National Museum of Iran: Preserving Iran’s Archaeological Heritage in Tehran
Visitor Information
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Official Website: irannationalmuseum.ir
Country: Iran
Civilization: Achaemenid, Greek, Parthian, Sassanid
Site type: Museum
History
The National Museum of Iran is located in Tehran, Iran, and was erected in the modern period under the authority of Iranian institutions with design work supplied by French architects.
The idea for a national repository dates to 1906, when Morteza Gholi Khan Hedayat proposed founding a museum and a governmental Department of Antiquities to oversee archaeological activity; that early plan did not come to completion. A first, modest museum appeared in 1916 when a room within the Ministry of Education, near the Dar al-Fonun school, began to house a public collection. Known then as the National Museum or the Museum of Education, that space exhibited some 270 bronze objects together with other donated and gathered antiquities.
In 1925 the growing collection moved to the Mirorr Hall of the Masoudieh Mansion. Within a few years the Iranian government changed its arrangements for foreign archaeological work, and in 1927 French privileges were cancelled. France was soon asked to prepare designs for a purpose-built national museum and library; architect André Godard arrived in Tehran in 1929 to undertake that commission, working with Maxime Siroux on the concept.
The principal building for pre-Islamic material, now called the Museum of Ancient Iran, was realized between 1935 and 1937. Iranian builders Abbas Ali Memar and Morad Tabrizi completed the structure, which drew visible inspiration from Sassanid vaulted forms such as the great arch at Ctesiphon. The finished complex covered roughly 11,000 square metres and provided two floors of exhibition halls arranged by archaeological period.
Later, a separate Museum of the Islamic Era was added on the same grounds. Executed in white travertine and rising three storeys, this building was being renovated during the upheaval of the Iranian Revolution. Over the decades the site expanded beyond display to become a major archaeological research center, organized into departments that study successive periods of Iran’s past and housing a collection that totals more than three million objects. The Museum of Ancient Iran presents material ranging from the earliest stone industries through the Sassanian period, including Middle Paleolithic tools of the Mousterian tradition (a Middle Paleolithic stone tool industry) and Upper Paleolithic implements dating to about 30,000–35,000 years ago, while the Museum of the Islamic Era holds more than 1,500 works from post-classical dynasties such as the Ilkhanids, Seljuks, Timurids, Safavids, and Qajars.
The institution has also engaged in international loans and repatriations. Noteworthy events include a 2010 exchange with the British Museum that brought the Cyrus Cylinder on loan, a 2018 presentation of masterpieces from the Louvre, and the 2023 recovery and public display of a Sassanid relief that had been smuggled abroad. One of the largest documented returns comprised some 4,000 Achaemenid tablets sent back from the University of Chicago after an absence of eighty-five years; those texts have contributed to understanding aspects of Darius the Great’s society. The museum continues to present Iranian heritage abroad, taking part in exhibitions such as The Glory of Ancient Persia in China in 2024 and loaning rare works to European displays, including one of the few surviving statues identified with Homer’s Penelope.
Remains
The museum complex consists of two principal buildings set within a shared site, arranged so that the older, brick-built Museum of Ancient Iran occupies the main footprint while the lighter-coloured Museum of the Islamic Era sits on the grassy grounds nearby. The older structure adopts a construction vocabulary that recalls Sassanid vaulted architecture, its massing and vault-inspired forms executed in fired brick across a plan of approximately 11,000 square metres. Built between 1935 and 1937 by Abbas Ali Memar and Morad Tabrizi from designs by André Godard and Maxime Siroux, the building provides two storeys of interlinked halls. Those halls are organized to lead visitors and researchers through chronological displays, from early stone industries to the last pre-Islamic empires, and house items such as stone tools, pottery, seals, wooden objects, coins, weapons, and textiles. The structure stands as completed in the 1930s and continues to function as the primary repository for Iran’s prehistoric and ancient collections.
The Museum of the Islamic Era is a later, separate three-floor building on the same site, faced in white travertine stone. Its interior contains galleries devoted to ceramics, textiles, manuscripts, metalwork and instruments, including astrolabes, as well as examples of adobe calligraphy and rare medieval carpets. The building underwent an official program of remodeling during the period of the Iranian Revolution, a recorded phase in its physical history, and thereafter became the main venue for post-classical and Islamic-period material from across Iran’s dynastic sequence.
Within the Ancient Iran galleries, visitors encounter artifacts that document long stretches of prehistory and early history. The term Mousterian, used here, refers to a Middle Paleolithic stone-tool tradition associated with Neanderthals and early modern humans; examples of those tools are part of the collection. The galleries also display implements attributed to the Upper Paleolithic, the later phase of the Old Stone Age characterized by refined flaked tools and dating here to roughly thirty to thirty-five thousand years ago. The internal arrangement groups items by broad archaeological phases, including Neolithic, Chalcolithic (the Copper Age, a transitional period when people began using copper alongside stone), Bronze Age and Iron Age, and then moves into the archaeological record of successive ancient Iranian states.
Notable physical attributes of the site include the brick vaulting motifs that reference Sassanid prototypes such as the arch at Ctesiphon, and the travertine-clad volumes of the Islamic-era building. Both buildings remain on the same plot and are integrated spatially, allowing the complex to serve as a unified center for conservation, research and exhibition of Iran’s material heritage. The holdings themselves—ranging from Paleolithic flake tools to medieval manuscripts and carpets—are housed in situ within these purpose-built galleries, which form the principal archaeological and architectural evidence of the site.
