KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip — Palestinian citizen Marwan Shahwan has turned the basement of his Khan Yunis home into an archaeological museum. His private exhibit features 10,000 artifacts collected over 30 years that attest to the history of the seven civilizations that called Palestine home: the Pharaonic, Greek, Romanian, Byzantine, Islamic, Mamluk and Ottoman civilizations.

He bought his first archaeological find in the 1980s from a popular market. It is a copper teapot that an archaeologist later on told him was a valuable artifact dating back to the Ottoman era. A carpenter and interior designer, Shahwan designed and built a museum to house and display his artifacts.

Shahwan told Al-Monitor that he was encouraged to collect archaeological pieces by stories his grandfather told him about an Israeli officer named Moshe Dayan, who had been buying large amounts of artifacts after the 1967 war and labeling them as part of Israel’s history. He added, "This pushed me to collect antiquities, as I wanted to preserve Palestinian heritage."

The archaeological museum, the largest in Gaza, contains a variety of pieces including rare stones and coins, as well as a historical copy of the Quran from the Islamic Golden Age.