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The headdress on this bust of Ptah is one I commonly associate with the priest class, not only in Egypt but also in Ancient Rome. Ptah was the god of the north part of Egypt, his centre of worship …

When I was in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo I joked about how a votive offering table looked like an ancient form of beer pong. In Munich visiting the State Museum of Egyptian Art this dish re…

Mummies are one of the world’s great monster horror tropes. You have Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies and Mummies and most horror films are some variant of those. Both Zombies and Mummies are ri…

The Bavarian State Collection of Egyptian Art has picked up a few orphans along the way. A room of the museum is dedicated to Assyrian and Babylonian artefacts that form part of the collection. The…

As a poet Eleanor Ross Taylor serves as a beacon of hope for late bloomers. A woman who put aside her writing ambitions in favour of her husbands career, she published her first poetry collection …

The Bavarian State Museum of Egyptian Art began life as the personal collection of Bavarian monarchs. The origin of the word Cabinet derives from a time when great men would maintain a collection o…

One of my favourite exhibits in the Egyptian Museum in Munich is the papyrus reader. This long strip of papyrus is stretched out in a case along the wall. As you might expect it is a confusing coll…

I previously wrote about this Egyptian obelisk in Munich in my post Obelisk #22 so I won’t go back over the history here. Close observation of the stone indicates where it was broken and rest…

The Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst (State Museum of Egyptian Art) is located in the Kunstareal area of Munich. Greeting me when I arrived was this wonderful art piece of a collapsed Egyptian …

Civilization was born on Rivers. In Eurasia on the banks of the Nile, the Indus, Tigris and Euphrates. In China on the Yellow River. The mark of civilization is the City. When many people come toge…

Etruscan civilization was flourishing when Rome was a handful of mud huts on the edge of a swamp. In antiquity there were three main theories about the origins of the Etruscans. Because Italy has t…

Directly opposite the Glyptothek on Königsplatz is the Bavarian State Collection of Antiquities. A slightly less impressive counterpart to the Glyptothek it was designed by Georg Friedrich Ziebland…

The lyrical poem by Su Shi below was written in 1082 during the Song Dynasty. The author was an accomplished poet, civil servant, engineer, calligrapher and bon vivant. While Song poetry is not hel…

On this day in the year 1757 Robert Clive led his army of 3,000 soldiers against an Indian and French army of 50,000 at the village of Palashi, north of modern day Kolkata. On the morning of this …

The photo above shows how we have come all the way back to the beginning, behind the boy with the goose you can see the ticket desk in the vestibule and in the distance the Barberini Faun. You can …

From the Plan of the Glyptothek you will see we have now arrived at room XII on the North side of the complex, the side on which we entered. Our time is growing short. The room of Apollo is dominat…

On one side of the Chamber of Images you will see a long frieze, and walking around it I first thought it was a massive sarcophagus. It is actually part of the base of the Altar of Domitius Ahenoba…