The Iraq Museum

Its holdings featuring over 2,000,000 artifacts are considered among the most important in the world and the Museum has traditionally exhibited collections featuring the multi-millennia long history of Mesopotamia in its 28 galleries. The Archaeological Museum was established with the help of the British scholar Gertrude Bell in 1926 and had its first Iraqi director in 1933, the famed educator Sati Al-Husri. In the 1920s the Museum was under the Ministry of Public Works, while it came under the Ministry of Education in the 1930s and is now under the Ministry of Culture through SBAH. The original buildings in its current location (Old Museum building, Administration Building, Library, and Old Storage Building) were built on the present site with the help of the German Government and opened in 1966. The New Museum Building was built with the help of the Italian Government in 1982. The Museum was closed in 1991 during the Second Gulf War and it reopened only in 2000. Following the Third Gulf War, the Museum was sacked in April 2003 and around 15,000 items are still missing. The newest building, the New Collections Building, was built by the Iraqi Government since 2006 in cooperation with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: new arrangements have been realized in the Assyrian and, currently, in the Sumerian galleries, while the EDUU project has recently realized the Didactic Room for schoolchildren. Due to the renovations under construction, the first floor of the Museum is currently closed to the public.