Twenty galleries filled with artifacts gathered from all over Turkey and the Near East celebrate 5,000 years of history with exhibits from Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the many civilizations of Anatolia and ancient Egypt.
The main building houses the finds of nineteenth-century archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey, in particular the famous fourth-century Alexander sarcophagus discovered at the royal necropolis of Sidon in Lebanon. The Museum of the Ancient Orient contains artifacts from Egypt and Mesopotamia, including a magnificent frieze of a bull from the Ishtar gate in Babylon.