Basra Cultural Museum
Housed in a former riverside palace, the Basra Museum displays antiquities from ancient Sumer and the wider south of Iraq, including finds connected to Ur and Uruk. Created with international help to safeguard the region's heritage, its galleries trace thousands of years of Mesopotamian civilisation.
3 stops to discover
- 1
From Sumer to the Gulf
The museum's galleries carry you from the dawn of writing in Sumer through the Babylonian and Islamic ages, with objects gathered from the great sites of the south. It opened to give Basra back a window onto the civilisation that began on these very rivers.
- 2
From Palace to Museum
This museum occupies a former lakeside palace of Saddam Hussein, set on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab. After the original Basra museum was looted and closed in 1991, the palace was used by British forces until 2008, then reclaimed by the State Board of Antiquities in 2010 and restored with help from the British Museum, opening fully in 2019.
- 3
The Sumer Gallery
This gallery is devoted to the earliest civilisation of southern Mesopotamia. Its artifacts span from the Halaf culture, around 5500 BCE, to the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2000 BCE, reflecting the deep Sumerian roots of the land around Basra.
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