Ancient Greece

We have been in Greece for a few days and I have a few things to show you. Yesterday we went to a new museum. It is called the Acropolis museum. The Acropolis is a hill right in the middle of Athens. The image of Athens below is from Google Earth. You can explore there to see what it looks like. One of the main structures at the top is the Parthenon. This is a very famous building that was originally built by Greeks. The proportions of the structure are amazing. The columns were made specifically so that they could hold up the weight of the ceiling, but not look as massive as they really are. The Parthenon has a long history. When it was built, ancient artists carved beautiful scenes into the big blocks at the top of the building. Over the centuries there were various things that destroyed parts of the Parthenon. For a while it was a church and there was a fire and it was also blown up. Early in the 1800’s a British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (the Turkish Empire was in control of this area at the time) saw how valuable the carved blocks would be. He removed about half of them and brought them back to England and they are now in the British Museum. At the time some people thought he was doing a good thing and others thought that it was like looting, or taking something that did not belong to him. Over the years there has been a lot of controversy about what is now called the Elgin Marbles (or the Parthenon Marbles). Greece believes that the marbles should be returned to their original place, but the British Museum argues that they are taking good care of them and that they were put in the British Museum legally. Now Greece has created this new museum, which is really fantastic in order to display many of the finds and they have created a place in the museum specifically for the Parthenon Marbles. They have on display all of the Marbles that were left and copies in plaster of the ones that are missing. What I liked most about the museum is that when they built it they did archaeology under the museum and they built the museum around the dig. You can walk on glass over the dig and look down to see what they found. Inside the museum we could not take pictures, but there were lots of statues and of course the Marbles. The thing about the statues was that many of them had color left on them and so it was possible to see how they were painted!

Classical archaeology shows us about how people built in ancient times. This is a picture of Hephaistos temple, which is one of the few that are in really good condition. You will notice that both ends of the building have a triangle at the top. This is called a pediment. Pediments often have beautiful statues that show scenes with Gods and men. Here is an example from the a model of the Parthenon. The image is from Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:West_Pediment_Parthenon_B-3.jpg