27,000 Piece Jigsaw Finally Solved: Tell Halaf Treasures

I came across this and thought that ATS would enjoy To reconstruct this requires serious patience!

Berlin (CNN) -- A collection of ancient statues destroyed during the British bombing of Berlin in World War II have been painstakingly restored and are being displayed.

It has taken nine years to piece together the 27,000 fragments of the 3,000-year-old Tell Halaf treasures taken from what is now Syria by the German archaeologist and wealthy collector Max von Oppenheim early in the 20th century.

Lutz Martin, co-ordinator of the restoration project, said: "'We started in 2001. The first step was to lay out all the fragments on an area of 600 square meters and then we started to sort the material. Our tools were only our eyes, our brains, our endurance and our patience."

Full Article


Peace

Thats awesome.
They also picked up the 27000 pieces, two times awesome.

That is so cool , these are the type of post I like....Great Find

Our tools were only our eyes, our brains, our endurance and our patience.

Gosh well I have one out of the four tools

A wonderful story!

What's particularly neat is that you see the difference between modern restoration and older forms of restoration. Originally they would try to match the material and surface so the thing looks as though it was never broken. Now they put in a different material -- similar in tone so that it doesn't distract the casual viewer -- so that the trained eye instantly spots what was original material and what has been resculpted. This is a boon to later researchers -- if other fragments show up, then they can be added in and corrections made if need be.

The scale of what they did was immense! I find it difficult enough to do a 200 piece jigsaw puzzle and that's mere child's play compared to this. There are some seriously dedicated and talented people out there reconstructing our past piece by piece.