ISTANBUL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the Istanbul Archaeological Museum in brief

For archaeology fans, a visit to the Archaeological Museum is a must during a trip to Istanbul. After all, it is the largest and most important archaeological museum in Turkey. Its collections include some 15,000 archaeological pieces from Mesopotamia, Assyrian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Egyptian antiquity, prehistoric, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Asia Minor, as well as pre-Islamic and Islamic Arab culture.

The location and history of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum

The Archaeological Museum is located in Istanbul’s Old City in the extreme southeast of the European part of Istanbul, within the outer walls of Topkapi Palace, surrounded by Gülhane Park and below Hagia Sophia.

The museum was founded in 1891 under Sultan Abdülhamid II by the painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey as the “Museum of the Empire” as the central archaeological museum of the Ottoman Empire. It is divided into three parts: The Archaeological Museum proper, the Museum of Ancient Oriental Art and the Museum of Islamic Ceramics.

The collections of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum

Probably the most famous single object of the archaeological museum is the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus from the 4th century BC, which was excavated in 1887 by the museum’s founder Osman Hamdi Bey in Sidon (in Lebanon). Other exhibition highlights include the so-called Sidamara Sarcophagus from the 3rd century, a 4th century BC lioness from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, a colossal statue of Zeus and the head of the Serpent Column from the Hippodrome in central Istanbul.

The Ancient Near Eastern Museum is an addition to the Archaeological Museum with finds from areas of the Ancient Near East that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, mainly from Mesopotamia (cultures of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, etc.) and Asia Minor, for example from the empire of the Hittites. Other exhibits come from the Syria/Lebanon/Palestine area, from Yemen and from Pharaonic Egypt.

Among the internationally very well-known exhibits are Hittite cuneiform tablets, including one of the three preserved Hittite copies of the peace treaty after the Battle of Kadesh between Hattušili III. (Hittite Empire) and Ramses II (Egypt). These tablets have been included by UNESCO in the World Documentary Heritage, as they contain the oldest surviving written peace treaty in human history. Another highlight of the Ancient Near Eastern Museum is the specimen of the Nippur cubit, the original measure of pre-metric longitude.

The collection of Islamic ceramics is housed in the so-called Çinili Köşk (Tile House), a former pleasure palace of Sultan Mehmed II dating from 1472, and displays Seljuk and Ottoman ceramics from the 12th to the 19th centuries from various places of origin.