Syrians returned on Wednesday to the national museum in Damascus, reopened for the first time since extremist-led forces seized the capital and ousted president Bashar al-Assad.
The antiquities museum closed its doors on December 7, a day before Damascus was taken by rebel forces, over fears of looting.
"We firmly shut the museum's iron doors after we saw the situation was unstable," said Mohamed Nair Awad, head of the national antiquities authority.
"They sent us a group of fighters to protect the museum," and it survived unscathed, he said.
On Wednesday, members of the public walked around the building and admired its collection.
The Baghdad museum's collection was decimated by looters in the chaos that followed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
Outside the Damascus museum, Iyad Ghanem was among a group holding up signs demanding the new rulers help preserve the country's cultural heritage.
Some artefacts at the museum date back more than 10,000 years, he said.
The museum's vast collection includes tens of thousands of pieces, ranging from prehistoric blades and Greco-Roman sculptures to Islamic art.
The museum was closed for six years during Syria's civil war, which broke out in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests, to protect its precious artefacts from violence or looting.
It reopened in 2018, after Assad clawed back control of large swathes of the country.
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