Part 1 Babylon
6/14/2023
A Five to 15 minute walk from our hotel (depending on how many photos I take on the way) is a Berlin’s Museum Island. ** With the Welcome to Berlin Card + I get free admission to most of these museums plus a discount on others. So many museums, so little time. My two museums will be the Pergamon Museum today and the Neues Museum (Egyptian) tomorrow.
These are the most popular museums, so I had to reserve a time to enter, 10:45. Three hours later and 200 plus photos, I walked by to the hotel to eat lunch and recharge my phone.
Pergamon Museum
“The absolute crowd-pleaser of Museum Island is Alfred Messel’s Pergamon Museum., Built between 1907 and 1930, the museum features archaeological finds from antiquity, the Ishtar Gate from Babylon.” (Berlin.de)
The walls of the Ishtar Gate are an archeologist’s dream or possibly nightmare as it is a beautiful puzzle of crates and crates of small fragments found in Babylon. Here are the world-famous reconstructions of brilliantly coloured Babylonian monuments: the Processional Way, the Ishtar Gate and the facade of the throne hall of King Nebuchadnezzar II (604 – 562 BC). Sections of the buildings were re-created to approximately the original dimensions by meticulously re-assembling the many broken pieces of excavated glazed bricks. Along the walls depictions of lions, bulls and dragons symbolize the major gods of Babylon.
FYI: this wall was up during Daniel’s time in Babylon!
Leaving for trip to West Berlin. More on this museum later. Ellen
Ellen’s Travel Journal 2016-2025 