A very satisfying day at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. As is typical, I got so thoroghly engrossed by the relatively small collection of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that I hardly had energy for the vast halls of pottery and burial monuments from antique Anatolia. Even so, the splendor of the Alexander Sarcophagous from Sidon (as well as the one with the weeping women) wasn’t lost on me.
I go just bananas for the Mesopotamian publishing techniques—clay cylinders, stamps, inscribed reliefs, and tiny tablets. The efforts that made them simply cry out for the power of words.
Before that, I wandered through the Topkapi Palace, which housed Ottoman sultans from Mehmet the 
Conqueror to Atatürk. It didn’t blow me away like the archaeology—ostentatious riches aren’t my cup of tea. But there was one really memorable part, in addition to the view of the Bosphorus: a reliquary of holy objects. And you thought the Vatican’s collection of “true cross” fragments (about enough wood to populate a forest) was ambitious. Here we have Moses’s staff, King David’s sword, Joseph’s turban, Muhammad’s footprint, and even a vessel used by Abraham. The museum dutifully labeled each with dates appropriate to the respective character. In the gallery, Qur’anic chanting was carried by speakers. Turns out, at the end there’s a man chanting into a microphone, sitting at a geometrical black desk that looks like it came from the bridge of a Romulan Warbird. The sound was beautiful of course.
One more thing: last night there was a cat playing in the lights at the Hagia Sophia.
