Pergamon Museum: Skip The Line

The Pergamon Museum is filled with classical sculpture, imposing architecture, colorful tapestries and enough historical artifacts to drive a thousand Indiana Jones films. Highlights include the famous Ishtar Gate, a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh , and the Market Gate of Milete. These skip-the-line tickets get you right into a museum that isn't just one of Museum Island's best - it's one of the finest in the world.
There are three major thematic sections at Berlin's world-famous Pergamon Museum - the Antiquity Collection, the Islamic Art Museum, and the Middle East Museum. Each individual collection on its own would be enough to warrant a visit, but with all three? Well, you've just tripled your reasons to dive into the Perg (as it's known).
The works come from Ancient Greece, Rome, Babylon and the Middle East and show how advanced these ancient societies were. One highlight is the Ishtar Gate. This bright blue glazed-brick wall is decorated with gods of the city in the shape of dragons, lions and bulls. A stone fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a section of one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world - the tale of this hero echoes in the works of Homer and the Bible.
But the Pergamon isn't about any single piece in its (admittedly enormous and richly varied) collection; to visit here is to bask in the depth and breadth of human history.
NOTE : Due to ongoing renovation works, the Pergamon Altar isn't open to the public until 2019. But fret not: there are plenty more antiquities here to make it worth your while.