History At Our Fingertips

The Israel Museum! What an amazing place. It was hard to wrap my mind around it all. I've seen movies with all kinds of things. Nayna calls them Hollywood props and they're  made in a studio by artists. But this is the real deal. They were dug out of the ground by people called archeologists who look for old things. 

These sarcophagus - stone coffins are from Egypt and date back over 5000 years.

Funny looking dolls aren't they? But they aren't dolls at all. They are gods. People prayed to these things expecting answers. About the size of an adult hand, they could be carried around. I'm sure glad my God is bigger then that and isn't made out of clay or stone.

When Nayna saw this she laughed. It's about the size of a dessert plate and around 8 inches tall. She said it must have been the first latte cup. Did they have Starbucks or Aroma back then??

These churns were found in Beersheva and Golan 5 to 6 thousand years ago. They were rocked back and forth to make butter from milk. So I wonder if they ate bread with butter and honey?

We kept going from room to room and each one was filled with more treasures. 

This room had lots of glass. Beautiful glass of all shapes, sizes and colors. This was one of Nayna's favorite rooms.

There were displays of jewelry. 

This jewelry was found in the tomb of a young woman from Jerusalem in the mid 2nd century . It's thought she must have been married to a Roman soldier because all the jewelry was imported from other places.

I found this lion in the Greek room. They all think I'm pretty cool huh?

 The helmet was worn by a Roman soldier. It looks so uncomfortable to me. But that's what kept him safe.

This was reconstructed from a synagogue. Isn't it beautiful? Even back then, they made their buildings very fancy.

This doesn't even begin to show you what we saw. There was so much more.
We saw that everything would close in an hour so we made our way back through the maze of rooms.
The last exhibit we went to was Herod the Great. Its only at the museum until January 2014 and they had people guarding everything. Nayna wanted to take pictures, but she was told no.
I can tell you about it though.
We saw his marble bathtub and a huge beautiful basin as well as part of his bathhouse, and things from his palaces - plates, bowls, pitchers, coins with pictures of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, and the big display held pieces of his shrine and sarcophagus.
Nayna found a picture of it online so you could see it.

Next we're going to the Kotel - the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem.
  

A Trip to the Israel Museum

So much to see and so little time. I think it would take my whole life here and I'd still run out of time to see everything.
Papa decided that he'd rather go to the Israel Museum instead of the Dead Sea and Masada. It would be so hot there, he told Nayna.
And so, after another big breakfast - burp! scuse me! - we walked up Nordau street and caught the #5 bus for the Tel Aviv train station so we could catch the #480 bus to the Jerusalem central bus station. We're getting pretty good at this public transportation thing.
I love watching the countryside change from city to fields, to mountains to city all within an hour.
This time, instead of taking the lightrail, or another bus, we decided to use a taxi.
Now that's an experience!
They weave in and out of traffic, almost drive up on the sidewalk and narrowly miss other cars and buses. I peeked out of Nayna's purse and snickered as Papa and Nayna gave each other funny looks.

The Israel Museum is big! We'd never be able to see everything.
On our way to the Shrine of the Book, Nayna reached up and set me on a very old carved stone from a synagogue.

We stopped to look at a scale model of second Temple Jerusalem.

 And then I saw what looked like a white Hersey Kiss with water sprayed over the sides. "Do we get to see all kinds of kisses?" I asked.
Nayna snickered. "No, silly bear. That's the Shrine of the Book. Its where the Isaiah scrolls found in Qumran in 1947 are housed.
We walked through a door and into a dimly lit hall where glass cases held all kinds of things they found along with the scrolls. There were cloth and coins, arrows and jars and plates. In some ways the people who lived back in Qumran more than 2000 years ago were so different, and yet, maybe they weren't. I've seen bowls and plates and even combs that look a lot like the ones I see now. I wonder what they ate and what they used their coins to buy. Did their moms sew them new clothes when they were children? Did they play with balls and have puppies and kitties as pets?
At the end of the hall was a door that led into a big room with the Isaiah scroll in the center. Because its so old and they want to protect it, they frown from anyone taking pictures of it, but I wanted you to see what it looked like, so Nayna found a picture on the internet.

It was cool! The Hebrew words look much the same as now so people who know Hebrew can read the scroll just like those who read it for the first time.
Now it was time to go into the big building and look at lots of really old things. We walked outside into the sunlight. We were surrounded by concrete and it was hot. Nayna found some handy hands to sit on for a moment.The ones in the shade where nice.

There is so much more I want you to see, so I'm going to save it for the next blog. I want to take you into the building where we saw things from the beginning of time when things were made. I'll tell you all about it and show more pictures from Nayna's camera.
See you in the 1st century BCE!