Hans Huckebein on Facebook

15.03.2011
Pergamonmuseum

Hello everybody, my name is Hans. Hans Huckebein. You can find out more about me and my friends from Tell Halaf on Facebook. I regularly post photos of myself and the Tell Halaf exhibition on my profile and I'd like to hear what you think about it and me. Don't be shy, you can ask me anything you want.

I suppose I should introduce myself first, shouldn't I? Well, I was born 3000 years ago, in the city of Guzana in the kingdom of Bit Bahiani. My job was to stand guard in front of the gigantic palace that the Aramaean king, King Kapara, had built. But after just a few decades at my post, the Assyrians crushed a revolt by the inhabitants of Guzana and set fire to the palace. They spared a thought for no one, not even me. I was toppled over and I broke. I was left lying there and, slowly but surely, people forgot me over time. I would have been forgotten completely if Max von Oppenheim hadn't dug me up. When he freed me from the ancient debris in 1911, I looked around me and saw that nothing was the same anymore: the spectacular city of Guzana no longer existed and the only thing left of the palace were its foundations. My stone friends had shared the same fate, they too lay broken and scattered around beneath the sand.

Nowadays the place that was my home is called 'Tell Halaf', the people who lived there most recently were Syrians and they no longer worshipped the weather god. Well, things all went pretty fast after that: Baron Oppenheim took me and my friends with him to his home, Berlin. He gave me to the Pergamon Museum to keep. But he put my friends on display in the Tell Halaf-Museum in Charlottenburg, just down the road. Someone told me that a bomb hit the museum in the Second World War. After that I gave up hope of ever seeing my friends again. But now, 80 years after the bomb hit, we've been reunited, in the exhibition 'The Tell Halaf Adventure'. You have no idea how happy I am!

Find out more about me and my stone friends on Facebook at:
www.facebook.com/gerettetegoetter