“The Past From Above”
Vee and I spent most of Saturday in central London with our dear Chinese friends Hua and Zhihao. We started with a dim sum meal in a restaurant in Chinatown called “New China” where we had lots of courses and took our time.
Then we went to the British Museum to see an interesting exhibition entitled “The Past From Above”. This consists of 100 aerial photographs taken by the Swiss photographer Georg Gerster and drawn from a collection of some 8,000 pictures shot by him over almost half a century. His subjects are important historical and archaelogical sites on each of the five continents.
In spite of all my travels, I have visited very few of the places featured in the photographs, but one that I have been to quite recently is Volubilis in Morocco [my notes here]
In many cases, the date of construction of the sites is uncertain and the purpose of the location is unknown. What was particularly striking was how many of these sites are in the Middle East – a region which today we associate so much with murder and mayhem. Five are in Iraq, five in Iran and six in Syria plus two in Palestine.