The metopes are individual sculptures in high relief. The Parthenon was decorated by 92 metopes, 32 on each long side and 14 on each short. Each metope was separated from the next one by a small grooved slab called trygliph.
The metopes, placed above the external row of columns, represented several mythical battles: episodes of the Trojan War on the north side, the Struggle between Lapiths and Centaurs (half-men, half-horses) on the south, the Gigantomachy (fight between gods and giants) on the east and the Amazonomachy (battle between Greeks and Amazons) on the west.
Of the 64 metopes preserved 48 are in the New Acropolis Museum of Athens, 15 in the British Museum of London and 1 with fragments of others in the Louvre Museum of Paris. Further fragments of Metopes are also in the Vatican Museums of Rome and 1 (a head) is at the University of Würzburg.
Below is short slideshow of some of the objects we ran across in our short visit to the Louvre. It is a fairly random collection of artefacts from Assyria, Greece, Crete and Egypt. Mainly these photos are the images that were better lit. I hope I got all the titles right, even haven taken photos of the tags didn't make it that easy to figure out what is what now that I am back in front of the computer. It is a bit of a wonder why they place these incredible things around the museum with such care, but don't bother much helping you understand what you are looking. Is the purpose of a museum just to show stuff or to make sense of things? Anyway, these objects are certainly beautiful and proof that the ancient world continues to reach across time and mesmerize us.
Submitted by Jon Himoff on Fri, 11/13/2009 - 19:49
I had a great break last weekend and made a one-day shot London/Paris/London via the Eurostar (which is best way to travel this itinerary) to join some family for a special celebration. After lunch we also had (not enough) time to make a quick visit to the Louvre Museum. Given the recent incident where the Louvre was busted by Zahi Hawass for taking "hot" artefacts from Egypt, we decided to go have a look at the Egyptian Collection. The Louvre is even bigger than I had remembered it. Getting to the Egyptian area was not very easy.
This inscribed terracotta tablet is an example of the application of Mesopotamian lexical literature to the field of science, which often manifested itself in the form of scholarly catalogues that worked on a simple level as lists of genres or species of plants or substances. They were also used as more elaborate lists of symptoms of disease. However this artefact is an example of a list of substances.
Submitted by Bija Knowles on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 10:14
Everyone makes them (some of us more compulsively than others): scribbled on post-it notes, or kept mentally in our imaginations – we all make lists. And we're not the only ones either; lists have been around for a long time – possibly since the first writing systems and certainly since Sumerian scribes began to keep accounts in the fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia. So what is it about the beauty of a list – its numerical order, hierarchy, completeness – that makes them such a part of how we like to categorise, order and understand the world?
Submitted by Sean Williams on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 12:06
A lighter chapter to the ongoing issue of repatriating Egypt's treasures will close today, as an ancient shrine fragment touches down on Egyptian soil after a year of international co-operation. The red granite chunk, part of a shrine, or 'naos', was bought by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art from a private collector last October, with the sole intent to send it back to its home nation.
It doesn't happen all that often that the battle over 'mere tomb paintings' makes headline news - why would they, when they have the highly debated return of the Elgin Marbles to the Acropolis Museum to write about? But the whole world was shocked last week, when Dr. Zahi Hawass accused France's most famous museum of theft. Or at least, of purchasing looted artefacts and then refusing to return them to Egypt. Dr. Hawass hit back by refusing to let the Louvre's Saqqara team dig in Egypt.
The Louvre stated that it was forced to wait for permission to return the artefacts. But now the committee has advised that the fragments from Tetiki's tomb are to be returned - President Sarkozy has even phoned President Mubarak to ensure they'll be shipped to Egypt in six days' time. Dr. Hawass says: "When the objects return I will be very happy to renew our archaeological relationship with the Louvre and allow them to excavate again at Saqqara."
It doesn't happen all that often that the battle over 'mere tomb paintings' makes headline news - why would they, when they have the highly debated return of the Elgin Marbles to the Acropolis Museum to write about? But the whole world was shocked last week, 
