A while ago I signed up for a full day tour of Tel Aviv’s archeological museum, The Eretz Israel Museum. This was a bit (very) over-ambitious as I have about 2 hours of “museum stamina” in me. It was a special offer tied to the archeology lectures I have been attending, and featured tours given by the curators of three different collections, Glass, Pottery, and Man and his Work, so I went for it! It was exhausting, but worth it, to listen to the curators, all of whom are practising archeologists, and who were passionate about these collections which they had been instrumental in building.
The museum itself is built on the site of an archeological dig, Tel Quasile, (over 3,000 years old), on beautiful grounds overlooking Tel Aviv. As the dynamic curator of the “Man and his Work” pavilion said, it seemed a brilliant idea at the time to put an archeology museum right at a dig site. However, every time they sunk a shovel, the builders would find some new antiquity, everything stopped dead, and so it took quite a while to finish. The site is now home to several individual pavilions, each operating as a separate museum focused on a particular theme, including oddly, a museum of postal history, covering mail-service in the area from the 15 century to 1948! (I may have to go back for that one. I have never really thought about mail service that way.) Interspersed with all of these, are the original dig sites, and subsequent finds such as Byzantine olive presses etc.
Of the three museums we toured, the loveliest from a visual standpoint was the Glass Museum, featuring glass from the 15th century BC to the present. It was amazing to see how well preserved these ancient glass items were, especially compared to the pottery museum, where many pots were found in fragments and reassembled. As the curator pointed out, this is because glass items were precious in their day, and were often buried with their owners.
The most striking piece was a remarkable glass mosaic from Caesarea circa late 6th century (Byzantine period) unique in the world for its condition.
It was a pleasure to finish with some contemporary pieces. I especially like the splashing water.
