From Babylon to Berlin: ANES Museum Tour of Europe: Berlin Day 2

Our group in front of the Neues Museum, which contains the rich Classical collection of the Museuminsel.

After breakfast, we took the U-bahn (subway) and then the S-Bahn (local railway) to the Museum Island, where we worked in our last two museums in Berlin. Our visits yesterday and today were done according to when we could get reservations, not necessarily in the chronological order of their materials.

The Bode Museum

The Bode was the second-to-the-last of the museums on the island to be constructed, being finished in 1904. As a building it is a work of art itself, boasting two domes, impressive external facades, and sweeping grand stair cases. The halls in which the museum's holdings are displayed are grand themselves.

The Bode specializes in Byzantine, Early Christian, and some Medieval Christian artifacts and art. It also houses sculpture and paintings from other periods. I had scheduled it largely to see how Ancient Near Eastern and Classical culture came together in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods, when postapostolic Christianity became the driving influence.

My students had not prepared museum reports on any of the artifacts in this museum, but I was eager for them to be exposed to some of this material, especially since the "Greek-speaking, Christian, Roman" culture of the Byzantine Empire has always been intriguing to me.

This is not an early Christian artifact, but I thought it was fascinating. It is the Greek dedication prayer for a Jewish house of worship in Egypt that dates to about the first century B.C. Eric Huntsman © 2017 for educational purposes only.

The apse of an early Christian church in Ravenna, Italy, featuring a beardless Jesus (that is, in Roman style) with the archangels Michael and Gabriel. Eric Huntsman © 2017 for educational purposes only.

Sometimes you just need to take a silly group selfie in an important museum.

There were other beautiful items from later periods, a few of which I am quickly posting here (it is turning out to be another late night).

The Altes Museum

The Altes Museum is the "Old" Museum because it was the first one built on the island (1823-1830). It has a simple and extremely functional floor plan and was east to visit and use. In addition to its usual collection, it seems to have a number of items that are usually in the Pergamum Museum wing that is currently closed for renovation. Regardless, currently it has Greek and Hellenistic artifacts on the first floor arranged chronologically in a counter-clockwise ring and Etruscan and Roman on the second.

This picture from the web does a better job than any of mine in showing the whole Altes Museum. By Avda - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21821130

Heroic representations and other items from the Bronze Age

Archaic Greece, especially funerary items

Classical and Funerary Items

Hellenistic

Quick, but wonderful, selection of Roman items

Detail of said knucklebones.

Portrait panel of the family of Septimius Severus. Except for mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, not many painted portraits from the ancient world survive. Eric Huntsman © 2017 for educational purposes only.

Yes, Livia again. Here she appears after her grandson Claudius made her a goddess with the accoutrements of Ceres.

Oh yes, we are in Berlin . . .

Sometimes I get deep into these blog entries and realize that we spend so much of our energy on museums, and my interest is so deep in the ancient world, that it may not appear like we are on study abroad. Well, clearly we are studying, but what about the abroad?

Well, after we left the Museum island this morning, the students fanned out across the city to see the sites. I have not received any images to post, but a search of social media for the tags #BabylontoBerlin and #BYUANES may turn some up.

As for me, today I had the pleasant company of my daughter. We first visited the Berliner Dom; despite its name, "Berlin Cathedral," it is in fact a Lutheran church and used to be the official Prussian and then German Imperial church. It still sits over the former state Hohenzollern crypt.