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Bactrian Gold
Treasures Turn Up in Afghan Vaults
Long Thought Lost, More Than 22,000 Items Had Been Hidden
By THOMAS H. MAUGH II for the Los Angeles Times. Article appeared November 18, 2004
An ivory panel depicting palace life in Begram, the Kushan capital, is one of the many museum artifacts that were safely stashed away by curators. Photo by Fredrik Hiebert / National Geographic.
More than 22,000 treasures from the Kabul Museum in Afghanistan, long thought to
have been lost in the war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent cultural purge
by the Taliban, have been located in bank vaults and other safe places where they
were hidden by museum officials.
The priceless Bactrian gold collection, precious ivories, bronze statues and other
artifacts of 5,000 years of history on the Orient's Silk Road - virtually all of
the museum's most precious items - were preserved despite the devastation engulfing
the country, archaeologists said Wednesday.
In the midst of the resistance against the Soviets, a team of curators in the early
1980s boxed up the most valuable pieces in the museum's collection, stashing them
in various vaults around Kabul, the Afghan capital. The curators - most of whose
names are unknown - used small safes, tin boxes, steel containers and anything else
they could find at hand.
They then went "dead quiet," said British archaeologist Carla Grissman,
keeping their knowledge to themselves even as rumors floated widely about the destruction
and looting of the museum's contents.
They kept their secrets for a quarter of a century.
"These are the real heroes of this story," said Oxford University archaeologist
Fredrik T. Hiebert, leader of the team that has been inventorying the newly rediscovered
artifacts.
Because the once-missing artifacts come from so many different places along the
Silk Road, he added, the find "has a significance well beyond Afghanistan and
Central Asia. It's of world importance."
The Kabul Museum was a small facility housed in a 1920s-era federal building 30
minutes outside the city. Although it was small, Hiebert noted, "it is said
that every piece [it had] was a masterpiece."
Because it straddles the Silk Road that camel caravans used to transport textiles
from China to Europe and pottery, artworks and other materials in the opposite direction,
Kabul was a prosperous city throughout much of civilization's early history.
As a result, the museum held objects from a string of civilizations that conquered
or traveled through the region, including the Bactrians, Kushans, Greeks and Buddhists. | | | |
| A brooch of the goddess Aphrodite points to the influence of Greeks and other civilizations in Afghanistan’s history. Photo by Fredrik Hiebert / National Geographic.
Unfortunately, the museum's neighborhood became a front line in the fighting against
the Soviets and the building was shelled into a windowless, roofless hulk. Many
of the artifacts that had not been removed were blasted to shards. More important,
the inventory cards that described the museum's contents were destroyed by fire
and neglect.
That wasn't the end of it. The victorious mujihadeen broke open locked storerooms
and looted much of what was left. Antique dealers in New York, Tokyo and London
began displaying artifacts bearing catalog numbers from the museum.
The final indignity came with the Taliban regime, which smashed many of the remaining
statues in the museum and destroyed the monumental Buddhas in Bamiyan. They apparently
tried to find the hidden treasures, but were unsuccessful.
An estimated 70 percent of the museum's collection probably has been lost to looting
or destruction, Hiebert said. But the gold, bronze, ivory and terra cotta objects
recovered and identified so far amount to "the majority of the masterpieces
previously displayed in the Kabul Museum," he said.
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|  | | Gold pendant. Photo by Richard Barnes / National Geographic.
Among the greatest treasures hidden away was the Bactrian gold, a collection of
20,457 golden objects excavated in northern Afghanistan in 1978 by Russian archaeologist
Viktor Sariandi. Excavating a crude burial mound not far from the city of Shiberghan,
Sariandi found that the coffins, skeletons and clothes of the six occupants had
rotted away, leaving behind a collection of near-pristine golden ornaments.
The collection included appliques from cloaks, figurines, clasps decorated with
cupids riding dolphins, pendants depicting scenes of war, a statue of the goddess
Aphrodite and an elaborate crown.
After the gold disappeared during the early stages of the war, historians feared
that it had been carried off to Russia or possibly melted down for its gold.
As it turned out, the Bactrian gold was stored in an elaborate bank vault along
with much of the country's store of gold bullion, protected behind a shield of seven
locks that defied the efforts of the Taliban to break in. It was not until August
2003, when a team of locksmiths was brought in from Germany, that their location
became known.
Hiebert was brought in this spring to catalog the gold with funding from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the National Geographic Society. Using a portable
laboratory carried in a half dozen suitcases, the team identified each piece, photographed
it, cataloged it, and preserved it before packing it back away.
They found that every piece of the Bactrian collection, from medium-size statues
down to fingernail-size slivers, was present and accounted for.
When Hiebert finished that task, he was surprised to be told that there where some
other boxes to be inventoried. None of them were labeled, so he had no idea what
they contained.
The team began opening them in August of this year. The first set of boxes contained
2,000-year-old ivories from the Kushan capital of Begram, intricately carved and
engraved with scenes from palace life. Other boxes contained highly detailed glass
goblets from Alexandria, Egypt, bronze statues and plaster busts of the elites from
Rome and Begram, and early Buddhist sculptures.
"It was a very emotional experience watching these men [Afghan archaeologists]
as they saw their own heritage coming back to life," Hiebert said. "Every box we opened was like a Christmas package," he said. He said the team has now found and inventoried all but about 100 of the most valuable
artifacts from the museum.
"We were worried about animal damage, water damage, temperature damage,"
Hiebert said. "But they came out of their wrappings looking like they had just
come from the museum. They're in really wonderful condition, and I can't explain
it. It was an amazement to us and a joy."
The team also has re-created the original cataloging system, so they know which
items are missing from the collection. Armed with that information, international
authorities may be able to retrieve many of the items from dealers and collectors,
he said.
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