Zayed National Museum brings UAE’s maritime heritage to life

The Zayed National Museum’s ‘By Our Coasts’ gallery opens a portal to the seafaring traditions that formed the foundation of Emirati culture. Through audio narration, visitors navigate the stories of pearl diving, fishing and maritime trade, each thread woven into the larger tapestry of national identity.

The experience unfolds across six languages: Arabic, English, Chinese, French, German and Russian. The museum’s app becomes the vessel for this journey, transforming a smartphone into a guide that speaks to the particularity of each visitor’s tongue. Download before arrival, and the gallery’s carefully arranged displays reveal their deeper significance layer by layer, the voices drawing connections between the objects and the lives that created them.

Pearl diving once sustained the Emirates’ economy and shaped its character; the audio tour traces how divers ventured into the Gulf’s depths and how that labour, that courage, that intimate knowledge of the sea became inseparable from what it means to be Emirati. Fishing traditions follow, then the networks of trade that extended across oceans. What emerges is not a catalogue of maritime activities, but a portrait of a people whose relationship with the water defined their resilience and their place in the world.

The gallery itself holds the museum’s signature approach to storytelling, where objects speak as much as voices do. Visitors move through installations that hold nautical instruments, historical photographs, and artefacts recovered from the Gulf. The audio layer amplifies what sight alone cannot convey: the salt spray, the rhythm of tides, the dialect of merchants haggling over cargo, the particular knowledge that only those who worked the water possessed.

Download the Zayed National Museum app before your visit to access the audio tours. The ‘By Our Coasts’ gallery welcomes visitors daily in Abu Dhabi.

Imagery courtesy of Zayed National Museum (@znmuae).