Afghanistan's Hidden Treasures

Concealed from invading Soviets,later from the Tailiban,and feared lost,a trove of precious antiquities reveals the rich cultures that came togother at one of history's great crossroads.For a country shattered by decades of war,evidence of a glorious past inspires a renewed sense of national pride.A gilded silver plate from the Greek colony of Ai Khanum unites classical deities and local designs.Watched by the Greek sun god Helios in his crown of rays.Cybele and Nike ride in a Central Asia-Style chariot pulled by Lions.The plate's creation followed Alexander the Great's fourth-century B.C. march into Asia.A sinuous sculpture in ivory resembles Ganga,India's river goddess.Hunderds of such ornate carvings in tusk and bone were found at Begram,along with Chinese lacquer,Egyptian glass,and other exotic goods that establish Afghanistan as a vibrant commercial center in the ancient world.Officals from Kabul guard a crate of artifacts exhibited in Paris,Turin,and Amsterdam before heading to U.S. museums.These are national treasures,says curator Fredrik Hiebert.They're not going anywhere without the Afghans.The collection includes a miniature mask of a Greek god top right.


Omara Khan Massoudi knows how to keep a secret.Massoudi is director of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul.Like the French citizens during World War II who hid works of art in the countryside to prevent them from falling into Nazi Hands,Massoudi and a few trusted tahiwidars-key holders-secretly packed away Afghanistan's ancient treasures when they saw their country descend into an earthly hell.


First came the Soviet invasion in 1979,followed about ten years later by a furious civil wat that reduced much of Kabul to ruins.As Afghan warlords battled for control of the city,fighters pillaged the national museum,selling the choicest artifacts on the black market and using museum records to kindle campfires. In 1994 the building was shelled,destorying its roof and top floor.The final assault came in 2001,when teams of hammer-wielding Taliban zealots came to smash works of art they deemed idolartous.When they finished,more than 2000 artifacts lay in smithereens.Throughout those dark years,Massoude and a handful of other museum officals kept quiet about the hoard of museum artifacts-among them the crown jewels of Afghanistan,the famed Bactrian gold-that they had hidden in vaults under the presidential palace in 1988,as the Soviet occupation gave away to civil war.Reserachers the world over despaired of ever seeing the objects again,thinking they would been sold piecemeal into the illicit antiquities trade or destoryed by the Taliban in their final,iconoclastic frenzy.By October 2003-more than two years after U.S. led forces toppled the Taliban regime-most of the key holders had disappeared or had fled Afghanistan.Massoudi felt it was time to see if the objects had survived the war.When a team of locksmiths wrenched open the safes that month,every last piece of the Bactrian gold was there,trussed in the same tissue paper in which the museum staff had wrapped it.Five months later,researchers opened a set of footlockers stashed in the same underground vault and made another jaw-dropping discovery,priceless 2000 year old ivory carvings and glassware that had been excavated in the 1930s from a site known as Begram and given up for lost.Massoudi's staff had cloistered those away too,and they were remarkably well preserved.



If we had not hidden them,the treasures of Afghanistan would have been lost.That is a fact.Those who knew the truth kept silent,says Massoudi,sipping ginger tea in his spartantly furnished office.His museum-Afghanistan's museum-has been rebuilt with help from unesco and other international donors,and it hum with activity now.Exhibit planners stroll from gallery to gallery, taking mesurements for future installations,teachers lecture in Dari to group of schoolgirls in head scarves.At the door,policeman in gary-flannel uniforms keep a close watch.Visitor numbers have inched up to about 6000 a year.Storerooms are filling with looted artifacts intercepted by customs agents around the world and restituted to Afghanistan,including some 5000 confiscated artifacts returned from Switzerland and Denmark.More than four tons of loot seized by British police sit in a warehouse in London's Heathrow Airport awaiting repatriation.In the mesuem lobby,Massoudi demonstrates what it means to build heritage.Standing in a display case is a life-size statue of a bodhisattva,a type of Buddhist deity,dating from the third century A.D.,an era when Afghanistan was a predominantly Buddhist land.Taliben hammers had scattered the fire-clay statue,and mesuem conservators recently finished reassembling the fragments.A jigsaw of cracks is still visible,but the statue's face again glows with rapturous peity.



As we finish the restoration of pieces,we bring them out to show the public,one by one.We will be doing this for many years.says Massoudi.Yet the choicest artifacts-the ones he and his staff concealed for so long-won't be on display in Kabul for some time to come.The museum lacks an adequate security system and remain short on staff,while a series of suicide bombings around Kabul have underlied the continuing risks.Face with these problems,Afghans have gathered their ancient treasures into a dazzling exhibitionand sent it on an international tour.The Afghanistan government asked National Geographic to inventory the artifacts and help organize the exhibition,which is currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,D.C.,after a two-years spell in Europe.In addition to safeguarding the treasures,the Afghans hope the exhibit will elevate the image of their country.The history of Afghanistan is one of receiving the art of others,and then turning them into the arts of others,and then turning them into our own way of expression,say Massoudi.He beleives the exhibit will help people see beyond his country's recent history of intolerance and isolation to the open,cosmopolitan spirit that long characterized this creative melting por and hub of the Silk Road trade.Walk through the bazaars in Kabul or Mazar-eSharif and you'll see why,for more than two millennia,people have been calling Afghanistan the crossroades of Asia.One face looks Mediterranean,another Arab-or Indian,or Chinese,or eastern European.Eyes range from pea green to chestnut brown to something approaching orange.Successive invasions and influences wove a tapestry of ethnicities and left behind what the exhibitiion curator,Fredrik Hiebert of the National Geographic Society,calls some of the most remarkable archaeological finds in all of Central Asia.



The ancient city of Begram supplied many of the luminous objects.Today Soviet-era land mines litter its grassy landscape,and American fighter jets from a nearby air base howl overhead.But 2000 years ago this was the opulent summer capital of the great Kushan Empire,which stretched as far as nothern India.Traders brought ivories and art form all corners of Asia.Courtiers stuffed themselves on local figs,pomegranates,and grapes against the majestic scrim of the snowy Hindu Kush.When French archaeologists cut into the site in the late 1930s,they found a cache of luxury goods suggesting a vibrant,trade-based economy that flourished while Rome crumbled.Buried under layerof soil were bronze sculptures from Italy,lacquer boxers from china,plaster medallions of muscular Greek youths,and a group of exquisitely painted Egyptian glass vessels depicting,among other things,the Alexandria lighthouse,an African leopard hunt,and a scene from the Ilian.Most strikingly,the diggers found stacks upon stacks of carved ivory and bone sculptures,more than a thousand in all,featuring placidly smiling women and mythical river creatures associated with the art of India.Someone left this impossibly eclectic mix inside two rooms that,around A.D 200,were bricked shut and abandoned.Dazzled by the find,archeologists compared it to the discovery of King Tut's tomb 15 years eariler,believing it to be the remains of a royal residence.Researchers now think the structure may have been a warehouse for luxury goods being transported across Asia on the Silk Road or marketed to local elites.Like Begram,the site of Tillya tepe golden hill in Afghanistan's northwestern corner yielded trasures-most famously the Bactrian gold-whose legend was only heighted when they disappeared from view.Found by Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi in the 1970s,the hoard tells a uniquely Afghan story of how nomads rode off the Central Asian steppes around the time of Christ,crossed the Amu Darya River,and created a civilization whose art reflects an amalgam of East and West,transience and settled life.From the wilds of Siberia come the animals,such as bear depicted on a knife handle,dancing and holding a grapevine in its mouth.Greek and Hindu influences merge in a golden Aphrodite with wings and an Indian-style circle on her forehead.



Many objects show a strikingly Western naturalism,such as a ram sculpted in gold that decorated a nomad noblemans headdress.Only under a magnify glass can the masterpiece's splendid workmanship be fully appreciated.And a delicate,golden crown tells of a refined culture that had not given up its steppers roots.The crown can be disassembled into six pieces for easy transport,perhaps in a leather satchel on a two-humped Bactrian camel-a perfect accessory for a nomadic princess.Archaeology is slowly returing to Afghanistan,promising more discoveries and deeprt knowledge.New sites are being excavated,and well-known ones are being mapped for reexploration.In the past.American or European researchers played key roles,these days,Afghan archaeologists often lead projects on their own.On a steep hillside outside Kabul,at a well-preserved Buddhist site from about A.D. 400 called Tape Maranjan,Afghan researchers found the remains of 16