683 for each. Shipping is free. (UPDATE: At the moment, Amazon’s price on the Encyclopedia is $138 with shipping. My guess is that won’t last. You can track Amazon’s price here.)

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Museums, New Exhibits, Resources

Thieves Loot Theft Exhibit

From Haaretz:

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