Baghdad holds 5,000 years of layered memory: Nimrud ivories in glass cases, an Abbasid college on the Tigris bank, Ottoman minarets in Rusafa and monuments built by a fallen regime. This route follows that chronology street by street.
Twenty-plus halls run chronologically from Sumer to the Islamic period: the Warka Vase, the Lady of Warka mask, Ur's lyre and the Nimrud ivories. Look for the display marking the 15,000 objects looted in April 2003 and the roughly half since recovered. Sun–Thu 09:00–16:00.
Founded in 1227 by Caliph al-Mustansir, this is one of the world's oldest surviving universities — a brick courtyard on the Tigris with a working water clock recess, muqarnas portal and Kufic inscription bands. It survived the 1258 Mongol sack that destroyed most of Abbasid Baghdad.
A 12th–13th-century brick complex beside the Mustansiriya, with the finest surviving muqarnas vaulting in Iraq — honeycomb brickwork over a two-storey arcaded courtyard. Scholars still argue whether it was a caliphal palace or a second madrasa of the late Abbasid era.
The cylindrical brick minaret is the last standing fragment of the Abbasid Caliphs' Mosque, dated to 1289 and built on the site of the earlier Palace Mosque. Its geometric brick lattice and stalactite balcony are the model for later Iraqi minarets; the mosque around it is a 1960s rebuild.
Two pairs of 40-metre bronze forearms — cast from moulds of Saddam Hussein's own arms — hold crossed sabres over the parade ground, opened in 1989 for the Iran–Iraq War. Thousands of Iranian helmets are set in the concrete bases. Dismantling began in 2007 and was halted.
Ismail Fattah al-Turk's 1983 split turquoise dome, 40 metres high and cleaved in two over an eternal flame, commemorates Iraqi dead of the Iran–Iraq War. The underground museum holds soldiers' names, letters and a subterranean gallery beneath the artificial lake.
Khalid al-Rahal's 1982 monument — a vast tilted disc, read as a shield dropping from a dying warrior's hand — replaced Rifat Chadirji's 1959 original demolished for the parade ground. It marks the shift from republican to Baathist commemorative style.
Jawad Saleem's 50-metre travertine and bronze frieze, unveiled 1961, reads right to left like a line of Arabic: the 14 July 1958 revolution that ended the monarchy, framed by a mother, a political prisoner and Mesopotamian bull imagery. It became the backdrop of the 2019 Tishreen protests.
Twin golden domes and four minarets over the tombs of the seventh and ninth Shia Imams, buried here in 799 and 835 CE. The present Safavid-era structure dates from 1515 under Shah Ismail I, with mirrorwork halls and a silver-clad zarih at its heart.
Baghdad's first modern boulevard, cut through the old city by the Ottomans in 1916, still lined with colonnaded shanasheel balconies in various states of collapse. The 1827 Haydar-Khana Mosque halfway along was the assembly point of the 1920 revolt against British rule.
A folk-life museum in a restored riverside building using life-size plaster figures to stage vanished Baghdad trades: the qahwachi, the water carrier, the scribe, the mulla's school and the hammam. Directly nearby stands Khan Murjan, a 1359 vaulted caravanserai.
The Qishla was the Ottoman military barracks and administrative seat, its 1868 clock tower a gift from George V's era later crowned by the site where Faisal I was proclaimed king of Iraq in August 1921. Friday afternoons poets and musicians gather in the courtyard.