The National Museum of Beirut is one of the most interesting museums I have ever visited. The first surprise is the building itself, which is in some kind of Egyptian style. Inside, it is essentially a very big hall with…
A nice Ottoman house with a collection of jewelry, pottery, porcelain, and sculpture from various ages. Several nice funerary portraits from Palmyra. Closed in about 2015.
There are 1…
Belginum was a small settlement along the road through the hills between Trier in the southwest to Bingen and Mainz on the Rhine, in the east. The road still exists on exactly the same place: the ancient houses, which were…
Museum of warfare from Prehistory until today, including a small department of ancient (especially) Roman military equipment.
There are 3 items in Belgrade, Military Museum:
…
Sometimes, the history of a museum is as interesting as its collection. The Dutch Museum Orientalis in Berg en Dal (near Nijmegen) was founded almost a century ago - in 1911 to be precise - and was meant to offer…
When the Altes Museum was founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, many people believed in Winckelmann’s theory that only the ancient Greeks had been able to create truly great art, and that the only way for artists to…
I am just back from a quick visit to Berlin. Although I had visited the city several times before, I had never been to the Bode-Museum. Stupid me: it is one of the most beautiful museums I’ve ever been to.…
The Neues Museum was, for me, the main reason to visit Berlin last week. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, although I must add immediately that there were so many interesting objects that I had to…
The Pergamonmuseum is probably Berlin’s most famous cultural institution. It contains three major collections which, each in itself, might have been fine museums: a classical department, a department of ancient Near Eastern art, and a department of Islamic art. What…
The collection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in the Berlin Zeughaus has a department of Roman and German antiquities.
There are 3 items in Berlin, Zeughaus:
…
I was writing my book on Alexander the Great when I visited Iran for the first time. We had already visited Susa and our next stop was Shiraz, which we wanted to use as base to visit Persepolis, Pasargadae, and…