A brand new mega museum is slated to open within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island in December this 12 months. Designed by UK architectural agency Foster + Companions, the Zayad Nationwide Museum will home a Qur’an greater than 1,000 years previous and the world’s oldest pure pearl.
The museum is known as after the primary president of the seven emirates of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1918-2004). It is going to “concentrate on his life and achievements but additionally replicate extra broadly the historic trajectory of the nation from the earliest occasions by means of to the newer previous,” the museum’s director, Peter Magee, instructed The Artwork Newspaper. “[The Zayad National Museum] is rooted within the values of the UAE’s founding father.” The UAE was born in 1971.
There shall be six everlasting galleries throughout two flooring spanning 300,000 years of human historical past and a brief exhibition gallery. The gathering will comprise artifacts from throughout the UAE together with Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age objects, in addition to these loaned from home and worldwide establishments. “These artefacts inform a narrative of resilience and resourcefulness of the nation’s first communities, from the world’s oldest falaj irrigation system to proof of Bronze Age copper mining,” the museum mentioned in an announcement.
“Certainly one of [Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s] values which we discover within the gallery is non secular tolerance,” Magee mentioned. “We make the purpose that when the primary proof for an early Christian Church relationship to the seventh century was discovered on one of many islands off the coast of Abu Dhabi in 1959, [he] was extraordinarily encouraging of that work.”
Whereas the museum is the “recipient of beneficiant state funding,” Magee mentioned, it plans to generate income. Its design is impressed by a falcon’s wing in flight (falconry is an integral a part of Emirati tradition) and contains 5 huge glass towers which draw cooling drafts up by means of the museum to counter the Gulf state’s scorching temperatures.
As outlined within the UAE’s Tourism Technique 2030, Abu Dhabi plans to attract nearly 40 million vacationers annually by 2030. When it opens, the Zayad Nationwide Museum will be a part of different main cultural establishments on Saadiyat Island together with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and the upcoming Pure Historical past Museum Abu Dhabi.
The Abu Dhabi Pearl, which is 8,00 years previous, shall be among the many museum’s essential sights and shall be completely on present in its To Our Ancestors gallery, which the museum mentioned “examines proof of human exercise on this a part of the world relationship again 300,000 years and early commerce with different societies within the Arabian Gulf area.” Relationship from AD800-900, the Blue Qur’an may even be a serious draw. Researchers have discovered Qur’anic verses hidden beneath an intricate ornamental layer of gold leaf on one in every of its pages.
Analysis, Magee defined, is a serious a part of the museum’s mission. “Whereas analysis being generated from inside the establishment is extraordinarily vital, the museum has a elementary function in furthering a analysis ecosystem inside the nation,” he mentioned.
Among the many worldwide establishments lending objects to the museum is the British Museum.
