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Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan's National Museum dazzle at the Met
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Nomadic princess's crown. 1st Cent. A.D. Courtesty Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gold crowns, ivory figures, turquoise-studded bracelets, swords and daggers. When you consider the odds, it’s miraculous that these treasures from Afghanistan arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or any museum for that matter. From the 1980s until just a few years ago—as civil war raged in Afghanistan—most of the archeological wealth of this ancient region went missing.
The National Museum in Kabul, the main repository of the region’s cultural history dating back more than four millennia, was shelled, bombed and--In the 1990s, after being overtaken as a militia headquarters--destroyed and looted. By the late-90s, the museum’s doors were padlocked and most of its artifacts were gone. Rumor had it that much of the country’s artistic heritage that hadn’t already been destroyed had been smuggled over the boarder to Pakistan, where the historic pieces had been sold on the black market to foreign collectors.
Few knew that in 1988 a small group of Kabul’s museum staffers—at great risk to their own lives—had packed up hundreds of the museum’s finest artworks and hidden them in a vault at the presidential palace. Now about 200 of those pieces are part of “Hidden Treasures,” a traveling show that has toured Europe and stopped in San Francisco, Houston and Washington, D.C. before arriving in New York City for the summer.
More than just an assortment of glittering objects, the show offers a new picture of the rich and complex layering of cultures that shaped this Central Asian country. Focusing on just four excavation sites out of hundreds in Afghanistan, the exhibit ranges from 2200 B.C—the Bronze Age—to the second century A.D.—the height of the Kushan Empire, which reached across much of Asia and India. The sites provide microcosms for the country’s long multicultural history.
Afghanistan is located at the heart of the historic Silk Road—in reality not one road but a series of trade routes, first established about 300 B.C., that linked the Eastern Mediterranean with China. Relays of merchants passed everything from Chinese silks and Indian rubies and ivories, to Mongolian horses and Persian carpets, along these routes. Besides goods, they also shared news, stories, poetry and religious and political ideas. Located in the center, Afghanistan became a sophisticated melting pot of religious and cultural traditions.
As early as the third millennium B.C., people of the Bronze Age Oxus culture, in what is now northern Afghanistan, were already exporting gold and lapis lazuli to the cities of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. The wealth they gained enabled them to build their own cities. A fragment of a hammered gold bowl, decorated with bearded bulls, found at one of the burial sites there, shows imagery that was common as far away as Mesopotamia.
In Northern Afghanistan, at the nexus of two rivers and not far from the Hindu Kush, lie the ruins of another, later ancient city, Aï Khanum. Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan in 328 B.C. and his successors founded Aï Khanum about 30 years later. It was essentially a Greek city, complete with a palace, streets laid out on a grid, a gymnasium school and Greek-influenced sculpture. A video showing a computer-generated virtual tour of the city suggests how impressive an urban culture had been developed. A portrait of Strato, the director of the gymnasium, carved in limestone, looks like a cross between Plato and Buddha, the perfect symbol of East-meets-West in this crossroads of civilizations.
Another excavation site featured in the “Hidden Treasures” show is Begram, a name now famous for the nearby United States military base, but known in the archeology world as an important site dating from between the first and second centuries A.D. At Begram, French archeologists in the 1930s discovered two sealed rooms that had remained untouched for 2000 years. They contained luxury goods including Roman glass, elephant tusks and beautiful ivories, carved in an Indian style.
Archeologists now believe these storerooms belonged to a merchant. The famous Begram ivories offer strong evidence of the cultural connections this part of the world shared with India, thanks to the active trade along the Silk Road. They were one of the most valuable treasures, believed lost forever, until they were discovered in the vaults under the presidential palace in 2004.
Most spectacular of all is the Golden Hoard of Bactria, fabulous jewelry, swords, and decorative objects from Tillya Tepe in northern Afghanistan. Digging into a hillside in 1978, Russian archeologist Victor Sarianidi and his crew found the 2000-year old tombs of ancient nomads. These people were descendents of the horse-riders from the Eurasian Steppes, who’d overrun the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms of Afghanistan in 145 B.C.
At the site, a male warrior, buried with his weapons, was surrounded by five elaborately bejeweled females, including one wearing a collapsible crown—just the thing for a nomadic princess. The jewelry designs suggested these horse-riding people had been in contact with Rome, China, India and Siberia, before combining their own nomadic esthetic with those other traditions in their locally-manufactured, gold and turquoise adornments.
Sarianidi brought this cache to the National Museum in Kabul in 1979, where the treasures where quickly inventoried and hidden away. In a 1990 article, Sarianidi wrote for National Geographic Magazine, he concluded, “Look well at these pictures of the Bactrian masterpieces that follow. Who knows when they will be seen again.”
Indeed, as he was writing, the Golden Hoard had already disappeared, many believed forever. Rumors circulated that robbers had melted the gold down to use for currency. Even in 2003, when Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai announced that some of the treasures from the National Museum had been locked in a vault for safekeeping, many doubted the anything of value would still be there.
The following year, when American archeologist and National Geographic Fellow Fredrik Hiebert attended the opening of the vault in Kabul, he and the Afghans present held their breath, hoping against hope that they would find the Begram ivories and the Golden Hoard there and intact. And so they did. A piece of glorious news for Afghanistan, which has suffered so terribly over the last 30 years.
With the backing of the National Geographic Society and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Hiebert and staffers at Kabul’s National Museum inventoried 33,000 objects and organized the “Hidden Treasures” show.
Today, walking through this sumptuous and beautifully designed exhibition is a moving experience. In peering through these windows into Afghanistan’s rich history, we can also imagine the possibilities for its future.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, NYC – 212-535-7710
The Met’s Afghanistan exhibit
National Geographic’s Afghanistan site with videos
National Gallery of Art’s Afghanistan video
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