The Deir ez-Zor Museum is a museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

 devoted to the archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 and history of northeastern Syria

Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....

, an area more commonly known as the Jezirah

Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia

Upper Mesopotamia is the name used for the uplands and great outwash plain of northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey which is known by the traditional Arabic name of Al-Jazira , variously transliterated into Roman script as Djazirah, Djezirah and Jazirah...

, or Upper Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...

. The museum is located in Deir ez-Zor, the capital of Deir ez-Zor Governorate

Deir ez-Zor Governorate

Deir ez-Zor Governorate or Muhafazah Dayr az Zawr is one of the fourteen governorates of Syria. It is situated in eastern Syria, bordering Iraq. It has an area of 33,060 km² and a population of 1,202,000...

, Syria. It was founded in 1974 and housed in a gallery of a shopping mall. Between 1983 and 1996, it was located in an old law court built in 1930. In 1996, the museum moved to its current location in a building that had been especially designed for the museum. The exhibition halls cover an area of 1600 square metres (1,913.6 sq yd) and are arranged around a courtyard. The construction of the new museum was a joint Syrian–German operation.

When the museum was founded in 1974, its collection consisted of only 140 objects, donated by the National Museum of Damascus

National Museum of Damascus

The National Museum of Damascus is a large museum in the heart of Damascus, Syria. The most popular part of the museum is the reconstruction of the 2nd century CE Dura-Europos synagogue.- Location :...

 and the National Museum of Aleppo

National Museum of Aleppo

The National Museum of Aleppo is the largest museum in the city of Aleppo, founded in 1931. It is located in the heart of the northern city on Baron Street, adjacent to the famous Baron Hotel and near the Bab al-Faraj clock tower...

. The current collection consists of some 25,000 objects, including the majority of the clay tablet

Clay tablet

In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age....

s found at Mari

Mari, Syria

Mari was an ancient Sumerian and Amorite city, located 11 kilometers north-west of the modern town of Abu Kamal on the western bank of Euphrates river, some 120 km southeast of Deir ez-Zor, Syria...

. The museum also holds many objects found by international teams of archaeologists at sites in the Upper Khabur

Khabur River

The Khabur River , , , ) is the largest perennial tributary to the Euphrates in Syrian territory. Although the Khabur originates in Turkey, the karstic springs around Ra's al-'Ayn are the river's main source of water. Several important wadis join the Khabur north of Al-Hasakah, together creating...

 area, such as Tell Beydar

Tell Beydar

Tell Beydar in modern Al-Hasakah Governorate, Syria, was the Ancient Near Easterncity of Nabada.-History:Nabada was first settled during the Early Dynastic period circa 2600 BC. By around 2500 BC a medium sized independent city-state had developed. At that point, it became a provincial capital...

, Tell Brak

Nagar, Syria

Tell Brak, ancient Nagar, is a tell, or settlement mound, in the Upper Khabur area in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria. The site was occupied between the sixth and second millennia BCE...

, Tell Leilan

Tell Leilan

Tell Leilan is an archaeological site situated near the Wadi Jarrah in the Khabur River basin in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria. The site has been occupied since the 5th millennium BC. During the late third millennium, the site was known as Shekhna...

 and Tell Mozan

Urkesh

Urkesh or Urkish is a tell, or settlement mound, located in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria...

. The Euphrates

Euphrates

The Euphrates is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia...

 Valley southeast of Deir ez-Zor is represented with objects from the Classical

Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...

 site of Dura-Europos

Dura-Europos

Dura-Europos , also spelled Dura-Europus, was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment 90 m above the right bank of the Euphrates river. It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in today's Syria....

, which was once a border city of the Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

.

The collection is organized around five chronological themes: prehistory

Prehistory

Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...

, ancient Syria (late fourth to first millennium BCE), the Classical period, the Islamic

Muslim history

Muslim history is the history of Muslim people. In the history of Islam the followers of the religion of Islam have impacted political history, economic history, and military history...

 era and ethnography

Ethnography

Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

. It includes a number of life-size reconstructions of buildings from different periods, including a house from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B is a division of the Neolithic developed by Dame Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the southern Levant region....

 site of Bouqras

Bouqras

Bouqras is a large, oval shaped, prehistoric, Neolithic Tell, about in size, located around from Deir ez-Zor in Syria.-Excavation:The tell was discovered in 1960 by Dutch Geomorphologist, Willem van Liere. It was excavated between 1960 and 1965 by Henri de Contenson and van Liere and later...

 in the Euphrates Valley, an Early Bronze Age city-gate from Tell Bderi on the Khabur River, the southern façade with wall paintings of the "Court of the Palms" of Zimri-Lim

Zimrilim

Zimrilim was king of Mari from about 1775 to 1761 BCE.He was the son or grandson of Iakhdunlim, but was forced to flee to Yamkhad when his father was assassinated by his own servants during a coup. The city was occupied by Shamshi-Adad I, the king of Assur, who put his own son Yasmah-Adad on the...

's palace in Mari and the gate of the Islamic Qasr al-Heer al-Sharqi.