The collection survived fifteen years on the front line because the director sealed it in concrete.
This is the best museum in Lebanon and the story of how it still exists is better than most of what is in it.
The war
The museum stands on the Rue de Damas — the Damascus road — which for fifteen years was the Green Line, the front between east and west Beirut. The building was directly on it, and the crossing beside it was known as the Museum Crossing.
The museum was shelled, occupied by militias, and burned.
Before that happened, the director Maurice Chéhab and his wife Olga did something extraordinary. They moved what could be moved into the basement and sealed it behind a wall. The large stone pieces — the sarcophagi, the mosaics, the statues — could not be moved at all.
So they encased them in reinforced concrete where they stood.
Wooden shuttering was built around each object and concrete poured. The mosaics on the floor were covered with a concrete slab. For fifteen years the collection sat inside the front line as a set of anonymous grey blocks, while shells came through the roof.
The museum reopened in 1999. The film of the concrete being cut away, and the objects emerging undamaged, is shown in the building.
Not everything survived — humidity in the sealed basement destroyed a large number of the smaller objects, and the archive and the library were lost. But the great pieces are here because of a decision made in 1975.
The collection
Around 1,300 objects on display, arranged chronologically over three floors, from prehistory to the Ottoman period.
The Ahiram sarcophagus — a Phoenician royal sarcophagus from Byblos of about 1000 BC, carrying one of the earliest substantial inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet. That alphabet is the ancestor of Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and almost every other alphabetic script in use today. It is one of the most important objects in the world and it is in this room.
The anthropoid sarcophagi from Sidon — Phoenician coffins in Egyptian form, in white marble, with carved faces.
The Byblos figurines — hundreds of small bronze votive figures, gilded, found in a temple deposit of about 1900 BC and displayed as a mass.
The Phoenician sarcophagus of the tomb of Tyre, Roman mosaics, Hellenistic sculpture, Byzantine glass, Mamluk and Ottoman material.
The basement, reopened in 2016 after a long restoration, holds the funerary collection — including a set of 31 Roman-period mummies found in a cave in the Qadisha valley, Maronite villagers who took refuge there in the thirteenth century and died.
Practical
Charged, and inexpensive. Closed Mondays.
Three hours to do it properly. The labelling is good and there is an audio guide.
The building itself, a 1930s French-mandate structure in Egyptian-revival style, is worth looking at — and the shell damage on parts of the exterior has been left visible.
The MIM mineral museum is fifteen minutes away and the two make a good half day.
More Museums
Sursock Museum
A Venetian-Ottoman villa given to the city as a modern art museum, wrecked by the port blast and reopened in 2023.
American University of Beirut
A green campus falling down a hillside to the sea, with the third oldest museum in the Middle East on it.
MIM Mineral Museum
One of the finest private mineral collections in the world, in a university basement, and almost nobody knows it is there.