Muscat, 30 July 2016: The National Museum of the Sultanate of Oman, located in the capital of Muscat, a Persian Gulf port city, opened with much pomp.
The museum’s 14,000sq m building, with a stately white façade, includes 4,000sq m of exhibition space dedicated to the permanent collection. It has around 12,500 artefacts from Oman dating back to the prehistoric era. The country’s erstwhile empire once reached modern-day parts of Pakistan, Iran and Zanzibar.
Around 5,500 objects are on display across 14 permanent galleries with themes such as Maritime History and Arms and Armour. The Oman and the World gallery, for example, includes gold coins and utensils from a recently excavated 16th-century shipwreck thought to be the Esmeralda, part of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s fleet that sank off Al Hallaniyah island in 1503 en route to India. There is also a gallery for temporary exhibitions.
The museum has agreements with the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate in London, the Smithsonian Institution in the United States as well as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal.
For more information:
National Museum Project: https://mhc.gov.om/tabid/385/Default.aspx
