Wanderings & Ramblings: Cool Shots from the Istanbul Archeological Museum

Istanbul has an amazing Archaeological Museum complex. If you think about it, it makes sense. Constantinople/Istanbul has been at the heart of the Greek, Roman, Near East and Egyptian worlds for over a thousand years. There are amazing Greek ruins all along the three coasts of Turkey even today - the Aegean, Black and Mediterranean coasts were colonized by the Greeks way back when. The Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires ruled the entire Near East for a massive amount of time. So lots of really interesting items made their way to Istanbul and to the Archaeological Museum.

When Spence, Aimee and I were in Paris, Spence and I went to an exhibit at the Louvre called Babylon. I think there are some photos from then somewhere on this blog. One of the cool things we saw there were tiles from the Ishtar Gate at Babylon. The Ishtar Gate was one of the major entrances to Babylon and was built by Nebuchadnezzar. That means it was built over 2,600 years ago. Can you imagine these tiles have managed to survive for that long?

Anyway, Spencer will have to correct me, but I think the tiles in Paris were reproductions of the actual tiles from that gate. Well, I walked into the Museum by Topkapı palace and there were tons of ACTUAL tiles from the Ishtar Gate. Now that Iraq has been turned upside down by the Americans (us) with so many archaeological treasures destroyed or looted (and so lost probably for every), this may be one of the few places with original tiles. It's like we've opened Pandora's box there. Anyway, these tiles were amazingly beautiful....

They also had a lot of really interesting HUGE tombs - I don't know the plural of "sarcophagus"! Sarcophagi? Anyway, this one is the most famous - it's called the Alexander Sarcophagus. The second and third are from another one - don't know the name of it, but it's taller than I am. So really huge carvings.

This is a bust of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. I saw a great bust of Hadrian and his lover Antinous at the Greek National Museum in Athens last year. I also just went to a really interesting exhibit on Hadrian at the British Museum. It's called Hadrian: Empire and Conflict. The exhibit talks about the political and military situation during Hadrian's rule as well as his personal life with Antinous. There was a scale model of Hadrian's villa in Tivoli in the exhibit. I didn't know it but the villa was really as large as a small village. I tried to find website with this scale model, but I couldn't find one! But it was really impressive.

There is a very good book about Hadrian called the Memoirs of Hadrian. It's by Marguerite Yourcenar. Here's a link to it if you'd like to find out more, and also to one more site. Check it out if you're at all interested in reading a very interesting and thought-provoking book.

Here's the last interesting photo from the Museum. It's actually very small - less than a foot tall. It's a small version of the massive statue at the ancient Temple of Diana at Ephesus (or Efes in Turkish.) Efes is in Turkey on the Aegean coast. I plan to go there when I visit Bodrum at the end of the week. Anyway, I think Paul (from the New Testament) preached there. Anyway, it's pretty amazing.

I forgot about this photo, so this really is the last one. It's a statue of a governor from the Babylonian Empire at the time of Hammurabi. Another amazing thing, I think. Hammurabi was around 1,750 years before Christ.