National Museum of Damascus

Before you reach the doors, you pass through a garden. Gravel crunches underfoot. Carved stones sit among the trees: column bases, broken capitals, weathered reliefs, and old tomb markers half-shaded by leaves. The traffic of the city fades behind the walls, and the air feels a little cooler here. Many visitors walk straight past these pieces on their way inside. Take a moment with them first. This garden is the museum's first gallery, and it sets the tone for what follows.

Then look up at the entrance. That tall, carved gateway is not a copy, and it was not built for this museum. It is the real facade of an Umayyad desert palace called Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi. The Umayyads were the first great dynasty of the Islamic caliphate, and they ruled from Damascus. The palace stood in the Syrian desert, and archaeologists moved its gateway here stone by stone. The museum was built behind it. So the first object you see is also the one you walk through.

Look closely at the surface of the gate. The carved decoration is made of stucco, a fine plaster that craftsmen shaped while it was still soft. You can see vines, geometric patterns, and small figures, all cut into the plaster with real care. This mix tells you something about early Islamic art. Its makers borrowed freely from Byzantine and Persian traditions, then combined them into something new. In the eighth century, this was the style of a confident young empire.

The museum itself grew out of the years after the First World War. Its collection began in 1919, and the present building opened in the 1930s. Over the following decades, wings were added as excavations across Syria produced more and more material. That is the key to understanding this place. Syria sits at a crossroads between Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. Almost every great culture of the ancient Near East passed through this land, and many left something behind.

Inside, the oldest galleries take you far back, long before Damascus became a capital. Here you meet the city-states of the Bronze Age. One of them is Mari, on the Euphrates River, near today's border with Iraq. Mari was a wealthy trading city more than four thousand years ago. Its sculptors carved small figures of worshippers with clasped hands and large, inlaid eyes. Those wide eyes are not a mistake. They show a person standing before the gods, alert and devoted.

Now comes the first real surprise. Somewhere in these early galleries is a clay tablet smaller than the palm of your hand. It comes from Ugarit, an ancient port city on the Syrian coast. The tablet is pressed with wedge-shaped signs, a script called cuneiform. But this is not the usual cuneiform with hundreds of signs. It is a short alphabet of about thirty letters, among the earliest alphabets ever found. The idea of writing with a small set of letters has deep roots on this coast.

As you move forward in time, the classical world arrives. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rulers all held this region, and the galleries fill with marble, bronze, and mosaic. Mosaic floors from Syrian villas show hunters, animals, and figures from myth, all made from thousands of small coloured stones. Notice how fresh many of the colours still look. Stone does not fade the way paint does, and these floors were made to be walked on for centuries.

The second surprise sits below your feet. Down a stairway, the museum has rebuilt an underground family tomb from Palmyra, the great caravan city in the Syrian desert. This kind of tomb is called a hypogeum, which simply means a burial chamber under the ground. Along the walls, carved portraits of the dead look out at you. Men, women, and children are shown in fine clothing and jewellery. Palmyra grew rich on desert trade, and these faces show a proud, cosmopolitan city.

Back upstairs, you will find one of the most remarkable rooms in the museum. It is a reconstruction of a synagogue from Dura-Europos, a frontier town on the Euphrates. The original building dates to the third century, and its walls were covered in painted scenes from the Hebrew Bible. That alone is rare, because many people assume early synagogues held no figurative images at all. The town was buried in sand after an ancient siege, and the sand protected the paint for many centuries.

Stand in the middle of that room for a minute. The painted panels run around you in bands, one above another. You can pick out figures in long robes, buildings, water, and crowds of people. The colours are earthy: reds, ochres, soft greens. This room shows how many faiths lived side by side in this region. In the same small town, archaeologists also found a Christian house church and many pagan temples. Syria's past was never just one story.

The Islamic galleries bring you closer to the city outside. Here you find ceramics, glass, metalwork, and manuscripts from the centuries when Damascus was a centre of craft and learning. Damascus was famous for its patterned steel and its fine textiles. One highlight is a traditional Damascene reception room, rebuilt here from an old house. Its walls and ceiling are covered in painted and carved wood. This style shaped the courtyard homes of the Old City for generations.

This museum has also lived through hard times. During the long conflict that began in 2011, the doors closed for several years. Staff packed and moved many objects to safer storage. Some sites they came from, such as Palmyra, suffered serious damage. When the galleries reopened, many visitors felt that the objects carried a new weight. Some of these pieces now stand for places that are badly changed. That is worth keeping in mind as you walk through the rooms.

The museum sits close to the Takiyya Sulaymaniyya, an Ottoman religious complex with grey and white stone domes. The Barada River, the old lifeline of Damascus, runs nearby. When you step back into the garden, the city sounds return slowly: car horns, voices, perhaps a call to prayer drifting across the rooftops. Take one more look at the Umayyad gateway as you leave. You walked through an eighth-century palace to enter, and now you walk through it again on your way back into a city that is still very much alive.