Berlin - Museumsinsel, Pergamon Museum, Museum for Islamic Art, Gate of Ishtar, Marduk, Pergamon Altar, Miletus

Pergamon Museum:

PERGAMON, GATE OF ISHTAR, ANCIENT MUSEUM, MUSEUM OF MIDDLE EAST, MUSEUM FÜR ISLAMISCHE KUNST

Pergamon Museum is the largest, most inspiring and most famous museum on Museumsinsel. It features large scale replicas of ancient buildings, the most remarkable are the Gate of Ishtar and the Processional Way from Babylon, the market gate of Miletus and a temple in the city of Pergamon. There was also an occaisional (2012) exhibition with a vertical, cylindrical panorama of the city of Pergamon. It was constructed between 1910 and 1930 and was designed by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann. The museum is subdivided into 3 parts: the antiquity museum (ancient Greece), the Middle East museum and the museum of Islamic art. It is the most visited art museum in Germany with more then 1.1 visitors a year. There are plans to expand the museum with modern parts.

The entrance to the Pergamon Museum. Inside the cylinder there was an occasional exhibition, featureing a high 360 degrees circular panorama that resemble the ancient Greek city of Pergamon and its people, shifting colours from (fictive) sunrise to sunset. I visited it but unfortunately it wasn't allowed to take pictures there.

The train bridge goes right throught the museum.

An express train ICE goes right throught Museumisland, right throught the Pergamon Museum!

An older train going through the museum.

The Pergamon Altar is a monumental construction built during the reign of King Eumenes II in the first half of the 2nd century BC on one of the terraces of the acropolis of the ancient city of Pergamon in Asia Minor. The structure is 35.64 meters wide and 33.4 meters deep; the front stairway alone is almost 20 meters wide. The base is decorated with a frieze in high relief showing the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachy.

In 1878 the German engineer Carl Humann began official excavations on the acropolis of Pergamon, an effort that lasted until 1886. The excavation was undertaken in order to rescue the altar friezes and expose the foundation of the edifice. Later it became the property of Berlin museums.

In Berlin, Italian restorers reassembled the panels comprising the frieze from the thousands of fragments that had been recovered. In order to display the result and create a context for it, a new museum was erected in 1901 on Berlin's Museum Island. Because this first Pergamon Museum proved to be both inadequate and structurally unsound, it was demolished in 1909 and replaced with a much larger museum, which opened in 1930 and is the current museum

The Pergamon Altar is today the most famous item in the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities, which is on display in the Pergamon Museum and in the Altes Museum, both of which are on Berlin's Museum Island. Source: Wikipedia.

Model of the ancient city of Pergamon.

The red marble floor seen from the Pergamon Altar.

The Market of Miletus. This is a large marble monument from the ancient Greek city of Miletus, in what is now Turkey. It was built in the 2nd century AD.

In the early 1900s, the gate of Miletus was moved from Greece to Germany and rebuilt by partly artificial material, since the original was partly destroyed.

The gate of Ishtar, once part of the ancient city of Babylon. It was the eighth gate to the inner city and was constructed in about 575 BC by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II.