Abu Dhabi's Al Maryah taking shape, Sheikh Zayed in Rome: Photos reveal 1900s UAE story

Before Al Maryah Island became a financial district of towers, luxury hotels and global companies, there was simply a stretch of coastline.

Today, its transformation can be reconstructed from a 44-image aerial photograph held by the National Library and Archives UAE; a remarkable composite that captures Abu Dhabi at a moment when much of the city that now defines its skyline did not yet exist.

Look closely and the landscape is almost difficult to recognise.

There is Qasr Al Hosn. There is the old Abu Dhabi town. There are stretches of coastline, open land and water. But there is no Al Maryah as the business and lifestyle destination it is today. Mina Port is yet to take its later shape. Saadiyat is largely open. Many of the islands, roads, towers and landmarks familiar to today's residents have not appeared.

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For Justin Codrai, a senior expert at the National Library and Archives, that is precisely why aerial photography matters. An aerial image does not simply show what Abu Dhabi looked like. It can reveal how the city was assembled.

“It's a very different city,” Codrai says, looking at the historical imagery.

The 44 photographs were stitched together to create a sweeping panorama of Abu Dhabi in 1968, giving a rare bird's-eye view of a city still at the beginning of a transformation that would reshape its geography.

The National Library and Archives itself now stands on filled land; another reminder of how difficult it can be to imagine the physical boundaries of the old city from today's vantage point.

At the time, even some of the infrastructure that would later connect Abu Dhabi to the wider emirate was still emerging. The first proper bridge at Maqta had not yet become the familiar gateway it is today, and Abu Dhabi's first international airport had not opened.

Then there are the photographs taken from the ground.

Afraa Butti Al Qubaisi, Content Accessibility Specialist at the National Library and Archives, guides visitors through images that make the transformation feel less like an urban-planning exercise and more like a human story.

One series follows the late UAE founding father Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan through journeys in the 1950s to Rome, Paris and New York, long before Abu Dhabi would become an international business centre.

In one photograph, Sheikh Zayed is seen at the Eiffel Tower.

In another, he is in New York's Central Park with his brother, who required medical attention. A Palestinian man named Mohamed Badran overheard Arabic being spoken, approached the group and offered assistance.

That encounter would eventually become part of the archive itself: the National Library and Archives later acquired the Mohamed Badran collection, bringing with it a group of photographs documenting a very different Abu Dhabi and a very different era of international travel.

For Al Qubaisi, these photographs help place Abu Dhabi's transformation in a human context.

The archive contains images of everyday life alongside the grand infrastructure projects that changed the emirate: early oil and LNG facilities, Das Island, the refinery at Umm Al Nar, the first Abu Dhabi hospital and experimental agricultural projects. One photograph shows an experimental farm on Saadiyat, developed with Arizona University to test whether vegetables could be grown in Abu Dhabi's sandy conditions.

Another captures a mobile bank operating from a Land Rover, taking banking services to oil workers.

There are photographs of hospitality sites including Bait Al Shamal and a guesthouse in Al Ain, as well as an image dating back to 1904 showing Zayed bin Khalifa, the grandfather of Sheikh Zayed, seated at a majlis.

The details are sometimes unexpectedly ordinary.

That is what makes them valuable.

A city can be remembered through its towers and roads, but it can also be remembered through where people gathered, how they were paid, where they shopped and what the coastline looked like before it was filled and built upon.

The exhibition currently being hosted at Four Seasons Hotel Abu Dhabi brings some of that material into a setting that is itself part of the story.

The hotel, which opened in 2016, is marking its 10th anniversary with Perspective, Crafted, an immersive programme that includes a National Library and Archives exhibition tracing Al Maryah's transformation through archival and contemporary imagery. Visitors enter through a large floral installation of thousands of blooms in shades of purple and lilac before reaching the historical photographs.

The juxtaposition is deliberate: a contemporary hotel lobby sitting above a landscape that has itself been transformed within living memory.

But the archive also shows that Abu Dhabi's transformation was never only about Al Maryah.

As Al Qubaisi moves through the exhibition, the images build a chronology of a city moving from low-rise homes and barasti structures towards roads, ports, industrial facilities and eventually a much more complex urban landscape. A photograph of an early souq, for example, shows the transition from informal street selling towards purpose-built commercial space.

The aerial photographs provide the corresponding view from above.

One later image shows Saadiyat's experimental farm, the Corniche under development and Mina Port taking shape. Al Maryah is now visible in the landscape.

Another generation of photographs shows further progress: the port, the changing coastline and landmarks that have since themselves become historical references.

Codrai says the archive does not have a definitive answer for which building came first on Al Maryah. What it does have is something perhaps more revealing: evidence of the island emerging gradually within a much larger process of urban expansion. That distinction matters because today's Al Maryah can appear inevitable when seen from the ground.

It is not.

The island is now associated with financial services, offices, luxury retail, hotels, restaurants and a dense waterfront skyline. But the archival photographs show the land before those functions existed, and, more broadly, a city before many of its defining pieces had been built.

Codrai traces the acceleration of Abu Dhabi's development to the period after Sheikh Zayed became Ruler of the emirate in 1966, describing a dramatic change in the pace and ambition of development.

The story, he suggests, is one of successive generations building on what came before. But preserving that story presents its own challenge.

The National Library and Archives is working to digitise aerial material held in collections in the UK, including imagery originating from the RAF, US Navy and private surveying companies such as Hunting Surveys. Around 50,000 aerial images have been digitised, with another 100,000 still to be processed.

The wider archive contains millions of photographs and documents, along with extensive film footage and government records.

For Codrai, the work is urgent because the landscape itself keeps disappearing beneath the next version of the city. An aerial photograph can preserve not only the shape of a road or coastline, but details that are invisible from ground level. Zoom into a high-resolution image and a city suddenly becomes populated again: people, vehicles, buildings and small details returning to view.

Those images can then be connected to photographs taken on the ground, allowing researchers to move between the physical landscape and the lives lived within it.