Andre Godard arrived in Iran as a scholar of Islamic architecture and stayed to become one of the country's most influential builders. Commissioned in 1934 by Ali-Asghar Hekmat, the Minister of Education under Reza Shah, Godard designed the Museum of Ancient Iran alongside his colleague Maxime Siroux. Two Iranian master builders, Ostad Morad Tabrizi and Abbas Ali Memar, oversaw the actual construction, which was completed in 1937. The building encompasses roughly 11,000 square meters across three floors. Godard's signature move was the entrance: an egg-shaped Sasanian vault scaled down from Ctesiphon, rendered in locally sourced brick. Above it, a marble panel bears calligraphy in the Thuluth script by Amir AlKottab Kurdestani, presenting a poem by Mohammad-Taqi Bahar, one of Iran's most distinguished literary figures. The museum and the adjacent Museum of the Islamic Era together form the National Museum of Iran.

The collection begins where human presence in Iran begins -- with quartz stone tools from the Kashafrud Basin near Mashhad, among the oldest evidence of hominid activity on the Iranian Plateau. From the Middle Paleolithic, the museum displays tools crafted from pyrite, recovered from caves in the Zagros Mountains and at sites like Bisotun and Khorramabad, dating to the era when Neanderthals inhabited the region. The Upper Paleolithic galleries hold what may be the museum's most quietly extraordinary object: a single tooth. Discovered in Wezmeh Cave near Kermanshah, it belonged to a child approximately eight to ten years old and dates to at least 40,000 years ago -- old enough to place it in Neanderthal territory. When researchers at the University of Poitiers re-analyzed it using X-ray micro-CT imaging, the internal structure of the tooth proved distinctly Neanderthal, making it the first direct evidence of Neanderthal presence on the Iranian Plateau. This small fragment sits in a display case in Tehran.

The Neolithic galleries shift from survival to artistry. The oldest known Iranian clay comes from Ganj Dareh, a hill site in western Iran. From Sarab Hill come the earliest human and animal figurines shaped from mud -- small, deliberate acts of representation that mark the boundary between tool-making and art. The collection expands through the great sites of the 5th and 4th millennia BCE: Susa in Khuzestan, Cheshmeh Ali near Tehran, and locations across Fars province, each represented by painted pottery whose geometric precision still impresses. Vessels from Jiroft and Shahdad feature intricate scenes: humans battling mythological beasts, geometric and botanical patterns wrapping around surfaces. One bronze figure from Shahdad shows a naked man with hands clasped to his chest, possibly in prayer. The Bronze and Iron Age galleries display weapons, containers, and ornamental objects that document Iran's transition from scattered settlements to organized power.

The museum's upper halls belong to the great states. Artifacts from the Elamite civilization include pieces from Chogha Zanbil, the massive ziggurat temple complex in Khuzestan that remains one of the best-preserved structures of the ancient Near East. Inscribed cow statues, glass tubes, and ornamental bricks represent a civilization that rivaled Mesopotamia for centuries. The Median galleries draw from sites at Nush-i Jan, Hasanlu, Godin Tepe, and Baba Jan Tepe, showcasing the expansion of iron-working and the invention of glazed pottery. A glazed tile from Ziwiye stands out: two goats flanking a lotus flower, a composition that balances naturalism with symbolic abstraction. And then the Achaemenids arrive. Stairs from Persepolis, an Egyptian-made statue of Darius the Great, Achaemenid lion sculptures, and Parthian-era figures -- including a haunting statue of a Parthian princess -- fill the final galleries with the weight of empires whose influence reached from the Aegean to the Indus.

What makes the Museum of Ancient Iran exceptional is not any single object but the unbroken continuity of the collection. Few museums anywhere attempt to trace a single region's human story from Paleolithic stone tools through the sophistication of imperial Persia, all within walking distance. Godard's building was designed for exactly this purpose, and its progression from ground floor to upper galleries mirrors the arc of civilization itself: from raw stone to fired clay to worked metal to imperial grandeur. The Ctesiphon arch at the entrance is not merely decorative. It is a thesis statement -- the argument that Iran's architectural and artistic traditions form a continuous thread, and that a building in 1930s Tehran can legitimately claim kinship with a Sasanian palace built 1,400 years earlier. Whether that argument holds is for each visitor to decide. The evidence fills three floors.