26 November 2008

E?

Then we went to the Delphi Archaeological Museum, which is another one of those museums where every room is filled with priceless cultural artifacts. This, for example, is the charioteer of Delphi. You may well have seen pictures of this statue before- it's quite famous. The French found it after the earthquake of the late 1890s, because he had been buried before that. It is made of bronze, and you can tell from the style (the facial features, the fact that he is clothed, etc.) that it is from the early classical period.
This inscription is really really cool, my music friends! Can you see how there are lines of text, and the occasional letters between those lines of text? Yes? Those are notations of music of some sort. What they actually mean in turns of tune, I am not entirely sure- I'm not, by any means, an expert on ancient musical notation- but it's pretty cool. It's like ancient sheet music! Only on rocks.
This is the omphalos! I did say that Delphi was the center of the universe, right? This is the stone that marks the center of the center of the universe.

To my science friends- no, you aren't allowed to say anything. If I choose to believe that Delphi is the center of the universe, in spite of a semester of astronomy, nothing you say is going to dissuade me. NOTHING.
This is a part of the pediment sculpture of the treasury of the Athenians. I'm not entirely sure if we were supposed to be in this room- there were ropes blocking off the entryways, but the guard let us in happily enough when we said that we were archaeology students. It depicts one of the labors of Theseus- he's killing an Amazon woman in this part. According to my archaeology professor, he has also just realized that he loves this person. I think that this is indicative of a somewhat dysfunctional relationship. There are lots of those in ancient Greek mythology- see "Atreus, House of".
This one is really cool, guys. That face is part of a statue- want to hazard a guess what materials it is made of?

If you guessed gold for the shiny gold metal, good job! The black part, however, is interesting- that's ivory. You might be thinking that black is an awfully interesting color for ivory to be- that's because it was damaged by fire at some point in time. This statue is "chryselephantine"- literally, gold and ivory, though the term also refers to a specific sort of cult statue. At some point in time, this statue (and some others) was buried, leading to this impressive state of preservation. I think we think that this statue is of Artemis, Apollo's twin sister.

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