When renovation work began at Al Ain Museum in 2018, archaeologists expected to preserve history – not rewrite it. But as the country’s oldest museum was stripped back for restoration, workers unearthed something far older beneath its foundations: a 2,000-year-old tomb and, with it, a story that changes how we understand life in the region before the advent of Islam.
“We knew nothing about the pre-Islamic period in Al Ain – this is the first evidence,” Peter Sheehan, senior archaeologist at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, tells The National. “The scale and extent of Iron Age agriculture was far greater than we realised. You can imagine a continuous water supply all year round – the beginning of an oasis landscape.”
The discovery, made in the early stages of the museum’s redevelopment before its reopening today, was so significant it halted construction for more than a year. Beneath the museum lay not a single tomb, but an entire cemetery.
“First, we found the tomb,” Sheehan says. “Then, around it, we found a number of individual graves, probably satellite burials. And then, about 500 metres east, we found more pre-Islamic graves, all intact with objects inside them. That suggests a very large cemetery – at least 500 metres wide – and therefore a sizeable settlement.”
The picture that emerged was far richer than the sparsely populated image the team had of the land at that time. “If you’ve got a cemetery of that size,” says Sheehan, “it shows you’ve also probably got a reasonably sized settlement or population.”
Until this discovery, the centuries between the Iron Age and the rise of Islam were a blank space on Al Ain’s map. These graves fill that missing chapter – the first tangible evidence of a thriving community here two millennia ago.
At the same time, Sheehan’s team were working on the UAE–Oman border fence, where similar remains appear. “Both projects produce evidence for very large-scale Iron Age agriculture in Al Ain – bigger than all of the oases you see now,” he says. “It confirms this wasn’t a marginal place; it was one of the main agricultural heartlands of its time.”
He points to the shift from shallow irrigation channels to deep falaj systems that tapped groundwater. “When you tap deep water, it means you can have a continuous water supply all year round,” he says. “That’s a requirement for having an oasis.”
Among the objects recovered were fragments of what looks like Alexandrian glass, Sheehan says. “It’s related to trade at that time.”
The material evidence showed technological change as well. “You start to get iron weaponry – that’s the difference,” he says. “The business end of things has shifted to iron.”
Grave goods reveal the details of life and death. “We can tell which were likely female burials from items of personal adornment and perfume jars, and which were male, with tools, ladles and sieves used for date wine,” Sheehan says. “Around the site we found dumps of broken wine amphorae thrown into old wells – signs of feasting associated with the burials.”
He points to a social dimension behind the objects. “What we understand about those kinds of societies is the living took part in feasting connected with the burials,” he says.
Of two smaller finds that carry faint markings, Sheehan says: “It looks like South Arabian, but it doesn’t really say anything. It’s likely to be a wasm – a kind of stamp on a camel, a familial or tribal mark.”
The graves themselves echo later Islamic customs. “They have a shaft and a little niche where the person is buried,” he says. “The only difference from Islamic graves is that these are randomly oriented, not towards Makkah.”
That continuity, Sheehan adds, suggests a world in transition. “You’re starting to get to the point where you have the prelude to Islamic culture, a more familiar thing, whereas it’s quite distinct from the Iron Age,” he says.
The discoveries point to smaller, organised oasis communities, each with its own identity. “You have potential local groups situated around oases, as you do in much later periods,” Sheehan says. “Whether or not they were rivals to each other – small chieftains, that kind of thing – it seems a more fragmented, smaller-scale society than in the Iron Age, when you have a massive expansion of work in the landscape.”
Across Al Ain, he explains, history moves in cycles. “You get peaks and drops,” he says. “The Iron Age is a definite peak, followed by a drop probably connected to climate change or water shortage. We thought that drop at the end of the Iron Age extended into the late pre-Islamic period, but now we know there was actually quite a lot going on.”
He traces how the pattern continued. “Then you get a gap, and in the early Islamic period, around 880, there’s an expansion of the Islamic empire trading into India – a lot of goods coming back and forth,” he says. “So you need coastal ports like Sohar, and those cities need food. That’s when Al Ain booms again. They come back and renew all the old agriculture, because they need to supply the coastal cities.
“Then, around the 13th century, things collapse again – the Mongols come down and we see a real drop in activity,” he says. “After that you get another revival with the Omani Empire in the 17th century. They wanted to make the oases into date-palm factories, producing on an industrial scale for export to India.”
Each rise and fall leaves its mark. “When you have unsettled times, things go out of use,” he says. “You can only have a smaller population because there isn’t enough water to go around. You can see that reflected in the archaeological record – the ups and downs of a living landscape.”
For Sheehan, the discovery fills in one of those missing rises, showing that Al Ain remained active long after scholars thought it had fallen silent. “Five years ago, we thought nothing happened here. But actually, we weren’t looking – and it was under our own museum.”
The site sits in the heart of modern Al Ain, beside the 7,000-year-old oasis whose date-palm plantations are still cultivated today. That a pre-Islamic cemetery lay directly beneath the museum shows how much of ancient Al Ain survives below the city’s streets.
“This landscape doesn’t end in the museum,” Sheehan says. “It extends out kilometres in every direction. Although not intact, large parts of it probably do survive.”
The Department of Culture and Tourism has woven those findings into the museum’s redesign by Dabbagh Architects, whose plan integrates “live archaeology” – sections of glass flooring through which visitors can view excavated remains. The result turns the building into both gallery and dig site, linking the UAE’s oldest museum to the ongoing act of discovery beneath it.
“Archaeology is always a work in progress,” Sheehan says. “Each project gives you a small view that adds to the bigger picture. When we do further work, the indicators either become stronger – or they change entirely. That’s how knowledge grows.”
What his team has already uncovered is transformative. The graves beneath Al Ain Museum reveal a civilisation more connected than previously imagined – one that traded with distant cultures, adopted new technologies and left its mark on a landscape that still defines the city today.
And in doing so, it has redefined the museum itself – a place once built to house the story of Al Ain’s past that now stands directly above it.
