Sulaymaniyah Museum

The Sulaymaniyah Museum, opened in 1961, is the second-largest in Iraq after Baghdad's, and its galleries run from Stone Age tools through Sumer, Akkad and Assyria to the Islamic age. But its most famous treasure is a modest-looking piece of clay — and the story of how it arrived is as remarkable as what it holds.

In 2011 the museum quietly bought back a job lot of around 80 to 90 tablets that had been looted and smuggled out of Iraq after 2003. On the advice of an Assyriologist who recognised its importance, one broken fragment was secured for about 800 dollars. It proved to be a missing piece of the Epic of Gilgamesh — the world's oldest great work of literature — and it added roughly 20 previously unknown lines to the poem. The new verses transform a famous scene: the Cedar Forest, once a silent backdrop, becomes a riotous wilderness loud with birds, insects and monkeys, its guardian Humbaba almost a foreign king, while Gilgamesh and his companion feel a pang of guilt for laying the forest to waste.

The museum also displays inscriptions from the Sasanian Paikuli tower, raised by King Narseh around 293 CE. Through its patient buying-back of stolen antiquities, the museum has become a quiet hero in Iraq's long struggle to recover its scattered heritage.