It's hot as hell, in Philadel- phia!
I never did tell y'all about our trip to Philadelphia, did I? Well, here's a quick summary, with much of it taken from a comment I just left in indiana_jane_'s journal:
First off, I should say that I really liked Philadelphia. It's not too big to be daunting, and it's old enough that it feels like the New England cities I'm used to. So two thumbs up for the city in general.
We did some basic fun things, like take a Duck Tour (OMG, whoever it was who suggested it, I both thank you, because it was fun, and am going to hunt you down, because mr. muse has kept his quacker and likes to sneak up on us all with it) and eat cheesesteak (chicken cheesesteak with mushrooms, in my case), and we toured Independence Hall and the other buildings in that area related to the founding of the US. I'm not a flag-waving American by any means, but there's something very powerful to me about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all of the work that those men put into them. So being in the room where Richard Henry Lee, FFV, brought back the resolution from Virginia to the Continental Congress to declare independence and where John Adams from Massachusetts argued so vehemently for it really touched me. Maybe it has to do with being brought up in an area where the cemetery where we have burial plots has Revolutionary War veterans buried in it, kind of like if you live in an area where the Civil War/War Between the States (depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you were born on) battles were fought and you see those mementos every day. Anyway, Revolutionary War stuff is meaningful to me.
We did not go down to Philadelphia for that, though. We went to see the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit, which is made up of some pretty cool objects from the Cairo Museum. The exhibit was designed to have a massive amount of people in it (long corridors with only one artifact up high at the end, a little mini-movie you had to watch in batches before you entered), but we had the first tickets of the day on a Monday morning and had lots of room.
The exhibit started with the pre-Amarna period with some Amenhotep III-era objects, including a pretty head of Queen Tiye, a huge and very detailed model boat (way better than the Meketre models in the Met), and then moved to Amarna period with a colossal Akhenaten head, an okay Nefertiti bust (my favorite bust of hers is not the famous Berlin one but a simpler unpainted stone one in Cairo; this one was a serviceable practice head), and a beautiful head of an Amarna princess. I knew many of these artifacts from my studies, and I was excited to see them in person.
Then we got to the Tutankhamun rooms. Now, this stuff wasn't the cream of the crop, obviously; that all's still back in Cairo. However, there were types of objects in that exhibit that I've never seen anywhere else, and I've been to the Egyptian collections in Boston, New York, London, Oxford, Leiden, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, to name but a few. There were so many fragile objects made of wood or precious metals that survived in the tomb but would have been long lost if they'd been removed in antiquity. A crown, a cane with the crook carved like a Nubian captive bending backwards, a gorgeous carved and gilded chair, a jewelry chest, a decorative shield, a gold and inlay crook and flail, wooden statues of Sekhmet, Isis, Amun, and other gods. Just wonderful and beautiful items. They're items of the sort that I knew existed in general but had never seen in person, since so few of them survive and most are in Egypt. There was also a detailed shawabti of the pharaoh and a tiny but gorgeously intricate little gold sarcophagus.
I think I was most struck by a portable shrine, about the size of two loaves of bread, which was gilded and inscribed on all sides. It had two doors that opened in the front, and inside, where the long-lost statue of the god would have stood, were little gilded footprints for under its feet. Since I spent so much time in school studying the religion, it was amazing to see such a thing up close.
I'm not doing the exhibit justice; it was better than I had expected, with every case holding a treasure (at least to my eyes). I know that since these are the items the Cairo Museum was willing to let travel when we actually get to the museum itself someday I'm going to be blown away.
Anyway, good trip over all. I'm glad we went. :)
Thanks to all of you who made suggestions about what to see and do!
First off, I should say that I really liked Philadelphia. It's not too big to be daunting, and it's old enough that it feels like the New England cities I'm used to. So two thumbs up for the city in general.
We did some basic fun things, like take a Duck Tour (OMG, whoever it was who suggested it, I both thank you, because it was fun, and am going to hunt you down, because mr. muse has kept his quacker and likes to sneak up on us all with it) and eat cheesesteak (chicken cheesesteak with mushrooms, in my case), and we toured Independence Hall and the other buildings in that area related to the founding of the US. I'm not a flag-waving American by any means, but there's something very powerful to me about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all of the work that those men put into them. So being in the room where Richard Henry Lee, FFV, brought back the resolution from Virginia to the Continental Congress to declare independence and where John Adams from Massachusetts argued so vehemently for it really touched me. Maybe it has to do with being brought up in an area where the cemetery where we have burial plots has Revolutionary War veterans buried in it, kind of like if you live in an area where the Civil War/War Between the States (depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you were born on) battles were fought and you see those mementos every day. Anyway, Revolutionary War stuff is meaningful to me.
We did not go down to Philadelphia for that, though. We went to see the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit, which is made up of some pretty cool objects from the Cairo Museum. The exhibit was designed to have a massive amount of people in it (long corridors with only one artifact up high at the end, a little mini-movie you had to watch in batches before you entered), but we had the first tickets of the day on a Monday morning and had lots of room.
The exhibit started with the pre-Amarna period with some Amenhotep III-era objects, including a pretty head of Queen Tiye, a huge and very detailed model boat (way better than the Meketre models in the Met), and then moved to Amarna period with a colossal Akhenaten head, an okay Nefertiti bust (my favorite bust of hers is not the famous Berlin one but a simpler unpainted stone one in Cairo; this one was a serviceable practice head), and a beautiful head of an Amarna princess. I knew many of these artifacts from my studies, and I was excited to see them in person.
Then we got to the Tutankhamun rooms. Now, this stuff wasn't the cream of the crop, obviously; that all's still back in Cairo. However, there were types of objects in that exhibit that I've never seen anywhere else, and I've been to the Egyptian collections in Boston, New York, London, Oxford, Leiden, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, to name but a few. There were so many fragile objects made of wood or precious metals that survived in the tomb but would have been long lost if they'd been removed in antiquity. A crown, a cane with the crook carved like a Nubian captive bending backwards, a gorgeous carved and gilded chair, a jewelry chest, a decorative shield, a gold and inlay crook and flail, wooden statues of Sekhmet, Isis, Amun, and other gods. Just wonderful and beautiful items. They're items of the sort that I knew existed in general but had never seen in person, since so few of them survive and most are in Egypt. There was also a detailed shawabti of the pharaoh and a tiny but gorgeously intricate little gold sarcophagus.
I think I was most struck by a portable shrine, about the size of two loaves of bread, which was gilded and inscribed on all sides. It had two doors that opened in the front, and inside, where the long-lost statue of the god would have stood, were little gilded footprints for under its feet. Since I spent so much time in school studying the religion, it was amazing to see such a thing up close.
I'm not doing the exhibit justice; it was better than I had expected, with every case holding a treasure (at least to my eyes). I know that since these are the items the Cairo Museum was willing to let travel when we actually get to the museum itself someday I'm going to be blown away.
Anyway, good trip over all. I'm glad we went. :)
Thanks to all of you who made suggestions about what to see and do!