Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
National Museum of Beirut
Summary
The National Museum of Beirut (متحف بيروت الوطنيّ, Matḥaf Bayrūt al-waṭanī or French: Musée national de Beyrouth) is the principal museum of archaeology in Lebanon. The collection begun after World War I, and the museum was officially opened in 1942. The museum has collections totaling about 100,000 objects, most of which are antiquities and medieval finds from excavations undertaken by the Directorate General of Antiquities. About 1300 artifacts are exhibited, ranging in date from prehistoric times to the medieval Mamluk period.
During the 1975 Lebanese Civil War, the museum stood on the front line that separated the warring factions. The museum's Egyptian Revival building and its collection suffered extensive damage in the war, but most of the artifacts were saved by last-minute preemptive measures.
Today, after a major renovation, the National Museum of Beirut has regained its former position, especially as a leading collector for ancient Phoenician objects.
In 1919, a small group of ancient artifacts collected by Raymond Weill, a French officer stationed in Lebanon, was exhibited at a provisional museum in the ogKaiserswerth Deaconesses' building in Georges Picot Street, Beirut. Meanwhile, a forerunner of the Archaeological and Fine Arts Service began to assemble items from the region round Beirut. The initial collection was rapidly expanded under successive antiquity directors with the addition of finds from the excavations led by Dr. Georges Contenau at Saida and Ernest Renan at Saida, Tyre and Byblos. Donations of private collections included those of Henry Seyrig’s coin collection, General Weygand in 1925 and George Alfred Ford, the director of the American Mission School of Sidon, posthumously in 1930.
In 1923, the "Friends of the Museum Committee", headed by Bechara El Khoury, then Prime Minister and minister of education and fine arts, was created to raise funds to build a national museum.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.