Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Okay internet, you don't like me and I don't like you...

So let’s try that again now I have a better rate than 1 Mbps.

The Jamahiriya Museum has five floors covering Libyan history from the Neolithic to modern times (including a display map of old oil acreages, of interest to the Ambassador). The bit that attracts all the attention is, fairly enough, the Roman and Greek stuff, but it altogether it displays things like:


Prehistoric stuff like replicas of the rock art in the Jebel Acacus, which I sincerely hope we have a chance to see for real (better photos here; click on Libya on the menu - the rest of that site's great too)

Libyan civilisations before the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans subsumed them, mainly the Garamantian people


Greek statues such as the lovely Three Graces (the comrades of Aphrodite)


A whole bunch of Roman stuff including statues, carvings and mosaics


Byzantine and Islamic architecture and artefacts, including examples of very early mosques, and this ornately carved door

Libyan resistance to Italian occupation and the September revolution

And natural history, including a 'freak animal' display.

Eventually, once I have more photos, I'll have to devote an entry to each level of the musuem. It is one of the highlights of the tourist attractions in Tripoli and the surrounds.

In other news: happy birthday to the relevant person; the driving has gone crazy (-ier) here as we pass the midway point of Ramadan, with the roads resembling a bumper-car race; we’ve had some decent rain; we still don’t have our own internet account, reportedly because demand for accounts is so much higher than expected (ie so much higher that people must be spending their food money on the monthly cost just to get online, viva la incredibly slow broadband internet).

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