Despite a long and rich history, Qatar, with its largely nomadic Bedouin past, has few tangible artifacts to show for its legacy. The Persian Gulf country’s image today is exemplified by its capital, Doha, where meteoric growth kicked off with the discovery of oil and gas in the middle of the last century, a development that has made this small nation the world’s richest per capita. It is against the city’s backdrop of bombastic high-rises that the otherworldly National Museum of Qatar, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, was imagined and, at the end of March, inaugurated with much fanfare after more than a decade-long gestation, carrying an undisclosed price tag.