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Culture in Jakarta

We thought a nice place to start our tour of Jakarta would be the National Museum a wonderful cultural outpost featuring of carved objects, instruments, and statues made of bronze. There are over 100,000 objects in the museum, so we were told, and one can visit an exhaustive collection of historical relics. Many Jakarta hotels advise starting here. I really enjoyed the Prehistory room which explores ancient fossils of man, dating back almost one million years. Many of the artifacts in this part of the museum were found in human burial sites, which adds to their significance. Some are ceramic, others carved from wood and from bronze. Large numbers of people emigrated from the Asian mainland around two thousand BC, were they were able to build structures and raise cattle and rice and settled into villages where they were able to develop their culture.

The museum also has an incredible Treasure Room where they keep gold artifacts along with precious stones and other metals. A recent discovery is on display here, one in which farmers discovered valuables in a field. These are on display along with 2000 other objects. There are also many stone sculptures, many discovered in Sumatra. Many of the carvings are of religious significance, and carved of sandstone and limestone.

Many rare and valuable coins and and foreign currencies are on display in the Numismatic section. the coins eventually were replace by paper currency, and currency from former kingdoms like Jambi and Banten had their own money and that can be seen here too. During the colonial period, the colonizers including the Dutch and the British and the Portuguese and the Japanese all had their own currency. This was during the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. It;s hard to think that coins were once actually made of gold!

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Tags: Jakarta hotels, National Museum, Sumatra

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