East meets West, and in this case ancient Greece, in a wide-ranging exhibition that opened last week at Beijing’s Capital Museum of China.
Entitled “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great”, the exhibition displays 270 artifacts and antiquities loaned by 14 museums and institutions in Greece. It will run until May 2025, before moving to its next stop in China, the metropolis of Shanghai.
As one might guess from its title, one of the show’s two best-known artefacts is the Bronze Age “Mask of Agamemnon”, a gold funerary mask excavated in Mycenae which some have attributed to the fabled Mycenean king who plays a lead role in Homer’s Iliad.
The other is a marble head of what is considered a Hellenistic-era statue of Alexander the Great, which was discovered during excavations on the Acropolis in the late 19th century.
