Iraq Museum

The Iraq Museum (National Museum of Iraq) stands on a broad boulevard in Baghdad's Al-Mansour district, a building of solid limestone with a distinctive stepped facade that was completed in 1922 and modelled on Babylonian ziggurat forms as a deliberate statement of national identity, and the building's architecture is itself a historical artifact, reflecting the archaeological nationalism of the post-Ottoman Iraqi state under British administration, when the new nation's elite sought to establish legitimacy through a direct visual link to Mesopotamia's ancient civilizations. The entrance is flanked by carved reliefs depicting scenes from Sumerian mythology, and the great doors bear bronze panels that echo the bronze work of ancient Mesopotamia, setting a tone of accumulated cultural weight before you even enter. The museum's collection, built from the pioneering excavations of the 1920s and 1930s, was the most important collection of Mesopotamian artifacts in the world until the 2003 looting.

The collection's greatest strength lies in its extraordinary sequence of Mesopotamian civilizations, from the Ubaid period through the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires, with objects of such iconic status that they appear in every general survey of world art and archaeology, and the collection of Sumerian sculpture from Ur, Lagash and other city-states includes dozens of limestone and gypsum statues of worshippers with large staring eyes that were set up in temples as intercessors with the gods, their surfaces worn smooth by millennia of hands. The collection of cylinder seals, small carved cylinders that were rolled across wet clay to leave a raised impression, represents the world's largest and most comprehensive holding of these miniature masterpieces of glyptic art, used to seal documents and containers and to authenticate ritual and commercial transactions. The collection of cuneiform tablets ranges from administrative records to literary epics including portions of the Gilgamesh cycle, the oldest written stories in the world.

The museum's survival and the recovery of most of its looted collection after 2003 became an international cause celebre that demonstrated both the vulnerability of cultural heritage in conflict zones and the possibility of recovery through determined law enforcement and diplomatic effort, and the losses during the April 2003 looting included some 15,000 objects, among them an extraordinary collection of gold artifacts from the royal tombs of Ur that had been in the museum for safekeeping during the Gulf War and were thought to have been destroyed. The recovery effort, led by museum staff, Interpol and the US military, eventually located and returned approximately 8,000 objects to the museum, and the returned treasures are now displayed in a dedicated gallery that serves as a monument to cultural resilience, and the recovered gold lyre from Ur, reconstructed from fragments, the gold and lapis lazuli inlay objects and the intricate jewelry demonstrate the extraordinary craft capacity of ancient Mesopotamian goldsmiths.

The Iraq Museum today functions as both a national repository and a cultural center, with its collection representing the largest and most comprehensive assembly of Mesopotamian civilization anywhere in the world, filling 30 galleries across two floors that trace the history of the Tigris-Euphrates region from the earliest agricultural settlements through the Ottoman period, and the building itself, despite its reduced circumstances, retains the capacity to produce a profound sense of the depth and sophistication of Mesopotamian culture in a visitor who moves through the galleries in chronological order. The collection includes the earliest writing (cuneiform tablets from Uruk), the earliest codified law (the stele of Hammurabi), and some of the earliest monumental sculpture, together constituting a record of the earliest urban civilizations anywhere on earth. For anyone interested in the deep history of human society, the Iraq Museum is simply one of the essential places on earth.

The most comprehensive collection of Mesopotamian civilization in existence, covering 5,000 years of history.

Treasures recovered after the 2003 looting, including the gold lyre of Ur, demonstrate both loss and recovery.

The building's ziggurat-inspired architecture is itself a landmark of Iraqi national identity.