The museum's main building announces its ambitions before you step inside. French architect Andre Godard designed the Museum of Ancient Iran in the early 1930s with a massive brick entrance vault deliberately modeled on the Taq Kasra, the great Sassanid arch at Ctesiphon in present-day Iraq. Construction began in 1935 and was completed within two years by Iranian builders Abbas Ali Memar and Morad Tabrizi, covering roughly 11,000 square meters. The building opened in 1937. Its second wing, the Museum of the Islamic Era, was later built in white travertine on the grounds beside it, though renovations were still underway when the 1979 Iranian Revolution swept the country. Together the two buildings span every era of Iranian history, from the Paleolithic through the Seljuk, Timurid, Safavid, and Qajar periods.

Some of the museum's most compelling stories are about objects that traveled far and returned. In the 1930s, roughly 30,000 Achaemenid tablets and fragments discovered at Persepolis were loaned to the University of Chicago for study and translation. They did not all come back for decades. These clay records from the time of Darius the Great contain detailed accounts of wages, road management, and daily life in the Achaemenid Empire. When they finally returned, they arrived on the same plane that carried Iran's delegation home from the United Nations General Assembly. A Sassanid relief, illegally smuggled to the United Arab Emirates during the 1980s, followed an even more circuitous path -- it surfaced at Stansted Airport in England in 2016, was displayed briefly at the British Museum, and finally came home on 28 June 2023, after 35 years abroad. Its estimated auction value exceeds 30 million pounds.

Among the museum's most unusual holdings is one of only four surviving statues of Homer's Penelope, discovered at Persepolis. The other three reside at the Vatican Museum and Capitoline Museum in Rome. In 2016, all four statues were reunited at the National Museum of Iran for a rare exhibition. Equally striking are the Saltmen -- naturally mummified remains of miners preserved by the salt in the Chehrabad salt mine. Their leather boots and tools survived intact for centuries, offering an unnerving glimpse of individuals frozen in the middle of ordinary work. The museum also holds the guardian bull of Chogha Zanbil, pottery from Shahr-e Sukhteh that contains what is considered the world's first known animation, and gold rhytons shaped like lions from the Achaemenid capital at Ecbatana.

The National Museum of Iran has become an increasingly active lender and exhibition organizer. When the Cyrus Cylinder was displayed in Tehran in 2010 as part of a loan arrangement with the British Museum, 500,000 people visited in four months. For its 80th anniversary in 2018, the museum hosted 50 masterpieces from the Louvre, drawing over 250,000 visitors. The museum's own traveling exhibitions have proven even more popular abroad. 'The Glory of Ancient Persia' toured China for 15 months beginning in 2024, with stops at the Forbidden City in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xinjiang. More than 50 million visitors attended, making it the largest international exhibition in the museum's history.

The museum's origins were modest. In 1906, Morteza Gholi Khan Hedayat proposed creating a national museum and an antiquities department, but his vision went unrealized. A decade later, in 1916, a first museum was established in a single room of the Ministry of Education, adjacent to the Dar al-Fonun school. It held 270 objects -- pottery, coins, weapons, seals. By 1925, that small collection moved to the Mirror Hall at Masoudieh Mansion. The turning point came when Iran canceled the unconditional archaeological privilege it had granted French excavators and instead commissioned Godard to design a purpose-built museum. What started as 270 objects in a borrowed room has grown into three million artifacts housed in two dedicated buildings, a research institution with multiple departments organized by historical period, and a global ambassador for Iranian cultural heritage.