“Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History” Brings a Fragile Past to Paris
At the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris, the exhibition Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5000 Years of History turns archaeology into front-page news. It presents ancient objects, but its story is sharply current: a small strip of land, under bombardment, fighting to keep its memory alive.
Running from 3 April to 7 December 2025, the show gathers around 130 artefacts that track Gaza’s history from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period. Most works come from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, in partnership with the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the IMA.
Gaza at the crossroads
Gaza sits on one of the region’s classic fault lines. It links Africa and Asia, the desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Caravans once arrived from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Ships sailed from its port toward Cyprus, Greece and beyond. Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslim dynasties and the Ottomans all passed through or ruled here.
That succession of powers is visible in the gallery. Excavations since the 1990s at sites such as Tell es Sakan, Tell el Ajjul, Anthedon and the Byzantine church at Jabalia revealed a dense field of towns, ports and religious sites. Finds from those digs form the backbone of the exhibition and show Gaza as a full player in regional trade and culture, not a footnote.
How the objects were saved
The title is literal. These works survived because they left Gaza years ago.
In the late 1990s, Palestinian and French archaeologists built an exhibition called Mediterranean Gaza. It brought 221 artefacts to the IMA and other venues in France. While the show was travelling, the Second Intifada broke out. Returning fragile objects to a besieged and unstable Gaza became too risky. The collection stayed in France, then moved to Geneva for safekeeping.
Many of the pieces come from the collection of Jawdat Khoudary, a businessman from Gaza who bought or rescued artefacts from building sites and informal digs. He donated his collection to the Palestinian Authority in 2018. Objects that remained inside the Strip are now damaged, missing or presumed destroyed.
Those that were already abroad escaped that fate. Geneva highlighted them in 2024 in a show on threatened heritage. From that starting point, the IMA and its partners developed Saved Treasures of Gaza.
Inside the galleries
Curator Elodie Bouffard, curator and the Head of Exhibitions at the IMA, working with Palestinian architects Elias and Youssef Anastas, from AAU Anastas, structures the exhibition in two movements.
The first section is historical, guiding visitors through Bronze and Iron Age artefacts that highlight Gaza’s early role in regional trade, followed by Hellenistic and Roman coins, figurines and everyday ceramics that reveal its strong Mediterranean connections. It then turns to Byzantine works, including a striking sixth-century mosaic from the Deir el Balah area with intricate geometric and vegetal patterns and hints of Christian imagery, before concluding with Islamic and Ottoman steles and inscriptions that trace Gaza’s story into the early modern period.
Wine amphorae, glass vessels, oil lamps and sculpted heads of deities anchor the narrative in concrete objects. They point to a city that traded, produced and exported goods on a large scale.
The second movement shifts the register. Historic photographs from the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem are paired with recent images from Gaza. Visitors see churches, mosques, historic houses and archaeological sites in their earlier state, then in rubble.
Large wall maps, based on recent research, plot cultural sites by category and level of destruction. The result is blunt: in little more than a year, a significant slice of Gaza’s built heritage has been hit.
Heritage in the line of fire
Since October 2023, international organisations have recorded extensive damage to religious sites, museums, archaeological zones and old quarters across the Strip. Some of the very locations that produced the objects now shown in Paris, such as the Byzantine church at Jabalia or the Mamluk-era Qasr al Basha, have been heavily damaged.
French and Palestinian researchers responded by compiling an online inventory of bombed heritage using satellite images and archival records. The exhibition incorporates this work. The museum becomes a temporary data room and memory bank for sites that are now inaccessible or destroyed.
Cultural diplomacy, quiet resistance
The show also speaks to politics and diplomacy. IMA president Jack Lang describes it as an act of public service and a tribute to “young and vibrant” Gaza. French president Emmanuel Macron visited soon after the opening and used the occasion to restate his support for recognition of a Palestinian state.
Beyond official statements, the exhibition works on a different register. It offers clear labels, timelines and maps. It introduces Gaza as a historic port city, not only as a scene of war. It invites visitors to look at names on the map — Deir el Balah, Jabalia, Gaza City — and connect them with mosaics, amphorae and carved stone, not only with breaking news alerts.
Reframing Gaza
Saved Treasures of Gaza achieves three clear aims. It restores Gaza to its place as a centre of cultural production, with objects that testify to a city that once exported wine, laid refined mosaics and minted its own coins. It also documents the scale of cultural loss, using photo pairings and maps to show which churches, mosques, museums and historic homes have already been destroyed or severely damaged. And it offers a setting for informed solidarity: rather than scrolling past anonymous images of ruins, visitors encounter context, timelines and names, supported by a catalogue and essays on archaeology in Palestine, the history of the collection and the ethical questions raised by safeguarding displaced heritage in Europe.
A fragile safeguard
The show does not rebuild homes or stop airstrikes. Its work is different. It holds part of Gaza’s past in public view at a moment when that past is at risk of vanishing from the ground.
In the galleries of the IMA, Gaza appears not only as rubble and crisis, but as a place where people have lived, traded, worshipped and created for five thousand years. That is the core message of Saved Treasures of Gaza: the Strip is not only a battlefield. It is also an ancient city of the Mediterranean, and its story is not easily erased.