Istanbul Archaeology Museums
The Archaeological Museum Istanbul (Turkish: İstanbul Arkeoloji Muzesi) opened in Istanbul in 1891. It received the 1991 Council of Europe Museum Prize.
Its collections include around 15,000 archaeological pieces from Mesopotamia, from the Assyrian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Egyptian antiquity, the pre-and early - Greek Anatolia, as well as the pre-Islamic and Islamic Arab culture.
Structure
The Istanbul Archaeology Museum is divided into three parts:
Location
The Archaeological Museum is located in the old part of Istanbul, in the district of Eminönü in the extreme southeast of the European part of Istanbul - like a horn on a superb peninsula, within the outer surrounding wall of Topkapı Palace, surrounded by the Gülhane Park - below the Hagia Sophia.
History
The museum was founded in 1891 under Sultan Abdulhamid II by the painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey as Müze -i Humayun ( " Museum of the Empire " ) as a central archaeological museum of the Ottoman Empire. The architect Alexandre Vallaury erected the building in the neoclassical style (begun 1881).
Collections
The finds are mainly from the territory of modern Turkey or the Turkish territories until 1918 in the Middle East. The building has two floors. The ground floor consists of 20 exhibition rooms, upstairs smaller objects and sculptures are exhibited from the Middle Ages and modern times in a further 16 rooms. A new six-story building is located on the southeast of the main building.
Archaeological Museum
" Alexander Sarcophagus "
( Hall 8 - left of the entrance ) From the museum founder Osman Hamdi Bey in 1887 in Sidon (Lebanon), the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus from the 4th century BC found.
Other important objects
- Discovered in 1950 in Konya - Sidamara sarcophagus ( 3rd century ): Room 3
- Room 10: Phoenician inscriptions from Sidon and anthropomorphic sarcophagi
- Room 13: Lioness ( 4th century BC) from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
- Room 18: colossal statue of Zeus
- Head of the serpent column from the Hippodrome in the center of Istanbul.
- ( Upstairs) bronze goods from Cyprus, Greek vases and coins, Chinese and Japanese porcelain
Cabaret
( Upstairs) Among other objects from Troy VII b (for example, drinking cups with a horizontal and a vertical handle )
Outbuilding
It contains each level exhibition spaces, for example on the topics " Istanbul for Ages ", " Anatolia and Troy in the course of time ", " Surrounding Cultures of Anatolia (Cyprus, Syria, Palestine) " and a children's museum.
The ancient Near East Museum
Diagonally opposite the archaeological museum is located as its complement the Ancient Near Eastern Museum with finds from areas of the Ancient Near East who have heard of the Ottoman Empire, especially from Mesopotamia ( cultures of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, etc.) and Asia Minor, where, for example, the Hittite Empire. Other exhibits come from the space Syria / Lebanon / Palestine, from Yemen (Old South Arabia ) and from the Pharaonic Egypt.
The building was constructed in 1883 as a school of art and rededicated in 1935 this museum.
Among the internationally well-known exhibits include Hittite cuneiform tablets from Boğazkale, including one of the three surviving copies of the Hittite peace treaty after the Battle of Kadesh between Hattusili III. ( Hittite Empire) and Ramses II (Egypt). These panels were included by UNESCO in the World Heritage documents, because they contain the oldest surviving written peace treaty in human history.
The ancient oriental museum in Istanbul also hosts the specimen of Nippur cubit, the Urmass the vormetrischen length measurements.
The faience Pavilion ( Çinili Köşk )
The Fayencenmuseum is housed (earthenware Pavilion ) in a separate building and shows Seljuk and Ottoman ceramics from the 12th to the 19th century from various places of origin ( Kutahya, Canakkale ). A special focus take different works of art from faience tiles from the workshops of Iznik. Most important exhibit is a mihrab from the Ibrahim Bey Mosque in Karaman (central Anatolia ), and two arc fields from the Madrasa of Hasseki - Hürrem Mosque in Istanbul.
The building was constructed in 1472 by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror outside the Topkapi palace district as a pleasure palace and equipped inside and out with mosaics of green and blue Iznik tiles. The representative portico replaced after a fire in 1737 a wooden porch.