“Myths, Cults and Cosmology” exhibition featuring Museum Island Berlin collections to open in Yerevan
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The opening ceremony of the exceptional new international exhibition “Myths, Cults and Cosmology: Museum Island Berlin at the History Museum of Armenia” will take place at the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan on September 21.
The unprecedented exhibition will feature more than 50 artifacts from six museums of Berlin’s Museum Island, spanning a broad period from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to modern times.
For the first time, artifacts selected from the rich collections of the six museums of Berlin’s Museum Island and the History Museum of Armenia will be brought together on a single platform. Ritual vessels, seals, jewelry, weapons and architectural reliefs discovered in Uruk, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Armenia, Byzantium, as well as Italy, Germany and elsewhere, will be presented, bearing traces of cosmological and mythological imagery.
Among the key exhibits of the exhibition are bronze models of the “solar system” dating to the 12th–11th centuries BC, from the Early Iron Age. Notably, the Berlin examples are being presented to the public for the first time ever.
Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the similarities and transformations between the cultural heritage, mythological thinking and cosmological concepts of different civilizations.
The exhibition is organized on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Armenia and the 200th anniversary of the founding of Berlin’s Museum Island, serving as a significant platform for cultural dialogue, institutional memory, and the mutual reinterpretation of the collections of two important museum centers.
The exhibition is being organized through cooperation between the History Museum of Armenia and the Museum of Prehistory and Early History of Berlin’s Museum Island, with financial support from the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports of the Republic of Armenia and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Armenia.
The exhibition will run until March 21, 2027.