National Museum

The most important of Syria's museums is the National Museum, and you'll get more out of Syria's archaeological sites if you take in the museum before and after your visits to the sites.

Purchase your ticket at the gate then stroll through the shady sculpture garden, best appreciated after seeing the museum proper.

Enter through the main gate of Qasr al-Heir al-Gharbi, a desert palace west of Palmyra dating from AD 688, the time of the Umayyad caliph Hisham. The gate was transported to Damascus stone by stone and reconstructed as part of the museum façade.

Within the museum, the exhibits are presented thematically and grouped into preclassical, classical and Islamic sections. Exhibits are labelled in English, Arabic and French, but The Concise Guide: National Museum of Damascus is also available at the gift shop and is well worth buying.

The lobby is devoted to Qasr al-Heir al-Gharbi, with large black-and-white photos of the palace with its façade still in situ. Upstairs is an airy gallery displaying a series of finely carved stone screens removed from the Qasr.

The Ugarit Room (No 1) is devoted to finds from Ugarit and contains stone tablets inscribed with what is believed to be the one of the world's earliest alphabets, along with beautiful bronze figurines. The Hall of Ras Shamra (No 2) contains finds from ancient Syria, including more from Ugarit and other sites. It leads into the Ebla Room (No 3), and on to two Mari Rooms, devoted to artefacts from the Mesopotamian city in the southeast of Syria, near the border with Iraq. The distinctive statuettes in here, with their feather skirts and lively black eyes, date to the 2nd millennium BC, making them roughly the same age as the Great Pyramids of Giza.

The first room of the Islamic galleries, the Raqqa Room (No 6), contains artefacts, pottery and stucco panels recovered from the old Abbasid city destroyed by Mongols in 1260. A staircase leads up to the Modern Art Galleries, which were closed at the time of research, while the long corridor (No 7) running north begins with carved wooden fragments of a ceiling found at Qasr al-Heir al-Gharbi, goes on to Islamic coins and then leads to jewellery and weaponry (No 8), where some heavy jewellery pieces and wonderfully ornate weaponry are displayed. They embody the two traits for which the Mamluk dynasty was renowned: artistry and violence.

Off the far end is woodwork (No 10), where a large room is devoted to the intricate style of woodwork that developed throughout the Islamic era as a result of the religious ban on figurative representations. This room is dominated by two great cenotaphs: the one nearest the entrance, decorated with a beautiful star motif, dates from 1250, while the second dates from 1265 and comes from the Khaled ibn al-Walid Mosque in Homs. Other objects here include domestic furniture from some of the old houses of Damascus.

North of the woodwork room is the Azem Palace Room (No 9), which is a reconstruction of an original room from Azem Palace in the Old City.

The remaining rooms of the Islamic galleries are devoted to the Quran and manuscripts (No 11), pottery (No 12), ceramics (No 13) and stonework (No 14).

The classical galleries make up the whole east wing, with the first room (No 15) containing a large collection of basalt statuary, executed in the black stone typical of the Hauran region. There's also an excellent mosaic here, recovered from Lattakia, which depicts the Orontes River in the form of a god.

The busts in the Palmyra Room (No 16) are representations of the dead. They would have fitted like seals into the pigeonhole-like chambers in which bodies were stored. To see how this worked, pass through the Dura Europos Room (No 18), which contains jewellery and ceramics from this Roman site on the Euphrates, and down the stairs to the Hypogeum of Yarhai (No 21), which is an extraordinary reconstruction of an underground burial chamber from Palmyra's Valley of the Tombs. Seeing this helps make sense of Palmyra's funerary towers, and some of the museum exhibits there (which is where this reconstruction truly belongs).

Beside the staircase down to the hypogeum is a staircase that goes up to the Homs Collection (No 21 upstairs). Alongside some exquisite gold jewellery, there are coins depicting Venetian doges, the Roman emperor, Philip the Arab and Alexander the Great.

The other attraction worth seeing is the synagogue (No 20), across a colonnaded courtyard. Dating from the 2nd century, it was discovered at Dura Europos, from where it was removed and reconstructed here. Other than its age, the most interesting features are the beautiful floor-to-ceiling wall frescoes. Executed in a colourful naive style, they depict scenes from Old Testament events, from the crowning of King Solomon through to the reign of David, the story of Moses and the flight from Egypt. This is a real oddity in that depictions of the human form go against Talmudic traditions. While the frescoes are faded (hence the low light in the room), the fact that they've survived at all is because the synagogue lay buried under sand for centuries until its discovery in the 1930s.