Zayed National Museum
Falcon-winged towers of steel over galleries tracing three thousand years of a nation's story.
This guide to the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi opens just past midnight on December 1st, 1971, when Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan pulls his car off the desert road between Abu Dhabi and Dubai instead of driving straight on toward the meeting that will remake the region. You'll hear the line he gave a newspaper that evening about what a man will give up for something precious, and follow him through the night he spent camped with a handful of advisers before morning. The guide also traces how the museum's architects, Foster and Partners, drew on a desert bird Zayed hunted with for the building's form.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.