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Monday, September 19, 2016

Pergamom Museum

There are a number of museums on Berlin's "Museum Island," but we chose to focus just on the Pergamom Museum, which houses primarily Middle Eastern and Islamic art, including a stunning reproduction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon:




The Market Gate of Miletus, a second-century BC gate destroyed by earthquake in the 10th or 11th century AD, was excavated in the early 20th century. Only fragments remained, so there is a lot of new material:


The Pergamom Altar was excavated from the Pergamom acropolis (modern-day Turkey) between 1878 and 1986 and reassembled in the museum:




The Mshatta Facade is the decorated part of the facade of the 8th-century Umayyad residential palace of Qasr Mshatta, one of the Desert Castles of Jordan; it's about 33 meters long:


Plenty of other delicious stuff, too, including Assyrian reliefs and some beautiful stonework:







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