Friday, May 19, 2006

More on Sunken Treasures exhibition

Nevine El-Aref takes a look at the Sunken Treasures exhibition in Berlin, and describes the background to the discoveries, the content and presentation of the exhibition and its impact on the city: "The exhibition has stolen the spotlight from the 2006 World Cup Championship which will be held in Germany in June. The streets of Berlin, its shops, airport, train stations, buses and hotels are plastered with posters of granite colossi of the goddess Isis, the Nile god Hapi, Ptolemaic royal figures and the head of Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar, found half-buried in the seabed. Magazine covers show divers face to face with monuments beneath the waves, while photographs of objects from Napoleon's sunken fleet dominate the front pages of newspapers. Berlin, it sometimes feels, has been cast beneath the spell of sunken treasure. Even the German Der Spiegel magazine has launched a special issue on the exhibition and the efforts of the IEASM to raise such magnificent artefacts from the seabed."

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,415677,00.html
A cheerful and detailed two-part item on the Spiegel Online website, in English, which offers some insights into what the exhibition reveals about ancient Egypt, providing a useful summary of Ptolemaic history: " Treasure hunter Franck Goddio has spent years bringing the sunken city of Alexandria to the surface. The results of his labors, now premiering in Berlin, reveal incest, fratricide and iniquity. And breathtaking beauty. It's a good thing that the Martin Gropius Building has such high ceilings. It'll need them. The exhibit at the Berlin museum includes 15-ton statues sculpted from rose-colored granite that have spent millennia on the ocean floor."
There is also a very fine photo gallery showing items as they were recovered from the sea:

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