Located off Sharia Shoukri al-Quwatli, this is Syria’s most important museum and well worth a visit. After passing the shady garden strewn with unlabelled antiquities, for which no room could be found within the museum’s walls, you enter the museum proper through the imposing facade (the relocated entrance of Qasr al-Heir al-Gharbi, a desert fortress near Palmyra that dates to AD 688).
The exhibits are presented thematically and grouped into preclassical, classical and Islamic sections; labelling (in Arabic and English) is improving thanks to a joint Syrian-Italian overhaul. Highlights include the finely wrought stone friezes from the qasr, which you’ll see immediately upon entering; tablets from the ruins of Ugarit showing one of the world’s first alphabets; the downstairs Hypogeum of Yarhai, an extraordinary reconstruction of an underground burial chamber from Palmyra’s Valley of the Tombs; and the astonishing frescoed, 2nd-century synagogue from Dura Europos in eastern Syria, our favourite room in the whole museum.
