The Sulaymaniyah Museum opened on July 14, 1961, in a small building in the Shorsh District. By 1980, it had moved to a larger facility on Salim Street, occupying 6,000 square meters in a single-story structure with two large exhibition halls connected by an open lecture hall. But that same year, the Iran-Iraq War began, and the museum closed entirely to the public for the duration of the eight-year conflict. It reopened briefly in 1990, only to shut again when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of that year. A full decade passed before Jalal Talabani, then secretary general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, officially reopened the museum on August 20, 2000. Each closure marked a period when the artifacts inside -- some dating back millennia -- sat in darkness, waiting.

When the 2003 invasion of Iraq triggered the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad, the Sulaymaniyah Museum took on an unexpected role: recovery agent. Staff began buying back looted artifacts on the black market, a controversial practice that drew criticism from some archaeologists who argued it incentivized further theft. The museum's leadership saw it differently. Artifacts were disappearing into private collections worldwide, and buying them was sometimes the only way to return them to Iraqi hands. The tension between preservation ethics and practical urgency defined this chapter of the museum's history. Objects that might have vanished forever instead found their way back to public display in Kurdistan.

The Narseh Gallery, inaugurated on October 24, 2021, houses five large busts of the Sassanian king Narseh, dating to approximately 293 CE. Four are carved in high relief; one is fully sculpted in the round. These stone faces once adorned the Paikuli Tower south of Sulaymaniyah, a monument where Narseh inscribed his claim to the Sassanian throne in both Middle Persian and Parthian. The busts had never been publicly displayed before. Nearby, inscribed bricks bear the name of Ur-Nammu of Ur, who ruled from 2112 to 2094 BCE. Gold earrings carry the inscription of King Shulgi. A stone stela depicts Iddi-Sin, King of Simurrum, from the Old Babylonian period. The museum spans roughly four millennia in a single walk through its halls.

On September 5, 2019, the museum opened Slemani Museum Kids, the first dedicated children's museum space in Iraq. Developed through a collaboration between the University of Glasgow, the Slemani Directorate of Antiquities, and the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund, the hall fills with teaching tools designed to make the ancient world tangible for young visitors. In a region where conflict has disrupted education for generations, the space represents something deliberate: an investment in the idea that understanding where you come from matters, especially when so much has been lost. The children who walk through this hall live in a city that has been closed, reopened, bombed, and rebuilt. The artifacts they touch survived the same.

The Prehistory Gallery, officially inaugurated on February 2, 2021, after pandemic delays pushed its planned March 2020 opening, displays hundreds of artifacts from Paleolithic caves across Iraqi Kurdistan and from recently excavated ancient sites. Sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, the two renovated halls trace human presence in the Zagros foothills back tens of thousands of years. UNESCO has partnered with the museum since 2011, renovating exhibition spaces including a small hall completed in 2023. Meanwhile, a selection of cuneiform tablets has been captured using high-resolution 3D scanning, with the resulting digital models made freely available through Heidelberg University's Dataverse. The past here is not static. It is being reread, rescanned, and reinterpreted -- and the Sulaymaniyah Museum intends to be where that work happens.