Tag: National Archaeological Museum

Two more items from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and I wouldn’t have actually guessed what these were if it wasn’t for the descriptions next to them.

So, this item is a folding mirror, and it shows the female Goddess Nike, which represents victory, killing a bull. Not the most pleasant item perhaps, but it has some age, it dates to around 290BC to 300BC.

And another folding mirror which was found in Demetrias, which is now in Greece, and shows a female with an earring. It dates back to the third century BC and was likely owned by a wealthy individual.

I thought initially that these were pigeons, which struck me as a strange thing to make a figurine of. They’ve actually doves, not that there’s much difference between them and pigeons, and they were found in the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Daphni and they date to the fourth century BC.

As another of my little asides, near to where these were found, and also in Daphni, is a monastery on the outskirts of Athens which was built on the former site of the sanctuary of Apollo. Some of the remains were taken by Lord Elgin and sold to the British Museum where they are still located today. However, the British Museum doesn’t display them, so it’s questionable to me why they’re holding them, surely a provincial museum somewhere would be better to have them where they could be seen. Having said that, the British Museum apparently don’t display 99% of their items, so this isn’t an unusual situation and perhaps it really is the case that no museum wants them on a long-term loan.

I might well be posting photos of random artefacts from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for many more days yet, there was much to see.

Anyway, this is a hippo dating back to 3,000BC, made from granite and found in a temple at Abydos in Egypt. It’s apparently a particularly rare find given the large size of the hippo. I imagine that creating this would have taken many hours of chipping away at granite, but it still seems to be in reasonable condition even given its great age.

Located in the National Archaeological Museum, this is the funerary stela (or tablet) of Amenemhet.

And this one, which is more colourful than the photo suggests, is a funerary stela with a representation of Khenit and her son, Kai.

Neither of these are dated, but both are likely from the Middle Kingdom, so at some point between 1975 BC and 1640 BC.

Located in the National Archaeological Museum, this is a wooden funerary model of a ship and its crew. It dates to somewhere between 2040BC and 1640BC and was a grave good to help ensure that the soul was able to travel on a pilgrimage to the city of Abydos.

I’ll limit myself in this post to just a brief few comments about the National Museum of Archaeology, as I have lots of photos of various exhibits I’ll post later on. The frontage of this museum looks spectacular and it has been in this building since 1889, although the museum has been in operation since 1829.

The staff member at the desk was welcoming, although visitors are given precisely no information such as a map. This museum is substantial and so an orientation map would have been useful, or just a guide to the main key items in the collection. I wasn’t even sure where I was going to get into the museum after I had obtained my ticket, so I followed some Germans. They seemed equally unsure, but they were more decisive than me, and they made a good judgement on where to go.

There is no set path around the museum, which again might have been at least partly useful, as everything seemed rather random. However, the size of the museum was something else, and it’s the largest museum of its type in Greece and it’s also of international importance.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen so many statues, but I suppose that if anywhere is going to have a substantial collection of Greek statues then it’d be here. There are also a large number of damaged statues with various parts having fallen off over the centuries, but that simply adds to their charm. Well, sometimes… There’s also a Roman collection as well though, and numerous other collections from the ancient period, as well as a prehistoric collection.

I walked around for nearly three hours until I decided that I’d had enough of statues and sculptures. There were elements of the museum that I didn’t really discover despite visiting for that length of time, and apparently the museum is planning an expansion in the future.

Some reviews indicated that the museum randomly closes part of their collections when they’re short staffed, but I didn’t notice that being a problem during my visit. Although given how much there was to see I’m not sure that I would have really noticed if they had closed some of it.

I was again fortunate to be visiting in late March, as the museums become more expensive from the beginning of April. The usual admission charge for this museum is €10, but for the winter period it was just €5. Given how much there was to see, I considered that more than satisfactory value for money.