Museums are considered to be places of knowledge. Whether
it’s knowledge about the past, about science or how things came to be, or the
future, museums are often visited to fill the mind and to help people
understand things they don’t. They also help the youth find what they want to
become when the time comes to choose a career.
The National Museum in Manila is a popular and an
often-frequented place of knowledge. It is full of history and art and
information about the Philippines that is just waiting to be absorbed. The
museum is located at P. Burgos Drive, Rizal Park, Manila and is open during
Tuesdays to Sundays from 10 AM to 5 PM. The National Museum has many
collections in it. Those collections are
categorized by Fine Art, Archaeology, Ethnography, and Natural History.
Philippine art has really come a long way from being
primitive to being ingenious. In the Fine Art collections, you will find some
artifacts that date from the 18th century to the present. It is like
a timeline of how art was in the past and how it changed through time to the
present. You can say it’s like walking through time, and the works of art are
what guide you and tell you how it was like in the past.
Archeology. It’s
another collection in the museum that shows and informs it’s visitors of how
things were like way back when from the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic Period) to
the Age of Contact with the Great Traditions of Asia
(1000 A.D.). Here you
will also see things like flake tools, skull caps, stone and shell Adze, shell
Bracelets and pendants, Angono Petroglyph, bark-cloth beater, and many more.
Ever since the National Museum was built, the Anthropology
Division started collecting artifacts. Dr. Henry Otley Beyer was the one who
began collecting cultural materials from different peoples of the
Philippines—from baskets to weapons to textiles and wooden things. He also
collected several religious, monetary and agricultural tools, as well as
musical instruments and personal ornaments and adornments. During the war, the
doctor distributed the artifacts he’d collected to friends and colleagues to
keep them safe. After the war ended, he began retrieving them back and found
most of them to be intact ad in good shape, save for some that were badly
damaged. Today, the artifacts are arranged according to function and are kept
in storage where the temperature of the room is kept through air-conditioning
for 24-hours.
There a plenty of things to see in the National Museum. It’s
definitely a place to go and visit at least once.
