A 300,000-year story unfolds at Zayed National Museum

From a reconstructed Bronze Age cargo boat to the burial of an 8,000-year-old woman, the UAE's new national museum - Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi opened to the public on Wednesday with immersive galleries and community memory archives.

- Haneen Dajani

The museum features six permanent galleries and tells the story from a distinctly Emirati perspective. The UAE's Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, is central to this story.

(PHOTOS BY MUHAMMAD SAJJAD / KHALEEJ TIMES)

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 midair. 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.