Interview with Fred Hiebert, Curator of Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul

Dr. Fredrik Hiebert enjoys his job. I mean, he really enjoys his job. Talking to him for an hour, which I had the pleasure of doing a few days ago, serves as a powerful incentive to make a clear-eyed review of the compromises you’ve allowed into your life in order to stay housed and fed, and check that you haven’t totally forgotten that the purpose of life is to be happy. Curator of the current Met exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, Hiebert is a central character in the dramatic story of how the incredible collection of Afghan treasures were hidden, re-discovered, and finally exhibited. I spoke to him about the 'moment of his life', and how the gold just kept coming.

A True Explorer

Dr. Hiebert is an excellent role model - charismatic, engaged, and curious, in the style of the truly fulfilled. He’s just returned from a spell in Mongolia, of which he speaks with breathless enthusiasm. The undiscovered land! The endearingly small horses! The fermented yak milk! “Archaeologists are romantics,” he says. “When I was working in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, I thought the rockets were fireworks! Since we don’t get paid anything, we have to do it for love. Imagine the tangibility of picking up something that’s four thousand years old and thinking: I’m the first person to pick this up for four thousand years. It could be just a piece of pottery, but it’s a thrill.”

Wonderous Things

Hiebert is a field archaeologist; the Mission Programs Archaeology Fellow for National Geographic, to be more precise, and five years ago, he was responsible for making an inventory of the contents of several dozen crates that had been pulled out of a secret vault in the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, and which turned out to contain what can be described without exaggeration as the cultural heritage of Afghanistan - presumed lost - including a hoard of 2,000 year-old gold jewelry and ornaments that make Ali Baba’s cave look like the spilled contents of a change purse.

“It was like Christmas every day,” says Hiebert, of his work taking stock of tens of thousands of items ranging in age from 2,000 BCE to 200 CE that together act as testament to Afghanistan’s important role as the crossroads of Eurasia, and a melting pot for Eastern and Western cultures. Many of these are on display in an exhibition called 'Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,' which is currently on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and will shortly leave for Canada, the UK, and possibly Greece.

Abandoned to Their Fate

The story of how the exhibition came about is worth telling. Hiebert was sitting round a camp fire in Turkmenistan in 1988 with his friend and mentor, Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi, and some other colleagues, swapping stories about the best finds they’d ever made, the stars glittering above, when Sarianidi told him about his discovery ten years earlier of six tombs of Afghan nomads that included 21,000 pieces of gold decorating the corpses. It was an archaeologist’s dream. But, because it was 1979 and the Russians were coming, all Sarianidi could do was photograph

them, pack them up and take them to Kabul. He saw them one more time during a visit in 1982, and then never again. They were presumed lost, swallowed in the violent chaos that descended on that troubled nation, probably melted down for ready cash. Hiebert’s imagination was fired, and he got National Geographic to print an article on what’s known as the Bactrian Hoard. “I remember, the last line of the article said: ‘Look well on these photos, because these artefacts are gone,’” said Hiebert. “It was so sad.”

Then in 2003, Hiebert heard a BBC radio report that Hamid Karzai, the new president of Afghanistan, had been snooping around in his presidential palace and had found a secret vault in the basement containing gold bullion and several museum cases. “I thought, oh my god. I called Viktor and said: Could this be your gold? He was traveling at the time, so he said: You go and find out. I called National Geographic and said: Can I finish the story?" Hiebert thought he was going over there for a week, but when he arrived in Kabul, the director of the National Museum, Omar Khan Massoudi, confirmed that they had the boxes, but that they were locked and there was absolutely no information about what was in them. “He said: Don’t leave quickly. I’ll make you a deal. You’re a curator. If you promise to do a scientific inventory, we’ll open them for you.” It took a while for Hiebert to raise the money through National Geographic to fund the museum quality inventory, but by March 2004, he was ready to open the boxes.

You do the Math!

That, in itself, wasn’t exactly simple. The boxes were actually bank safes, and the keys were long gone. “Eventually they brought in a guy from an Afghan jail with a circular saw. Saws like that generate a lot of heat. We thought we might find a pool of melted gold at the bottom, or a little note from the Taliban saying ha ha ha,” says Hiebert. “But no, instead, here were 1970s-type Ziploc bags full of greasy, dirty, and – as far as I could tell – 2,000 year old objects.”

Hiebert was crammed in to a basement room with 30 security guards, the Museum’s director, and his friend Viktor. “Nobody had seen this stuff before, so they wanted to ask us: How do you know these are real? This was the moment of my life, and they were questioning its authenticity!” But Sarianidi found a piece of jewelry on which he’d made a repair with nylon thread 25 years earlier. “At that point, the veil of disbelief fell and they finally believed that they’d saved their cultural heritage and it was like delayed ecstasy. Everyone stood up and congratulated each other and the Minister of Culture said: Now we have to inventory this. Twenty-one thousand pieces of gold! Viktor said: I already counted this in 1979, I’m out of here. You do it,” Hiebert laughs.

It took three and a half months, with 18 Afghans and Hiebert sitting round a table, surrounded by security staff, with no electricity and no running water in the building. It was warm work. “But what’s amazing is, when we finished, we had the exact same count as Viktor. The exact same. Nothing had been stolen; nothing had been disturbed,” explains Hiebert. “I have to give credit to the Afghans. They’re the ones who saved this, despite the Taliban and the war and everything else.” The team invited President Karzai back to the vault when they’d finished, to show him the amazing haul. “I was exhausted. But Massoudi said: You can’t leave – there are other boxes!” These, it turned out, contained other fabulous treasures, including a vast collection of Roman glassware, and Indian-style carved ivory panels from between the first and second centuries CE. “All these things were presumed lost,” says Hiebert. “It was like a TV show. There they were.”

Identifying and listing all the objects, which had no labels at all, took until 2006, and Hiebert and his team had inventoried more than 33,000 objects by the time it was all over. “Now we can finally tell the story that the Afghans had been very clever and hidden their treasures,” says Hiebert. “You’d have hoped they’d have done this in Iraq, but they didn’t. Same with Cambodia – that country lost most of its cultural heritage. But for some reason Afghanistan saved theirs.”

The Heroic Keyholders

Although the identities of the men known as the Keyholders, who collected and hid the treasures and then kept their whereabouts a secret, is itself a secret, we do know that Museum director Massoudi was one of them. “Five million people fled Afghanistan during the civil war. That’s half the population,” explains Hiebert. “But brave Mr. Massoudi, along with other people we met, they knew exactly what was going on. Massoudi has a twinkle in his eye because all those years he knew that they’d saved his culture.” Hiebert describes Massoudi as handsome like Omar Sharif; tall, thin, with a manner of speaking slowly and softly, but with eyes that have seen it all. “He tells this great story without blinking an eye about how the museum received a bomb one day and lost its roof and was being looted and Massoudi got on his bicycle and rode down there to protect the museum because it was his job.”

Doing your job is something deeply ingrained in the Afghan culture, Hiebert says, and that’s a clue as to why the Afghans were able to save these important artefacts. “The Afghans don’t consider these Keyholders to be heroes. I do. My colleagues and the West do. But the Afghans say: What do you mean? They were just doing their job! And in a way, this stubbornness that caused me so many problems in Afghanistan, their sheer butt-headedness, is what made these guys save their culture,” Hiebert explains.

Hiebert came up against that obstinacy head on when he discovered he had to get the entire 500-member Afghan parliament to vote on each individual item to be included in the traveling exhibition. “They said: How do we know these objects are not going to be replaced? How do we know they’re going to be safe in a strange foreign land like France or America?” He lost the fight, for example, to include a cut rock crystal goblet that has carved into it the only existing contemporary depiction of the Lighthouse at Alexandria. “They said it was too delicate to travel,” he sighs.

All the same, Hiebert is thrilled about the exhibition. “I like to think when I put on an exhibition like this, that it’s a two-way thing. I want to show Afghanistan that they’re fabulous; but I also want to show the US that there’s something to learn here; that this stubborn, obstinate nature has been there ever since before Alexander the Great. He came with this wonderful Greek culture. Buddhism came with wonderful Tantrism. Islam came with the promise of all the fruits of heaven. And Afghanistan was still Afghanistan. If you have a really strong sense of cultural identity, you can survive anything. This is what I want to teach my kids. I think there are a lot of lessons we can learn from this particular story.”

Unpacking the Story

Selecting which of the 33,000 objects to include in the exhibition was a question of choosing which story to emphasize, and Hiebert chose to construct a narrative about how the Bactrian gold came into being. Once you get past the bling – and boy, there’s a stunning amount of bling – the truly remarkable thing about these artefacts is that, stylistically, they seem to have no precedent at all. The symbolism and the combinations of motifs seem to come out of nowhere. “When it was discovered, nothing like this artistically had been seen,” says Hiebert. You have to go back in Afghan history to trace the origins. So the exhibition starts with some 4,000 year-old gold bowls from Tepe Fullol, to show that Afghanistan was natively rich in gold. Then the exhibition moves to the Greek city of Aï Khanum, to show that, if you’re rich, you attract invaders, and they bring their culture with them. The third part of the exhibition shows collections of items from a merchant’s warehouse in Begram – the Roman glass, the ivory carvings – to show that Afghanistan was the crossroads of ancient trading cultures. “All these influences, from Alexander to the Romans, and the Indians, and the Chinese; all of these ended up staying in Afghanistan,” says Hiebert. “So when you get to the mysterious nomads who made the Bactrian gold, you ask how they can have all this amazing iconography and artistic style, and that’s what the show tells us. All these influences come into Afghanistan and then are produced locally.”

Hiebert, who is an unabashed fan of Indiana Jones, was involved in another tale of derring-do regarding saving Afghan treasures, when Massoudi asked him to go to London to look into a report of some stolen artefacts headed for the private market. It turned out that UK Customs had intercepted a 3.5 ton haul of 1,500 objects that they suspected were looted Afghan treasures. The Afghans did not have the resources themselves to identify them, so National Geographic employed Hiebert to go and look them over. “It was Christmas all over again!” says Hiebert. “There were Bronze Age objects, ancient Islamic objects… Fifteen hundred objects that are crucial to Afghan cultural history. I sent them all back to Kabul. I was very happy to be returning them.”

A new era for Curators

The National Museum at Kabul is open again, but the treasures on view in the exhibition, as well as the rest (about ten times as much as is currently on show), are not going to be on display there any time soon. There are two problems, Hiebert explains. One is that Afghanistan is not exactly a stable country right now. The second is that the staff of the museum are simply not ready. “For twenty-five years, they didn’t have any displays. The registrar had nothing to register. The photographer had nothing to photograph,” says Hiebert. When the show goes to Ottawa, museum staff members are going to come over from Afghanistan to train. “It’s a twenty-five year learning curve,” explains Hiebert. “The biggest problem is getting these guys to think they’re running a museum instead of a bank vault. My hope is that, by the time we’re done with the international tour, these people will be fully prepared and only then can we put these objects on display in Afghanistan. It’s important for national pride.”

Weirdly, despite Hiebert’s long-term involvement in Afghan artefacts, he has never actually dug Afghan soil. He hopes that will change. “I’m a dreamer. I like to think one day in the future I’ll go back to Afghanistan and dig. The heyday of Afghanistan and architecture was the 1970s – the Bactrian gold was found, and a city of Alexander the Great was found – and then chaos descended,” he explained. “It’s so rich, and it’s still so rich. People think of Afghanistan as a wasteland, a dependent of the United States or whatever, and it’s not. It has this incredible legacy of Alexander the Great, the Silk Road, the great Islamic empires; and it’s practically untouched. So some day, I’ll go back.”

 

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