National Museum Of Beirut

About National Museum Of Beirut

Museum in Lebanon

The National Museum of Beirut, at the Museum crossroads on Damascus Road between Achrafieh and Ras el-Nabeh, is Lebanon's principal archaeological museum. Its collection began after the First World War; a Friends of the Museum committee formed in 1923 to raise funds, and the Egyptian Revival building by Antoine Nahas and Pierre Leprince-Ringuet went up on land donated by the municipality near the racecourse, opening officially in 1942. It holds some 100,000 objects, mostly from excavations by the Directorate General of Antiquities, and displays about 1,800 of them from prehistory to the Mamluk period: carved Phoenician sarcophagi, including that of Ahiram, king of Byblos, which bears one of the earliest inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet, the small gilded bronze figurines of Byblos, Roman and Byzantine mosaics, jewellery, coins and ceramics. In the 1975 civil war the museum stood on the front line and the building was badly damaged, but most of the collection was saved thanks to the antiquities director Emir Maurice Chehab and his wife, who hid small objects in the basement and encased the large ones in concrete. After major restoration it has regained its place, and a short film tells the story of the rescue.

Where:

Beirut, Lebanon