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

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

There are a lot words in English where there is no difference in German but there are some where I could only find a difference in German but not English. How much German did you learn meanwhile?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

"Ashurbinal gets bored during portrait sitting and starts reading paper."

(Sounds like a great trip, I'd love to see the Pergamon Museum one day...)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

<fx: green_knight goes green(er) with envy>

<looks in mirror>

Damn, how did you know?

Love the captions, and love the third photo.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not really my field of expertise, but maybe I can shed a little light. The bird headed genie was probably facing a tree, and there would have been another genie on the other side, looking more or less the same; that's neo-Assyrian, I think.

Vague memory tells me that they're protective spirits, and that the handbag was for carrying water, and the whatsits in the other hand is for sprinkling water; you'll often find those guys flanking a palm tree. I'm not sure if they're purifying the tree, or the tree is also protective. I think that either the handbag or the whatsit is called a mullilu, but I could be wrong about that.

I'm not at all sure that's Ashurbanipal--his beard is too short. But he does look more or less right for a neo-Assyrian as well.