Hama Museum

Hama's excellent regional Hama Museum, located about 1km from the centre, is housed on the ground floor of a striking sandstone building. Each room is devoted to a particular era, including Neolithic and Palaeolithic, the Iron Age, Roman and Islamic. There's some interesting material on finds at the citadel mound, including a splendid 2.5m-high, 10-tonne black basalt lion that once guarded the entrance to an Iron Age palace.

Other stand-out items are some intricate 8th-century bronze and gold-leaf figurines with blue lapis eyes; an exquisitely rendered 3rd-century mosaic, depicting a group of young women playing music and dancing; and a fragment of a 5th-century Byzantine mosaic, recovered from Apamea, that depicts a noria.To get to the museum walk north along Sharia Said al-A'as and take the first left after the large Omar ibn al-Khattab Mosque.