Antiquities

We left late again because we woke up late, and Andie and I refused to leave unless Aaron took a shower.

We also had to wait another half hour because Finn's friend Milan, was going to join us-- a fellow foreign exchange kid from his same year at Norcross. We took the train out to the Egyptian museum, after a few false starts (a large museum complex = lots of chances for wrong museums/entrances).

I always forget that it was Europeans that first started the Egyptian excavations (and subsequent artifact abuse from their seeming expendability, like using ground mummy as a medicinal). The Neues Museum left me awed and annoyed, by turns.

I was bugged by the slightly condescending feel of the exhibit halls, which also felt unfinished and out of order. European archaeology has more of a base in history under the umbrella of "antiquities", and I felt a lot of the explanations were lacking in people details; it's more of a things-to-put-on-a-shelf heritage rather than in-depth studies of the artifacts themselves. (Though to be fair, the contexts in which most of them were removed was well before "archaeology" was ever codified, and without solid excavation notes or consistent methodology, their details are probably tapped out.) The Egyptian artifacts are grouped thematically, not by period, which also makes me scatterbrained trying to put together items that were dynasties apart.

I also don't think the Amarna Period deserved its own exhibit upstairs. I mean, you kind of have to build something around the Nefertiti bust, which resides here-- it's an absolutely spectacular piece-- but it gives a disproportionate amount of attention to a mere 28 year era, among the 3200 that ancient Egypt survived. Egyptian culture, particularly that surrounding the pharaoh, tried to appear monolithic and unchanging for the sake of ruling legitimacy, but that wasn't the case overall. Things did change-- and I saw no mention at all of the intermediate periods, or even an acknowledgment of Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Add to this the neutral-to-complimentary wording in a hall dedicated to Heinrich Schliemann and his butchering work on Troy, and I was slightly put out.
(Schliemann's Trojan excavations-- though that may be too generous a term-- are one of archaeology's greatest embarrassments, since he tore through countless valuable layers of the city to reach the bottom, and then misidentified most of them. He did dig it out, but now his finds are all suspect because he didn't use the correct methodology, and those parts of the site are spoiled for future study.)

But there are so MANY artifacts, and such large and grand pieces that the inconsistencies are all forgiven. (Well... mostly.) This museum has a few Roman and German history halls, and started with a Cypriot collection. But everything else on three floors is Egyptian, including the bust of Nefertiti (no photography allowed).
In short, I don't think it's curated well, but the collection is VERY impressive.

I lollygagged through most of the museum and completely lost the other kids, but I really shot myself in the foot when I wandered out an exit and couldn't get back in or signal the group where I'd gone. They eventually figured it out and came outside, but not before we were all starved and running for the first food stand we saw. (Döner kebab, loaded up with vegetables and tzatziki in huge, toasted pita pockets.)

Finn insisted on taking us to Alexanderplatz, another Berlin mall, just to prove that German malls did get bigger than the tiny underground one we were at yesterday. (He made sure we knew this, he said it three times.) We found our other tour group half-- the Brits and friend-- outside the mall and walked over to the Berlin Wall Memorial together.
The memorial is a section of the removed wall with accompanying excavation sections, informational plaques, and mini-exhibit effect as you walk along where the wall used to be. It focuses mostly on the building period and the escapes that were staged from the East to the West during that time and later through tunnels. You can tell which is the East; all of the remaining houses that were close to the wall had their windows bricked up on that side, since jumping from them had been a popular escape tactic.

Everyone was tired out after walking and couldn't decide what to do next, so we split up. Finn and Milan and us three headed off to the East Gallery, which is the artist-decorated sections of remaining wall. It's a huge, graffitied expanse of colors and styles (pictures to come), where every artist gets a section about the size of a billboard. When we walked around the back, that side is decorated with photos of other famous dividing walls: Gaza, the Korean DMZ, Israel, and others.

We went home after that, but would not admit defeat to an early bedtime, so we played German board games for a few hours after that; Finn has this one that's a version of Trouble, but the playing piece colors are all hidden (all black, as witch characters). It makes for a very mixed-up, aggravating, ill-thought-out drinking game.
"This is why we burn witches." -- Finn
Aaron and Milan and Finn then left to hang out at a friend's house and we went to bed.