Berlin trip report

Last weekend, aviva_m took me to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where I was able to follow up my visit to the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum with green_knight by seeing the actual fabled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate of ancient Babylon. (<fx: green_knight goes green(er) with envy>).

The museum featured a large amount of artefacts from the ancient world, but with a surprisingly small number of explanatory labels. Actually, that's not entirely true: There was a lot of explanatory text on the artefacts; unfortunately it was all in Akkadian. I'm beginning to think I ought to teach myself cuneiform in the same way as I taught myself the Arabian alphabet, to look for Hebrew cognates (quite a few of which I was able to spot in transliterated names). Unfortunately, that wouldn't be as easy: cuneiform (a) is a syllabary, not an alphabet (b) is ideally suited for Sumerian and poorly suited for Semitic languages (the relationship is similar to how Mycenaean Greek really had to be shoehorned to be fitted into Linear B), (c) changed over time; and (d) once I'd learned it, I couldn't reinforce it by reading labels on supermarket produce or on mosques temples, the same way I could with Arabic.

Anyhow, in the absence of explanatory captions, I came up with some of my own to compensate:

( Ashurbanipal about to take a photo (the camera he was holding was stolen in antiquity by tomb robbers) )

( No goddess is complete without her handbag )

Afterwards, we demonstrated that anything Jesus could do we can do better by walking quarter of a mile along the top of a channel (or possibly canal—the difference doesn't seem to exist in German) of the river:( Walking on water )

aviva_m also took me to an exhibition on kashrus at the Jewish Museum; I now have a plastic smart spoon (like a smart card, but spoon-shaped) sitting on my desk bearing tokens I picked up around the exhibition, which I can exchange at the museum website for recipes. :o)