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The Oriental Institute Museum [Picspam]
Sep. 12th, 2010 03:26 pmA couple of months ago a friend came to town, and we decided to skip the usual thing of going to a big showy museum in favor of finding something small and unusual. We ended up spending a morning at The Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago.
It isn't a big museum, but it's full of amazing stuff from the ancient Near East, including a few real jaw-droppers. Pretty much every new gallery had me saying "you are KIDDING me. Seriously?" upon seeing what was on display there. You can walk right up to everything, you can take pictures of everything, and IIRC admission was "pay what you want, $5 suggested." And although other people would wander through from time to time, mostly we were by ourselves in the galleries.
Because it's a museum dedicated to the work of a particular group of archaeologists, there is informational material posted here and there showing how they acquired and restored the stuff on display. I was very pleased to learn that their standard procedure at the time most of the excavations were done (early 20th c) seems to have been to partner with the government of the place they were working in; dig up stuff, and then the country of origin would take the better-quality stuff and the OI would get the worse-quality stuff. There is a big statue of Tutankhamun, for example, that is one of a pair. The less-damaged one is on display in Egypt, and the one in Chicago, which was half rubble, was restored by taking a cast of the Egyptian one and using that as a basis for rebuilding. All of the monumental objects on display are restored single members of larger sets, with the other members remaining in their home countries. It's very nice to be able to ogle things without feeling that they were probably stolen.
My whole photo set is over here on flickr, and some of my favorites are below.
( Pictures behind the cut. )
It isn't a big museum, but it's full of amazing stuff from the ancient Near East, including a few real jaw-droppers. Pretty much every new gallery had me saying "you are KIDDING me. Seriously?" upon seeing what was on display there. You can walk right up to everything, you can take pictures of everything, and IIRC admission was "pay what you want, $5 suggested." And although other people would wander through from time to time, mostly we were by ourselves in the galleries.
Because it's a museum dedicated to the work of a particular group of archaeologists, there is informational material posted here and there showing how they acquired and restored the stuff on display. I was very pleased to learn that their standard procedure at the time most of the excavations were done (early 20th c) seems to have been to partner with the government of the place they were working in; dig up stuff, and then the country of origin would take the better-quality stuff and the OI would get the worse-quality stuff. There is a big statue of Tutankhamun, for example, that is one of a pair. The less-damaged one is on display in Egypt, and the one in Chicago, which was half rubble, was restored by taking a cast of the Egyptian one and using that as a basis for rebuilding. All of the monumental objects on display are restored single members of larger sets, with the other members remaining in their home countries. It's very nice to be able to ogle things without feeling that they were probably stolen.
My whole photo set is over here on flickr, and some of my favorites are below.
( Pictures behind the cut. )
