In the heart of Ajman, where the gold souk and the traditional market meet within walking distance of the Corniche, stands a building of palm-coloured walls, narrow openings, and a single round tower that catches the afternoon light. This is Ajman Fort. Since 1991, it has carried a second life as the Ajman Museum — and within its walls live not only the objects of the past, but the long, layered story of how this place, the second-smallest of the seven emirates, came to occupy its quiet, indelible position in the history of the Arabian Gulf.
“We are part of the geography and history of this region that has shaped our lives in various aspects.” — His Highness Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, UAE Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Ajman
The Ruler’s words appear at the entrance to the museum, both in Arabic and in English, set above a photograph of fishermen drawing a net along the shore. They function as a curatorial premise. The Ajman Museum does not narrate a single triumphal story. It assembles, instead, a careful and unhurried chronology — geological, archaeological, dynastic, technological — that begins seven thousand years before the present and continues into the lifetime of the leaders who oversaw the country’s foundation.
The Fort
The building itself is the first exhibit. Constructed in the late eighteenth century from coral stone, mud, and palm wood — the materials of vernacular Gulf architecture — the Ajman Fort served, until 1970, as the residence of the ruling family and the seat of the emirate’s government. A British survey from 1820 described it tersely: “Ajman at the time was a small town, possessing a large fortress used by the Sheikh as his residence and although it had been partly demolished due to the campaign, it seems that new fortifications had already been made.” The wind tower at its centre — barjeel in Arabic, a vertical shaft that catches and redirects breeze through the interior — is one of the few remaining of its type in the region and was rebuilt by Sheikh Rashid I bin Humaid Al Nuaimi between 1820 and 1830 after British naval bombardment had reduced parts of the original structure.
In the early 1980s, His Highness Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, then a recent successor to his father, gave the directive to restore the fort and turn it into a museum, with the explicit objective of preserving the emirate’s heritage. The official inauguration took place on 20 May 1991, in the presence of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of the United Arab Emirates, and His Highness Sheikh Humaid himself. Two old cannons now flank the museum’s entrance, beneath the carved Arabic inscription متحف عجمان.
Seven Thousand Years, Patiently Laid Out
The museum’s central narrative thread begins at 7000 BCE and ends in 2021, presented across a sequence of interactive timeline panels that allow the visitor to move between epochs at their own pace. The earliest layer is geological: the Ubaid period (6500–3800 BCE), the prehistoric Stone Age culture that extended from southern Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula and showed an early commercial connection with the Gulf. The first evidence of human life in Ajman itself dates to Neolithic settlements in the Al Zawra area, northeast of the present city, around 5000 BCE — flint and tools indicating a civilisation dependent on trade.
The Bronze Age arrives at 3200–2600 BCE in what is known as the Hafit period, named for Jebel Hafit in the eastern region of Abu Dhabi, where more than five hundred stone cairn tombs were first excavated by a Danish team in 1962. It is followed by the Umm Al Nar culture (2600–2000 BCE), the bronze-age civilisation that gives the museum’s archaeological collection its centrepiece.
The Umm Al Nar exhibits are drawn from the Al Muwaihat archaeological site, discovered in 1986 when construction workers laying water pipes uncovered a series of graves with a mechanical trench digger. Recognising the find as ancient, they informed the competent authority. Between 11 and 25 December 1990, Belgian archaeologists from the Department of Near Eastern Archaeology of the University of Ghent completed systematic excavations at Al Zorah, Al Muwaihat, Masfut, and Manama — work which placed Ajman, for the first time, on the international archaeological map of the third millennium BCE. The Mowaihat tombs are now recognised, together with Tomb N at Hili in Al Ain, as the only known burial of their specific type in the United Arab Emirates: a circular above-ground tomb with an adjacent subterranean burial.
In the gallery, a large pottery jar from this period stands at the centre of the display — c. 2600–2000 BCE, used for the burial of a child whose bones were found inside, accompanied by a set of household and ritual objects intended for life after death. Around it: smaller burial vessels; necklaces of carnelian beads, of clay, and of agate (the latter two indicating, respectively, trade with India and with China); a bronze ring; a soapstone bowl carved with concentric circles. The labels are bilingual, the proportions modest, the message — that the inhabitants of Ajman, four and a half thousand years ago, possessed both an elaborate cultural understanding of death and trade ties extending across the Indian Ocean — unmistakable.
The Land of Magan
The timeline pauses at 3000 BCE to consider a name: Magan. The first Sumerian written reference to Magan, recorded during the Umm Al Nar period, refers to the territory currently covered by the United Arab Emirates and Oman. A map mounted on a wall of the gallery places Magan among its neighbours — Mesopotamia, Dilmun (Bahrain), Meluhha (the Indus Valley) — and traces the maritime corridors that carried copper, pottery, and beads between the cities of the Sumerian south and the harbours of the Arabian Gulf.
The narrative continues. By 1600–590 BCE, the sea ports of Rams and Sabikha, between modern Dubai, Sharjah, and Umm Al Quwain, indicated a thriving sea-based commercial economy. Around 1000 BCE, the introduction of the aflaj — underground irrigation channels tapping groundwater from distant sources — restored the agricultural economy after a period of deterioration. The aflaj of Hili, archaeologists now believe, are the most ancient known in the world, suggesting that the technology was developed locally and exported, rather than imported, contradicting earlier assumptions of an Iranian origin. In 323 BCE traces of a Hellenistic road, stretching from al-Dour in Umm Al Quwain to Ajman, mark the region’s entry into the wider Mediterranean trading network. In 622 CE, Islam entered the Emirates during the Prophet’s lifetime, and the region became part of the Islamic state.
The Arrival of Empires
A separate gallery, glazed in dark earth tones, takes up the story of the colonial Gulf. The Portuguese arrived in 1507 with the opening of the strategic seaport of Hormuz, beginning Western colonial ambitions in the region. In 1622, the loss of Hormuz to a combined force of the English East India Company and Safavid Persian troops under Imam Quli Khan, acting on orders from Shah Abbas I, opened the waters of the Gulf to the Dutch and the English. In 1664, King Louis XIV established the French East India Company, and French ships joined the contest. By 1700, the British, the Dutch and the French were competing openly for control of Arabian Gulf trade. The Royal Danish Arabia Expedition of 1761–1767, in which the German cartographer Carsten Niebuhr participated, produced the first comprehensive European scientific and social report on the Arabian Peninsula, including the land of the Emirates.
This long competition of empires forms the necessary backdrop to the museum’s most consequential dynastic moment: 1803. In that year, the Al Bu Kharaiban tribe, a large division of the Al Nuaim, established its rule under the leadership of Sheikh Rashid I bin Humaid bin Sultan bin Rashid Al Qurtasi Al Nuaimi. The Ajman Fort became their citadel. From this point onward, the museum’s chronology divides into two parallel threads: the long political contest with the British, and the slower internal story of how a small coastal emirate became a centre of culture and learning.
The Long Line of the Al Nuaimi
A timeline of the ruling family is presented on a single tall panel that runs the height of the wall. It begins in 1803 with Sheikh Rashid I and continues through nine successions until the present day:
- 1803: Sheikh Rashid I bin Humaid bin Sultan bin Rashid Al Qurtasi Al Nuaimi
- 1838: First period of Sheikh Humaid I bin Rashid Al Nuaimi
- 1841: Sheikh Abdul Aziz I bin Rashid Al Nuaimi
- 1848: Second period of Sheikh Humaid I
- 1864: Sheikh Rashid II bin Humaid I Al Nuaimi
- 1891: Sheikh Humaid II bin Rashid II Al Nuaimi (signed the 1892 “Prohibitive Agreement” with the British, by which the rulers refrained from signing agreements with any foreign country other than Britain; died in 1900 at the age of thirty-five)
- 1900: Sheikh Abdul Aziz II bin Humaid I Al Nuaimi (signed the 1902 agreement with the British preventing the import, sale, and distribution of weapons; died in 1910 at the age of sixty-one)
- 1910: Sheikh Humaid III bin Abdul Aziz II Al Nuaimi
- 1928: Sheikh Rashid III bin Humaid III Al Nuaimi
It is at Sheikh Rashid III that the timeline halts to give a longer account. His reign — fifty-three years, from 1928 to 1981 — is the longest in the recorded history of Ajman. During it, he expanded the emirate to include the inland enclaves of Masfut and Muzairah, and, as the seventh of the seven Founding Rulers of the United Arab Emirates union in 1971, he placed his signature beside those of his counterparts to establish the country. He passed away in 1981. The story closes with His Highness Sheikh Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi, who succeeded his father on 6 September 1981 at the age of fifty, and who has, since that date, presided over the cultural transformation that the museum itself records.
Land Rover with Plate «1» and Four Decades of Institutions
Among the museum’s most photographed displays is a 1960s-model Land Rover Series III, a replica of the vehicle owned by the late Sheikh Rashid bin Humaid Al Nuaimi. Painted in a soft, almost military green, parked beneath a thatched palm-frond canopy in the museum’s courtyard, it carries the licence plate “1” — the original number plate of the Ajman ruler’s car. It is a historical document: the vehicle in which the founding ruler traversed the emirate during the transitional decades that bridged the British protectorate and the federal era.
Beside it, in the museum’s second outdoor courtyard, the period 1980–2021 is presented as a sustained programme of institution-building under Sheikh Humaid:
- 1983: The Rashid bin Humaid Award for Culture and Science is established in memory of his father, “a lover of knowledge”
- 1986: The Red Fort in Manama is restored and a third tower is added to its structure
- 1991: Ajman Museum is officially inaugurated
- 1995: The Ajman Equestrian, Racing and Shooting Club is established by ruler’s decree; the Masfut Sports and Culture Club is launched
- 1996: Ajman Television Channel Four begins broadcasting over the land channel (VHF); the Endowment Fund for developing society and the care of mosques is established
- 1997: The Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Hospital in Al Jarf opens
- 1999: The Al Ihsan Charitable Association receives a generous grant from the ruler; the Department of Culture and Information is established under His Highness Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, “to ensure that the scientific, cultural, and literary movement in Ajman enriches national culture”
- 2000: The Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi Foundation for Human Development and the Humaid bin Rashid Al Nuaimi Charitable Foundation are established
- 2004: Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, as President of the Culture and Media Department, passes a resolution to establish the Ajman National Theatre Group
- 2012: The Council for the Coordination of Charity Works and Endowments is founded to achieve humanitarian objectives
The list reads, in its specificity, as a deliberate counter-narrative to the assumption that smaller emirates are merely waystations of larger ones. Ajman has, within forty years, built a complete civic infrastructure — a hospital, a television channel, a university (Ajman University, established in 1988, the first non-public university in the UAE), an equestrian club, an endowment fund, a charitable foundation, a theatre group, a culture and media authority — many of these institutions formally documented in the museum’s timeline.
What the Fort Holds
Beyond the archaeological gallery and the dynastic panels, the Ajman Museum holds a working ethnographic collection: centuries-old manuscripts, traditional weapons, models of wooden dhows, ingenious irrigation systems, folk costumes, and a section devoted to the pearl trade — the foundational economy of the emirate before the discovery of oil. The Al Nuaim tribe, the panels note, began fishing and pearling on the Ajman coast in 1810, establishing a permanent settlement by the sea. By the early twentieth century, when the pearl trade collapsed under the pressure of Japanese cultured pearls, the emirate had already become what it has remained since: a small, dignified community on the Gulf, attached to its land and to its sea.
The fort itself, perfectly preserved as a specimen of traditional Emirati architecture, is the integrating element. The wind tower still cools the inner rooms in the manner it was designed to; the carved wooden doors lead to chambers where the rulers once received guests; the courtyards retain the proportions of the eighteenth-century dwelling. Where other Gulf museums have placed their collections in newly constructed glass and steel pavilions, the Ajman Museum makes the architectural argument that the fort and its contents belong together — that the most authentic frame for the history of the emirate is the very building in which that history was once decided.
A Museum That Remembers Quietly
The Ajman Museum opens daily from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (and on Fridays from 2:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.). Entry is bilingual; the labels are in Arabic and English; the chronology stretches from 7000 BCE to the present. There are no queues, no shop crowds, no scheduled tours; the museum is encountered at the pace at which one chooses to encounter it. In a country where many cultural institutions have, over the past two decades, scaled themselves towards spectacle, Ajman has kept its principal cultural site at human scale — a fort, a courtyard, a wind tower, a Land Rover with the licence plate “1”.
It is, perhaps, the museum’s defining gesture. To stand in the courtyard of the fort, beneath the date palms, with the wind tower at one’s back and the sound of the corniche just beyond the wall, is to understand the Ruler’s opening words not as a slogan but as a description. We are part of the geography and history of this region that has shaped our lives in various aspects. In Ajman, the geography is still visible. The history is still close enough to touch.
Visitor Information
- Address: Ajman Fort, Al Bustan area, Ajman, United Arab Emirates
- Opening hours: Saturday to Thursday, 8:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.; Friday, 2:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
In addition, you might be interested in reading our article about the Al Zorah Pavilion in Ajman.
