Dar Al Madinah Museum

This guide to the Dar Al Madinah Museum in Medina starts with a single worn coin under glass and the detective work of reading it. It follows Doctor Abdulaziz Kaki, the Medina-born historian and conservationist who spent years assembling this collection piece by piece, and the coins spanning the earliest Islamic era through the Umayyads and Ottomans that let him rebuild the city's timeline. In the Hall of Urban and Cultural Heritage sit Umayyad pottery shards, fragments of the Kaaba's covering cloth, an eighteenth-century Ottoman hajj palanquin, and a bow said to have belonged to a companion of the Prophet, each rescued from ordinary use before it could vanish.