Last week, we did the classic Dubai-to-Abu Dhabi escape — the trip everyone living here makes at some point. It had nothing to do with the Zayed National Museum, and honestly, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go. The opening buzz had faded, I had seen that jaw-dropping exterior a hundred times already, and as for what was inside — how much of the UAE's story could really still surprise me?

Turns out, quite a lot. I left genuinely impressed, intrigued, and — rather unexpectedly — telling everyone I know to go.

So consider this your sign not to put it off the way I did. What is actually worth seeing inside? And what deserves a closer look? No spoilers — just enough to point you in the right direction. Here we go — inside Zayed National Museum.

I usually have very little patience for those long architectural explanations. But this is one of those rare cases worth loitering outside for. Because whether you have been to Zayed National Museum or not, you have probably wondered the same thing: why on earth does it look like that?

The story starts in 2007, when Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development & Investment Company launched an international architecture competition for the museum. 13 practices were invited, four made the shortlist, and the proposals couldn’t have been more different. Shigeru Ban imagined the "Big Roof" — one vast structure sheltering all seven emirates, built largely from local sand, with a huge circular pond out front. Christian de Portzamparc proposed sweeping forms inspired by Bedouin tents and dhow sails, essentially folding desert and sea into a single building.

The commission, though, went to Norman Foster: a low, mound-like building with five enormous steel structures rising above it like falcon wings.

By then, Foster needed no introduction. He had won the Pritzker Prize in 1999, and his practice had a habit of making striking buildings do rather more than simply look striking — engineering, environmental performance and visual identity tended to arrive as one package. Zayed National Museum follows exactly that playbook: the architecture had to carry the weight of heritage, respond to its surroundings, and be functional.

The roof is dominated by five enormous steel structures designed to evoke a falcon's wings — a nod to Sheikh Zayed's personal love of falconry, but also to a much older tradition across the Arabian Peninsula, where falcons were prized for hunting and woven into desert life. Here is the clever bit, though: the wings aren't just for show. They are functioning solar-thermal towers. Hot air rises through them and escapes at the top, drawing cooler air naturally through the museum below.

Google when the UAE was founded and you will get the tidy answer we all know: 1971. Correct, technically — but slightly misleading when you are standing in a museum that reaches back some 125,000 years. Turns out an awful lot was going on here long before seven emirates became one country.

Inside, the story is split across six permanent galleries, each taking on a different piece of the puzzle — Sheikh Zayed, the land itself, the people who lived here, the connections they built and, eventually, the country that emerged from it all.

The first gallery — Our Beginning — starts with the story of Sheikh Zayed and the development of the UAE. And that choice isn't accidental. Chronologically, the museum could have started thousands of years earlier, with the earliest traces of human life in this land. Instead, it begins with the person without whom much of the history that follows might never have come to light. Sheikh Zayed's fascination with archaeology, and his conviction that a country needs to understand its past, helped drive the excavations behind much of the history the museum now tells.

The section opens with the Al Nahyan family and Sheikh Zayed's early life, with Al Ain looming large in those first chapters — not least for how communities managed water, agriculture and the falaj system. From there, the scale shifts fast: onto the oil era, then education, healthcare and infrastructure, and finally the negotiations that led to Union. This is also where the other emirates properly enter the story — including the rather startling detail that Bahrain and Qatar were briefly part of a proposed nine-member federation.

Second — Through Our Nature — a section built less around artefacts and more around screens and atmosphere. But it earns its early spot: before the museum gets into settlements, trade or the growth of cities, it wants you to first grasp the conditions people were working with — heat, scarce water, desert, mountains, sea.

The centrepiece is hard to miss — an enormous 11-by-11-metre screen showing how generations adapted to exactly that. Worth a pause. But for me, the real story starts upstairs.

Third — To Our Ancestors suddenly takes you hundreds of thousands of years back in time. The section opens with a stone tool discovered near Jebel Hafeet in Al Ain — evidence of some of the earliest humans to pass through this corner of Arabia.

From there, you more or less watch life being built object by object. Stone tools give way to fishing equipment, jewellery, pottery and signs of trade across the Gulf.

The strangest part, though, is remembering where you are actually standing. The landscape outside hasn't always looked like this. Arabia went through much wetter periods, with lakes, grasslands and conditions rather more forgiving than the desert you'll walk back into afterwards.

Fourth — Through Our Connections is a small room with an improbable amount of history crammed into it. Here we move through the Bronze and Iron Ages, as metalworking, production and trade start reshaping how people live. One development stands out: falaj irrigation, a rather ingenious system for channelling groundwater that made farming and permanent settlement possible in a thoroughly unforgiving climate.

Then comes the biggest shift of all — the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, which transformed the region's religious and cultural life and helped written Arabic spread far more widely.

Fifth — By Our Coasts is probably my favourite. It covers roughly five centuries of life along the UAE's coastline, and you will know you have arrived the moment you spot the enormous vessel dominating the room.

There is navigation, including the story of Ahmad Ibn Majid, the celebrated 15th-century navigator from Julfar, present-day Ras Al Khaimah. But look past the ship. The real story is everything that made life at sea possible: sailors, navigation, trade and, above all, pearling — not simply a tradition, but an entire industry that sustained communities across the Gulf for generations.

Sixth — To Our Roots turns personal. After thousands of years of trade, religion and seismic historical shifts, the final gallery looks at everyday life across desert, mountains and oases — how people built homes, found food and water, dressed, made music, told stories and passed traditions down.

I know — a hall-by-hall walkthrough can only take you so far if you haven't set foot inside yet. But it served a purpose: first, to give you the lay of the land; and second, to get us to this point. Because now we can get into the good stuff — the things actually worth hunting for. This list is entirely subjective. I am keeping it anyway.

1. Exhibit showing a 90-minute drive that once took a week

Location: entrance to the Our Beginning hall

Picture this: no air conditioning, no motorway — just you, a camel and seven days ahead of you. In 1949, Sheikha Salama bint Butti made the journey from Abu Dhabi to Al Ain by camel, captured in a photograph that is very easy to breeze past without a second look. For perspective: that same journey today takes around 90 minutes.

2. Exhibit showing a ride to school, decades before it was easy

Location: Our Beginning hall

Forget the glossy yellow school bus rumbling down the street — this one is a simple, open-top car, packed with children dressed in the fashions of a changing era. It's easy to assume the big turning points in history are treaties, signatures, and photographs of rulers shaking hands. But sometimes, transformation looks a lot more simple

3. Exhibit showing someone’s grocery list 5,000 years ago

Location: To Our Ancestors hall

Look closely and the tiny wedge-shaped marks come into focus. Those tiny marks are cuneiform — one of the earliest ways humans figured out how to write. Around 5,000 years ago, scribes would take a piece of soft clay and press a cut reed into it, creating the little wedge-shaped marks you see here. And what were people using this revolutionary new technology to record? Often surprisingly ordinary things: grain, livestock, payments, deliveries and debts. Turns out, the need to make a list is almost as old as writing itself.

4. Exhibit showing when Arabic became something you could see

Location: Through Our Connections

Pre-Islamic Arabia had a powerful oral culture. Poetry carried everything from genealogy and tribal history to reputation and collective memory. Written Arabic already existed, but it wasn’t yet the primary way this knowledge was preserved.

The Qur’an changed the equation. Revealed in Arabic in the seventh century and believed by Muslims to be the word of God, its precise wording mattered — and so did preserving it. As Islam spread, written Arabic travelled with it, eventually becoming a language of religion, government, scholarship and literature across a vast part of the world.

Look closely at the Qur’anic manuscripts here: they capture the moment Arabic was becoming not only something spoken and remembered, but something increasingly written, preserved and seen.

5. Exhibit showing the tool navigating the ocean with a bit of wood and string

Location: By Our Coasts hall

Before clever instruments came along, sailors did something rather brilliant with what they already had: their own hands. Hold your fingers at arm’s length, line them up with a known star, and its height above the horizon tells you roughly how far north or south you have travelled. Simple, free and always to hand.

There was just one snag — fingers, rather inconveniently, come in different sizes.

Enter the kamal. By the late medieval period, sailors across the Indian Ocean had swapped fingers for a small wooden board on a knotted string. Grip the string between your teeth, line the board up between horizon and star, and let the knots do the measuring instead. Sailors could even memorise the right knot for different destinations — a remarkably simple navigation system for crossing an enormous ocean.

6. Exhibit showing the tradition that doesn't really exist on paper

Location: To Our Roots hall

And finally, listen for Alheda’a. For generations, camel herders used their voices to communicate with their animals — rhythmic calls could gather a herd, get it moving, slow it down or lead it towards water. Camels would become familiar with the sounds and, in some cases, even recognise their own herder’s voice.

But perhaps the most interesting part is how Alheda’a survived. There was no manual to learn from: younger herders learnt simply by listening, repeating and eventually passing the calls on themselves. Today, that chain of voices is recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Which feels like a fitting place to end: after thousands of years of objects, manuscripts and archaeology, some history survives without ever being put behind glass.