From a reconstructed Bronze Age cargo boat to the burial of an 8,000-year-old woman, the UAE’s new national museum opens to the public today with immersive galleries and community memory archives.
Khaleej Times took a preview tour of the museum.
The first thing visitors see is a hulking, black-bitumen boat — 18 metres long, stitched without a single nail, and rebuilt from a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian recipe. It sits in the atrium like a beached giant, its goat-hair sail suspended mid-air. Museum organisers sailed this exact reconstruction across the Arabian Gulf for two days to test it. “We reached five knots… it was amazing,” said a member of the crew.
Another gallery features the burial of an 8,000-year-old Marawah woman and a Bronze Age sword unearthed just 18 months ago in Al Ain.
Mohamed Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, said the woman’s tomb, discovered on Marawah Island, revealed a figure “held in very high regard”, buried with a shark-tooth necklace, feathers and traces of a pigment thought to be ancient henna. “We found in this beautiful sort of stone tomb an amazing find… she could have been a chief,” he explained.
The new Bronze Age sword, exhibited for the first time, is just as striking. “We realised… many of them had weapons with them, so they were buried with their weapons,” he said of the excavated graves that yielded the discovery.
These finds punctuate several immersive galleries, including an artistic display consisting of hanging glass sculptures representing the formation of fossil fuel, as well as vivid clusters of naturally oxidised copper from the Hajar Mountains — azure, green, and gold under gallery lights.
“This is how you see it in nature,” a curator explained as we examined the stones up close.
Nearby, another installation uses blown glass to show how ancient communities extracted fresh water from shallow coastal wells — a technique that endured for thousands of years.
A national museum built with community memory — not just objects
Beyond the artefacts, Al Mubarak stressed that the museum is built on people’s stories as much as archaeological discovery. “A lot of our modern history… has been passed on through verbal dialogue between families,” he pointed out.
The museum has established what it calls a “vault”, where visitors can contribute memories, documents and family histories. “People will come to this museum and say ‘I have a story to tell… We will archive it… and it will be part of the museum narrative.”
This focus on intangible heritage is reflected in several galleries. In the “Our Beginning” gallery, curators walk visitors through Sheikh Zayed’s early life under an artistic structure recreating a ghaf tree. Underneath is a majlis -style seating area dubbed ‘the seat of learning’. “Majlis is not just a physical location… it is about sitting with people, listening, debating and coming to consensus,” explained the guide.
A museum built for residents first, not tourists
Although the museum is set to draw international crowds, Al Mubarak was unambiguous about its purpose; tourists are welcome, he said, but the institution’s mission is identity-building for the people who live in the Emirates. The museum’s narrative is anchored by Sheikh Zayed’s belief that “if you do not know your past, then you cannot know your future” – a principle that guides the entire Saadiyat Cultural District.
Architecture inspired by falcon wings
Stepping outside, the building’s five towers rise like wings above the mound-shaped structure — a silhouette visible across Saadiyat Island. Al Mubarak explained the symbolism behind the Norman Foster–designed form. “They are a manifestation of the falcon wings; the falcon always aspires to great heights. That is the DNA of the UAE.”
Inside, the galleries maintain a warm sand-coloured palette, blurring the line between past and future. “You enter the space, and this could be a place that could have been built in 2077, or it could have been a place that was built in 1904,” he noted.
A 300,000-year story told through an Emirati lens
The museum spans more than 300,000 years of human history across six permanent galleries, but equally important is that it tells this story from a distinctly Emirati perspective. “When we talk about our modern history, and we talk about our diplomatic histories, it’s all from the perspective of the United Arab Emirates… not the British perspective,” Al Mubarak emphasised.
During the tour, this became most evident in the galleries on maritime heritage, where curators traced the story from early Arab navigational sciences to pearling and fishing economies. A door belonging to an Ajman pearl merchant, blue-and-white Chinese ceramics excavated in Ras Al Khaimah, scent interactives of traditional spice mixes, and a pearling water tank ‘fintas’ attesting to women’s labour on the coast — all demonstrated the depth and nuance of Emirati perspectives on trade, craft and daily life.
The gallery ends with Sheikh Zayed’s own words, cast in bronze: a reminder of his commitment to preserving maritime heritage for future generations.
Training the next generation of Emirati archaeologists and researchers
Alongside the displays, the museum positions itself as a research institution. It will be a place where young Emiratis receive scholarships in archaeology, geology, palaeontology, art history and related fields, including placements at leading museums abroad.
Meanwhile, archaeological fieldwork continues to expand, particularly in Al Ain and Al Dhafra. “What we’ve accomplished over the last 10 years is taking some of our best and young, talented individuals… and really putting them in projects like the Zayed National Museum,” Al Mubarak said. That commitment is echoed in the galleries themselves. The 4,000-year-old cargo boat reconstruction, for example, was built by a team of Emirati and international specialists, then sailed across the Gulf in a real sea trial before being installed under the museum’s central atrium.
By the time the tour concluded, visitors had viewed a glowing map illustrating the geological birth of the UAE, smelt spice mixes traded across the Indian Ocean, peered into a Bronze Age burial, and walked through projections evoking ancient falaj irrigation channels.
The result is a national museum that feels both deeply rooted and refreshingly alive — a place where archaeological revelation meets the lived memory of families, and where the story of the UAE is told not as a footnote in global history, but as a narrative shaped by its own people. As Al Mubarak put it, the museum exists to help people see themselves in its story: “We always aspire to get better… to grow.”
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