Museum Island Berlin: World Heritage Art and Antiquities

Museum Island is one of the world's great concentrations of museum treasures — a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the heart of Berlin where five major museums on a small island in the Spree River contain collections ranging from ancient Egyptian temples to Assyrian palace gateways, Greek sculptures, and European painting from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The island's museum complex was assembled over the 19th and early 20th centuries by the Prussian royal family and the German state, bringing antiquities from archaeological excavations across the Mediterranean and Middle East to Berlin in a model of colonial collecting that built incomparable collections while raising ongoing questions about repatriation.

The Pergamon Museum is the most famous, housing the reconstructed Pergamon Altar from ancient Greece — a 36-metre-wide monument to Zeus erected in the 2nd century BC — alongside the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon and the Market Gate of Miletus. The scale and quality of these reconstructed ancient structures is breathtaking; standing before the Ishtar Gate's lapis lazuli-glazed brick dragons and bulls, one apprehends ancient Babylonian civilisation in a way no textbook photograph can replicate. The Pergamon Museum is currently undergoing major renovation and certain galleries may be closed — check current opening status before visiting.

The Neues Museum houses the iconic bust of Nefertiti — the 3,300-year-old limestone portrait of the Egyptian queen discovered in 1912 — in a gallery designed by David Chipperfield that is itself one of Berlin's finest contemporary architectural interventions. The Altes Museum on the island's southern tip displays Greek and Roman antiquities in Schinkel's magnificent neoclassical building from 1830, while the Bode Museum at the island's northern tip houses sculptures and Byzantine art. The Berlin Museum Pass allows entry to all five museums and pays for itself quickly given the extraordinary depth of each collection — allow a minimum of two full days to do justice to Museum Island's riches.