The National Museum for Archaeology I

I spent over three wonderful hours at the National Museum for Archaeology on Wednesday, and I can highly recommend it; it is possibly the best museum on antiquity I have ever visited. I had made a brief venture there on Tuesday, but as the memory card of my big camera was sitting pretty in my PC and all the batteries (including the four back-ups) for the small camera decided to die simultaneously, I thought it best to go back to the hotel and just sulk. So the very next day I returned, both cameras charged to the max and memory cards present.

I had just checked in my bag when I saw a sign for English guided tours and a lady sitting behing a desk. I went over to enquire and she told me that two other ladies were interested in joining a tour if I could wait five minutes. She went off, but came back without the ladies, who were no longer interested. She offered to give me a "very special private tour" for just 30 Euros (as opposed to the regular 50), so I agreed. I'm glad I did; I even opted for an additional tour of an extra room for €10 more. It was a great to have a knowledgeable person with 20 years of experience to show me the highlights, and I walked back later to look at some stuff in detail and get more pics.

I'm going to divide the material from the museum into three posts, as I took a shitload of pics while there; let me just reiterate that the National Museum for Archaeology is a great place and that a guided tour is very much recommended indeed.

This section consists of pictures from the early Hellenistic civilizations. This is the so-called "Mask of Agamemnon", a death mask found by a Kraut archaeologist in 1876. Recent carbon dating shows the mummy that was below it to be more than 400 years older than Mr. Agamemnon, but for reasons of publicity they still call it the Agamemnon mask. The scoundrels.


That's pure gold, btw.


Some old fertility symbol. Originally, the statue is thought to have had a big boner.


The swastika - a fertility symbol found in many places around the world.


The earth mother Gaia - an ancient Greek deity and the object of vast amounts of idiotic nonsense from present day dirty, smelly hippies and eco-fascists.


Greek civilization in many ways started with the one in Crete; the Minoans. They'd been to Egypt, were impressed with what they had seen, and one of the many things they copied was the ritual slaughter of bulls.


Another thing about the Minoans - it was the fashion among the ladies of the court to walk around with their breasts on display. Never say you don't learn anything from this blog!


The ancient ones would make helmets out of boars' tusks. These were an early form of armour and it could take upwards of 140 animals to make one helmet. If you encountered someone wearing one of these, you could be pretty sure he was a fierce warrior.