Ancient statues devastated in bombing on exhibit in Berlin
Restorers at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin have pieced together the 3,000-year-old statues that were nearly destroyed in World War II. © Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The roughly 3,000-year old statues have been pieced together over the past decade from fragments left behind when Berlin’s Tell Halaf Museum was bombed in 1943.
The exhibit, The Tell Halaf Adventure, opened Thursday.
The statues were excavated in 1911 to 1913 by German archaeologist Max von Oppenheim and first went on display in Berlin in 1930.
After the wartime bombing, the rubble was salvaged and stored for decades in the Pergamon Museum’s cellars. Restorers sifted through some 27,000 fragments to restore the sculptures.
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AP-CS-01-27-11 0345EST
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Restorers at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin have pieced together the 3,000-year-old statues that were nearly destroyed in World War II. © Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
