Berlin trip report

[lethargic_man]

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:

This is 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:

Whilst I'm at it, here's a painting we saw at the start of the year in our date at the Tate, which rather impressed me. This is Francis Danby's A Subject from Revelations (it would work better if the reproduction were several times the size, and you were viewing it, as we were, from below, so that the eye is drawn at first to the human-sized landscape at the bottom, and only then takes in the sheer scale of the angel figure):

What I found astonishing about it was that this was painted in 1829!

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)

Comments

[aviva-m.livejournal.com]

In general one doesn't use plural for substances, so you would also order "zwei Tee, zwei Milch" (yes, one can also order non-alcoholic beverages in Germany). "Zwei Biere" would refer to two different types of beer. So next time you are in a Kneipe, you know, what to do.
(Now wasn't that a very wise and intellectual first entry on your blog ;-)