Afghanistan has been subjected to centuries of turmoil, yet an astonishing collection of treasures survives and will be on show at the British Museum next week, as the exhibition’s curator St John Simpson explains
Afghanistan is often described as the crossroads of Asia and of the ancient world, and a major new exhibition of objects loaned by the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul to the British Museum sets out to tell the story of its turbulent history and rich culture.
By virtue of its position and physical geography, Afghanistan has always played an important role in the mediation of cultures between Iran, Central Asia and South Asia. The ebb and flow of different peoples, languages, faiths and material culture over the past 4,000 years is reflected in its archaeology and history. At times Afghanistan has been ruled from the centre, at others it has fragmented into different provinces and been assimilated by neighbours. This has produced a rich cultural heritage which is bonded into that of neighbouring regions.
More than 200 objects are on loan from four of the country’s most important sites. Tepe Fullol is where a collection of precious gold and silver vessels dating between 2200 and 1900 BC was discovered by local villagers in 1966; they put the Bronze Age of northern Afghanistan on the map for the first time. The designs chased on the vessels include geometric patterns that are closely paralleled on pottery and seals from neighbouring Turkmenistan and Iran; and a row of bearded bulls on another resembles designs on ancient Mesopotamian seals from modern Iraq.
One of the most sought-after commodities of the ancient world was lapis lazuli, the deep-blue stone whose only known source at this period were mines in a single valley in Afghanistan’s remote north-eastern province of Badakhshan. A small selection of raw and worked lapis found in Iran, Mesopotamia, Crete and Egypt is displayed, emphasising the trading connection.
The objects from Fullol were probably placed as grave-goods but they were divided up between the villagers who found them. The pieces were subsequently rescued by archaeologists and sent to the National Museum, but they vanished again and were feared lost when the museum was looted, burnt and vandalised during the civil war and under the Taleban between 1992 and 2001. A small group of Afghan individuals hid them along with all the other objects seen in this exhibition and they survived.
Culture is a fragile commodity and can be easily destroyed. Some of the finds on show come from a Hellenistic Greek city on the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan which was discovered in 1961 by the Afghan King Zahir Shah while on a hunting expedition. Excavations in the Sixties and Seventies revealed the best preserved Hellenistic city in existence, Ai Khanum.
It was founded in about 300 BC by Seleucus I, formerly an officer in Alexander the Great’s army, but soon after became part of the breakaway Greco–Bactrian kingdom. A century and a half later, Central Asian nomads entering from the north sacked the city twice within 15 years. A group of gold ingots, found hidden from raiders in the floor of a building, a silver disc ripped off the wall of a temple, and the restored remains of an inlaid shell and multicoloured glass disc telling the story of an Indian epic have all made their way to the BM.
Some of the nomads who entered Afghanistan settled down, and by the mid-1st century AD were united under a Kushan king, who carved out a powerful new kingdom extending from northern Afghanistan into northern India. Begram, its summer capital, controlled two of the vital passes across the Hindu Kush mountains which cut Afghanistan in two and thus holds the key to passage between the northern Afghan plains, Kabul and Pakistan. Excavations at this site revealed two adjoining rooms whose doors had been bricked up, plastered over and then forgotten. Inside, lying on the floors and benches, were literally hundreds of precious objects: Roman glass, bronzes, polished stone tablewares imported by sea from Egypt; plaster type-casts for casting metal representations from Classical mythology; and Indian furniture set with polychrome ivory and bone inlays.
Many of these were found in a very poor state so only a selection have travelled here, but they evoke a world of courtly comfort and a desire to emphasise status through the ostentatious display of exotic luxuries. It seems that a small band of palace officials hid the treasury at a time of unrest and the secret was lost until the 20th-century excavations.
In 1978–9, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, a joint Soviet–Afghan team researching Bronze Age settlement sites in north-west Afghanistan made a spectacular chance discovery. Dug into the top of a much older site was a series of six graves, one containing a warrior chief and the others belonging to women of different ages. Between them they contained more than 20,000 items, mostly of gold. There’s a folding gold crown, a gold belt, dozens of tiny gold appliques originally sewn on to clothing, and assorted other ornaments. Many contain coloured inlays, often of light-blue turquoise but also deep-blue glass (imitating lapis lazuli), pearls, ivory and garnets.
At first they were believed to be the remains of a local Kushan royal dynasty but it is much more likely that these are the secretly interred remains of a nomadic élite descended from those who invaded this region in the late 2nd-century BC. A small number of Greco–Bactrian objects is quite likely the booty from cities such as Ai Khanum.
The finds from Tillya Tepe illustrate a world far removed from the contemporary Kushan court at Begram. They represent portable wealth and the traces of wear on some pieces indicate that they were not simply made for the grave. The tension between the steppe and the sown — between the nomadic pastoralists and the sedentary farmers — is a recurrent feature of Afghan history and the objects in this exhibition illustrate this.
The wide cultural connections of all these objects give powerful messages of how their original owners saw themselves. More-over, they repeatedly underline the fragility of cultural heritage and how lucky we are to glimpse these ancient cultures through a combination of chance and concealment. History sometimes repeats itself but now that these objects have finally been revealed they play an important part in telling a story of survival and of Afghanistan’s role as the crossroads of the ancient world.
An accompanying catalogue, edited by Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon, is available at £25.
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