From Kabul to New York: The Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is not just an exhibition. This stunning collection, rescued from Taliban-sponsored destruction by the incredible acts of a group of 'Keyholders', reveals one extraordinary story after another.

The Guardians of the Gold

Mice can be a nuisance, even a hazard. Recently, a family of them took up residence in the trunk of my car, meticulously gathering nest material from any available fabrics and, no doubt, chewing through crucial electrical cables. However, the other day I learned I’d underestimated the benevolent potential of mice. As the “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul” exhibition, currently on show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals, mice are responsible for one of the most spectacular archaeological finds in history.

I’ll get back to that story. But first you should know the more astonishing tale behind this exhibition. The artefacts on show here were believed lost and gone forever, after Afghanistan succumbed in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to the kind of violent turbulence that made keeping 2,000 year-old glassware intact about as likely as a lily surviving a hailstorm. The country suffered a military coup succeeded by Soviet invasion followed by infestation by the Taliban. Actually, the Taliban have been the most disastrous in terms of Afghanistan’s ancient treasures. Blowing up those magnificent Buddhas at Bamiyan was just a good day’s work for these guys, it turns out.

Every kind of image they could get their hands on was fair game for smashing and burning; they even had a special task force for it. I know, it’s easy to be nasty about the Taliban – they’re the Nazis of the 21st century in their irredeemable villainy – but, boy, do they have it in for art, no matter how old or precious or symbolic of how we’re all connected to the same human past. In any case, one way and another, the National Museum of Afghanistan at Kabul, where a huge collection of amazing stuff was housed, was smashed into tiny pieces, along with everything inside it, in early 2001. Gone, it seemed, was 4,000 years’ worth of culture.

But no. Incredibly, a group of guys called “Keyholders” had, starting in 1988, squirreled away huge amounts of Afghanistan’s most significant treasures and sealed them in a bank vault in the presidential palace, at serious risk to their own lives. Other artefacts were hidden in dry wells, even behind fake walls. The Keyholders kept their secret until things calmed down enough to make it safe to bring the artefacts back to light. In March 2004, in a scene reminiscent of something from the Arabian Nights, the location was disclosed, the vault opened, the treasures revealed, and a nation’s cultural heritage – at least what was left of it – restored.

I get a little misty-eyed just thinking about what the Keyholders went through. A solitary piece of ancient gold would have been a ticket out of the nightmare of violence and depredation the country had become, yet not a single item they guarded went missing. “All of a sudden, Afghans were given back their heritage and a sense of claiming their place in the world,” said Dr. Fredrik Hiebert, exhibition curator and National Geographic Archaeology Fellow, who was present at the historic event. As a slogan on the wall proclaims as you leave the exhibition: “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.”

From Hiding to Shining

So, here it is now, about a tenth of it, on display in America because the museum in Kabul is yet to be rebuilt (and, frankly, Afghanistan is hardly a model of political stability just now). The exhibition has traveled from Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art,  to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is at last showing now through September 20, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It will then head to Ottawa, Canada, and the British Museum in London.

One of the great advantages of viewing the exhibition at the Met, or any equally diverse museum, is that you can further track influences and flavours into and out of this exhibition. The tangled skein of cultures that mixed into, and eminated from, ancient Afghanistan, is evident in the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman material in the museum.

“Each site tells something about how this part of Eurasia related to other parts of Eurasia,” said Dr. Denise Leidy, a curator at the Met. “We’re an institution that tells you a story about each of the contiguous civilizations. So you can track each part to another part of the building.” In an ideal world, the information in the exhibition would give you specific destinations elsewhere in the museum, but even without that, it provides a great lesson in history. The exhibition shows material from four different sites, all of them remarkably different and with notably diverse things to say about why we should never forget that Afghanistan was, is, and will always be, a hugely significant artistic and cultural crucible where East and West mix and meld.

Geographically Organised

The exhibition is divided into three sections, each painted in a usefully different colour. You enter the first room to be greeted by a single case dedicated to the Bronze Age site at Tepe Fullol in northern Afghanistan. This houses fragments of gold bowls, one of which depicts bearded bulls typical of contemporary art from Mesopotamia, hundreds of miles to the West. Helpful graphics in the same case as the bowls show the patterns uncrushed and complete. This site was discovered by farmers in 1966, and was the first indication of a hitherto-unknown Oxus Valley civilization going back to 2,200 BCE.

The rest of the first room is dedicated to Aï Khanum, a hulking great city built on massive ancient earthworks, located in the Northern region then known as Bactria (presumably where Bactrian camels got their name from), and dating back to 300 BCE. It was a Greek outpost, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s successors after Alexander had taken it from the Archaemenid Persian Empire, and managed by a joint Bactrian-Graeco local government. The nearby Bactrian capital of Balkh is rumoured to be where the mysterious spiritual figure Zoroaster lived. Aï Khanum, right on the border with what is now Tajikistan, was modeled on a Greek urban plan and was filled with the public buildings of a Greek city, such as a gymnasium for education and sports, a theatre, a fountain, and a library with Greek texts. But other structures, such as the royal palace and the temples, derive from ancient Near Eastern traditions.

There’s an impressive animated model of what the city looked like, played in a continuous loop on a LCD screen on the wall, and it really comes alive when the animation adds in the ghostly figures of robe-clad residents. Even more impressive is the sheer amount of architectural detail, including a whole row of gorgeous carved stone tepes - pediments that stopped the rain from eroding stone roof lintels - plus a wonderfully comic waterspout. The discovery is another great story worthy of a Boy’s Own adventure book: In 1961, King Zahir Shah was on a hunting expedition in the area and was shown a Corinthian column someone had unearthed. Luckily, he realized this was somewhat anomalous, out there in the wilds of Northern Afghanistan, and had the site excavated.

Around the middle of the exhibition, one is invited into a dark room where they’re screening a 13-minute movie made by National Geographic - which had a hand in putting the exhibition together – and narrated by Khaled Hosseini, who is author of The Kite Runner and currently the most famous Afghan anyone can think of. It’s a real treat, because it tells the amazing story of Afghanistan’s important position at the heart of the so-called Silk Road (which was a 4,000-mile trading route between East and West that acted like a sluice washing cultural influences back and forth for more than 400 years); gives a brief description of each of the sites, and then tells the tale of the despair and redemption around the loss and retrieval of the ancient artefacts from the National Museum.

On into the second room, and the artefacts from excavations at Bagram, a city further to the South and not far from modern-day Kabul. This offers two astonishing collections from the first and second centuries CE, when the Silk Road was at its busiest - one of painted Roman glassware; and one of Indian-style carved ivory panels that were used to decorate wooden furniture.

The glassware is particularly bright and vivid. Much as the glasses you’re looking at are visibly patched together from broken fragments, their wholeness and the brightness of the images painted on them really gives that “museum high” where you think: Gosh, here are the glasses they drank from! If the past is another country, as writer L.P. Hartley claims, museum curators, when they’re doing their job correctly, act as travel agents allowing us at least fleeting visits there. Again, it’s striking here how much the recognizably different styles jumble together. The ivory carvings look like scenes from an Indian temple; the Romans on the glasses, trailing vines, pursuing Bacchus, are instantly recognizable as such.

The third section of the exhibition focuses on Tillya Tepe, to the NorthWest and close to Turkmenistan, and this brings me back to the mice. This site, dating back to around 145 BCE, consisted of a six-chambered burial ground that housed the graves of a nomadic king and five princesses, all absolutely dripping with gold; a total of 21,000 gold artefacts were found there. In fact this room of the exhibition begins to feel like a ridiculously opulent jewelry shop. There is every kind of human ornamentation that can be made of gold and precious gems – earrings, bracelets, anklets, belts, buckles, and thousands and thousands of appliqués, which are little bits of nicely-shaped gold with holes to allow them to be sewn onto clothes. In some of the cases, there’s no attempt to even lay these treasures out individually; they are simply strewn and piled in glittering mounds. Tillya Tepe means “hill of gold” in the local language, which was a bit of a giveaway that there might be something interesting there, you’d think, but it wasn’t until a Russian archaeologist, Viktor Sarianidi, dug it all up in 1979, just before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, that the true treasure was revealed. It turns out the mound got its name because mice had been taking some of the smaller pieces of gold up with them to the surface for years. Clearly, since mice don’t have much use for gold themselves, they were trying to tell us something. I vote they get roles as extras in the next Indiana Jones movie as compensation.

Portable Fashion - a Nomadic Essential

Perhaps the most significant object of the exhibition is here amidst all the bling – a fabulous crown worn by the most senior of the Tillya Tepe princesses. Its design is reminiscent of several others found in 5th and 6th century CE Korea, raising all sorts of interesting questions about what ideas traveled back out of this cultural crossroads and far, far away. The crown is exquisite, and conveniently breaks down into six flat pieces for traveling (every nomadic princess should have one!).

But for me, the artefact that stays most poignantly in my mind is a carved stele in alabaster from the Aï Khanum site, depicting a young Greek soldier. When it was discovered in 1971, it had long ago been broken in pieces and reused in clay masonry blocking the entrance to an ancient mausoleum. French archaeologists painstakingly glued it back together. The Taliban smashed him up again in 2000 and, while he’s been partly reconstituted now, his head is irretrievably missing. The Taliban, it turns out, reserve their most destructive rage for art that depicts the visage; and it is clear that they meant to eradicate the human face of Afghanistan’s almost absurdly multi-cultural, multi-racial past. What a joy to learn, at this excellent and thought-provoking exhibition, that, for now, they have utterly failed to do so.
 

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About The Author

Helen Atkinson

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Heritage Key's NYC Correspondent, Helen Atkinson, has 20 years of journalism experience in subjects ranging from the reinsurance industry to canoeing down the Bronx River. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Helen studied English Literature at Oxford, before embarking on a writing career. She moved to New York in 1994 and intends to stay there.