More on the Exhibit of the Bactrian Hoard

From pbs.org/newshour
Originally aired July 2, 2008

Antiquities Exhibit Illuminates Ancient Afghan Trading
A new ancient Afghan art exhibition displays the country's rich and diverse culture. At the National Gallery of Art, the NewsHour visits the relics that have survived the tumult of recent history in Afghanistan.

JEFFREY BROWN: June 2004, Kabul. The bank vault in Afghanistan's presidential palace is opened, and a metal safe brought out. Lacking keys, a worker takes a circular saw to open up a box that could hold priceless antiquities long thought to be lost.

Archaeologist and National Geographic fellow Frederik Hiebert was there.

FREDRIK HIEBERT, National Geographic fellow: I was worried. A circular saw had a lot of heat. If there was gold in there, was it going to affect the gold? What if there was nothing in there? What if somebody had already gotten in there, stolen the gold, and there was a little note saying, "Ha, we got here first?"

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, thousands of pieces of gold from the so-called "Bactrian hoard" were there and safe.

CURATOR: You can see actually there's a piece of jewelry...

JEFFREY BROWN: And some can now be seen here, at Washington's National Gallery of Art, part of an exhibition organized with the National Geographic Society called "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul." It will travel around the U.S. through September 2009.

The 228 objects were excavated from four archaeological sites and together reveal a little-known land that stood at the center of ancient trade routes, while developing its own unique cultural blend.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: I think this is the most astonishing part of the exhibition. You look at these treasures from Afghanistan, from a country that you know only from the news as a land of terror, as a land of chaos.

And you look at these pieces, they're gorgeous. They're beautiful. They're so familiar. You see iconography from Greece, from Rome, from China, from India. You say, "Wow, these things came from Afghanistan."

JEFFREY BROWN: The oldest objects, from 2200 B.C., come from a Bronze Age site called Tepe Fullol. Little is known about the people who made these, but the images show they were in contact with ancient India and Mesopotamia.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: On these gold bulls, you see iconography that's distinctive of the neighbors. But the gold itself was local, so we know now that Afghanistan had a role in international trade already 4,000 years ago.

JEFFREY BROWN: Objects from the second site show northern Afghanistan -- then called Bactria -- when it was a colony of Greece. The city of Ai Khanum was founded around 300 B.C. by followers of Alexander the Great. Most of these pieces were excavated in the 1960s and '70s by French archaeologists.

A highlight is a ceremonial plaque in silver and gold, with Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot with the winged goddess, Nike.

Afghanistan as a mosaic
JEFFREY BROWN: The largest galleries in the exhibition bring the visitor into Afghanistan's role as a crossroads of the famous Silk Road, trade routes that ran from Rome and the Mediterranean to China and India. These ivory reliefs were used to decorate furniture including, as this video animation shows, a throne.

These objects were excavated in 1937 from a long-buried warehouse in the ancient city of Begram. Amazingly, most were found intact.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: This is really unusual in archeology. If we took a -- take a look at this fragile glass. That's 2,000 years old. You can see the pieces are intact. They're whole. Look at this glass.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, these were found -- these were found like this?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: These were found like this. These fish are typical of the Roman world. There are fish drinking glasses like this from other parts of the Mediterranean world.

JEFFREY BROWN: So this is a Mediterranean fish that washes up in Afghanistan?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: Of all places, in Afghanistan.

SAID JAWAD, Ambassador, Afghanistan: That's what Afghanistan is about actually. It is truly a mosaic of different cultures, countries, civilizations, languages, but yet it has kept a Bactrian or Afghan characteristics.

JEFFREY BROWN: And this exhibition, says Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., is a way of showing that identity to the world.

SAID JAWAD: For a lot of people, Afghanistan starts with the Soviet invasion or some of the recent violence. This is not the case. This country has been around for 5,000 years.

Objects survived modern Afghanistan
JEFFREY BROWN: But it is the recent history that makes this exhibition all the more striking, for as remarkable as the ancient history of these objects may be, their survival in modern times can seem miraculous.

Remember the Bactrian hoard? These thousands of pieces of gold were found in six graves at a site called Tillia Tepe, on and around the bodies of wealthy nomads.

But the year was 1979, just as the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, and archeologist Victor Sarianidi didn't even have time to finish the excavations.

Fredrik Hiebert, who would later work with Sarianidi, picks up the story.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: He actually had to go sort of incognito. He took his golden treasures, more than 50 pounds of gold, and he put it in paper bags and got on a bus.

JEFFREY BROWN: Paper bags?

FREDRIK HIEBERT: Paper bags, got on a bus, and went incognito back to the capital city. He quickly inventoried these objects. It was astonishing.

More than 20,000 pieces of gold were inventoried and then quickly hidden away in the National Museum of Afghanistan, not to be studied, not to be displayed. This was kind of an unusual moment for an archaeologist to find his greatest find and have to hide it away.

JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, hiding the treasures saved them, while so much else was lost. In the early '90s, the National Museum in Kabul was looted and shelled amid civil war.

FREDRIK HIEBERT: The National Museum lost its roof, lost its windows. When I first saw it in 2003, there was not a single artifact.

Restored museum to receive the art
JEFFREY BROWN: Next, the Taliban systematically destroyed works of art, including the famous giant sculptures of Buddha at Bamyan in 2001. Everything, including the Bactrian hoard, was at risk.

SAID JAWAD: The criminals and the looters wanted to have in their hands for financial gain. The Taliban wanted to destroy these items because of their wrong ideological or religious conviction.

JEFFREY BROWN: And it was, in the end, a handful of workers at the museum who apparently saved what they could, in the vault in the presidential palace, in homes, and elsewhere, and kept it secret, even as the world assumed the worst.

SAID JAWAD: Any one of these gentlemen could have actually packed one or a few pieces of these artifacts and lived very comfortably somewhere in Europe. They didn't.

JEFFREY BROWN: Indeed, this is now the great hope, that these, and so many other objects that have been looted and taken from the country, will be part of a restored National Museum in Kabul.

For now, even as Americans can study these treasures, the continuing political uncertainty in Afghanistan makes it impossible to predict when Afghans, young and old, will get their chance.

The "Key Holders," Heroes of Afghanistan

Another compelling article about the current "Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan" exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The article contains photos of some of the treasures - check them out! 2,000-year-old treasures tell wild story NEELY TUCKER; The Washington Post Published: May 25th, 2008 01:00 AM An exhibit in Washington, D.C., reveals gold, intrigue and jewelry once buried in Afghanistan. The finds have survived looters and wars. WASHINGTON – You can go see Indiana Jones and the temple of whatever if you like, but it’s probably not going to be as good as the Bactrian Gold and the Secret of Tillya Tepe. The former is at any multiplex. The latter is at only the National Gallery of Art. It’s one of those ripping good yarns of yesteryear, the kind you used to see on cliffhanger serials before the main feature. This one is set in a dusty corner of Afghanistan. It’s about ancient art, looters, gravediggers, the Russians, the French, the Taliban, an invasion or three, civil war, the Silk Road, the Dragon Master and 22,607 pieces of gold and ivory and lapis and turquoise. There’s a surprising role played by pink Chinese toilet paper and six mysterious safes in a sealed underground vault at the presidential compound. OK, so the plot gets a little crowded. That tends to happen when your story is true and covers more than 2,000 years. The show is “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” and it is a remarkable display from a remote outpost in the world of antiquity: a dusty land of foreign traders, violent nomads, dangerous women and the unmistakable glint of gold. It has a great subplot of archaeologists winning one against the black market. It plays until Sept. 7. Like any good archaeological thriller, this one features valuable antiquities and modern twists, set into world-shaping international politics. After being covered by dirt and mud for nearly 2,000 years, most of the artifacts in this show were discovered in digs made during the 1930s or the 1970s. Then, once found, they were lost again, as the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the rise of the Taliban in 1996 raised successive clouds of dust over their whereabouts. Most archaeologists feared they had been lost forever to the black market or destroyed by the Taliban. Then, three years after the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban, the sealed cases and footlockers were opened in vaults in the Arg, the Afghan presidential compound in Kabul. Nobody was sure what was in them – the keys had been lost – until they were broken open with a hammer, crowbar and finally a power saw. “This power saw starts going – bbbrrrzzzzttt!!! – and the sparks are flying, and at first I thought we were going to open them to find a couple of potatoes in a sack with a note saying, ‘We got here first! Your friends, the Taliban,’” says Frederik T. Hiebert, the show’s curator, who was representing the National Geographic Society when the safes were hacked open. “Or I thought the sparks would set something on fire, and it would burn up all these great artifacts inside.” Hiebert’s worries were well founded. It turned out much of the ivory and gold and glasswares had been packed in pink Chinese toilet paper. Which did not catch fire, and instead had preserved tens of thousands of items the wider world has not seen since the time of Christ. Here was the fabled Bactrian gold, named for the region in Afghanistan where it was found, in the graves discovered at a place called Tillya Tepe (“hill of gold”): Bracelets. Necklaces. A golden belt. A woman’s crown, thin hammered orbs of gold, designed to be pulled apart into five pieces and stored flat. Pendants depicting the Dragon Master of lore, a nomadic man holding a dragon’s foreleg in each hand. Here, in another case, ivory carvings from the ancient warehouses found in archaeological digs in the city of Begram. A woman astride a mythical leogryph. A fish-shaped flask, made of glass, stunningly blue. A bronze statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis-Heracles. More than 23,000 objects in all. “This is probably our best picture of how the Silk Road actually worked,” Hiebert is saying, giving a walk-through of the exhibit. He gets enthusiastic, pointing to a series of decorative plaques. They are flat and rectangular and carved of ivory. They depict women in various poses, sitting, standing, reclining. All these were part of an elaborate chair or throne, the rest of which is missing. On the adjacent wall, a flat-screen monitor shows a rotating three-dimensional re-creation of how all the pieces would have been placed together on the throne. “This is the first time in 2,000 years anyone has seen that throne,” Hiebert says. The Silk Road of which you’ll hear much in this exhibit was not actually a single thoroughfare, but a series of trails, pathways and trading routes that ran from Rome, Greece and Egypt, and stretched all the way to China, with connections to Siberia, India and Persia. Those roads pretty much all ran through northern Afghanistan. “Nowhere in antiquity have so many different objects from so many different cultures – Chinese mirrors, Roman coins, daggers from Serbia – been found together in situ,” Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist who made the historic find at Tillya Tepe in 1979, wrote in National Geographic in 1990. As recounted in that article, he was the leader of a joint Soviet-Afghan project that had been digging among ancient ruins in the region, off and on, for nine years. In 1978 he spotted a bit of painted potsherd on a nearby hillock. They dug beneath it. They uncovered a confusing site, as layers of villages from about 300 B.C. were lying atop the ruins of a massive edifice of walls and turrets more than 1,000 years older. That edifice had been built and collapsed and rebuilt, and apparently sat unused for more than 600 years. And amid these ancient ruins, they made a remarkable discovery: Tombs, from perhaps the 1st century A.D. It was a historic find, but civil war and the Soviet invasion were closing in. Sarianidi got the artifacts from the first six graves to Kabul before war broke out. He left in February 1979. In the intervening years, the national museum was bombed. Tons of Afghan artifacts turned up in Europe, traded on the black market. The Taliban, which did not allow graven images, destroyed more than 2,500 pieces of artwork in the museum. Archaeologists figured Sarianidi’s historic find had been sold off, melted down or destroyed. The find was thrilling in its day, but again, war intervened: World War II ended the dig. The artifacts were shipped to the national museum in Kabul and duly lost. It turns out they were in the footlockers in that vault in the Afghan presidential compound, the same place the goods from Tillya Tepe were taken. A small society of “tahilwidars,” or keyholders, had kept them safe, never saying a word about the treasure. Omara Khan Masoudi, the director of the national museum, was one. After the country was stabilized, they informed Karzai, and the world found them again. “To me, this exhibit isn’t just about archaeology, it’s about keeping culture alive, about real heroism in hiding and saving these artifacts,” Hiebert says. ********************************************************************************** The tahilwidars are heroes.

Silent Survivors of Afghanistan’s 4,000 Tumultuous Years

Prior post.

From The New York Times
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — Art objects inspire many reactions, perhaps most crucially acts of preservation or destruction. From 1979 to late 2001, destruction had the upper hand in Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war, the ensuing civil war and finally the pernicious rule of the Taliban inflicted incalculable losses on active archaeological sites and ancient monuments and artworks.

In March 2001 the world watched helplessly as the Taliban blew up the two giant Buddhas carved from existing rock that had faced each other across the Bamiyan Valley for 1,500 years. The progressive destruction of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul was less blatant but equally tragic. Its collection of 100,000 artworks and artifacts — one of the finest in Asia — spanned several millenniums of Afghanistan’s rich, multicultural history.

The museum suffered looting, bombing, fire; the Taliban ordered destruction of all depictions of the human figure. By the time they were driven from power in November 2001, the Kabul museum had lost two-thirds of its collection. (Since then the museum has been safe, although looting continues outside Kabul.)

But isolated acts of preservation and some lucky circumstances also prevailed. In 1988 a small group of the Kabul museum’s staff hid crates packed with about 600 of its most precious artworks in the vault of the presidential palace. No one was sure how these crates had fared until 2004, when they were retrieved with their contents intact.

Around 200 of these works are in “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” at the National Gallery of Art here. At once revelatory and heart-rending, this show, making a four-city American tour, has much to tell about Afghanistan, past and present.

The objects in the exhibition date from 2200 B.C. to around the second century A.D., that is, from the Bronze Age to the height of the Kushan Empire, which reached nearly across Asia and deep into the Indian subcontinent. Included are Indian ivories, Roman-Egyptian glass vessels, Greek and Greco-Bactrian bronzes and carved stone, as well as a trove known as the golden hoard of Bactria, an ancient empire in northern Afghanistan.

The combination offers a picture of Afghan cosmopolitanism, which was fed by the trade routes of the Silk Road, and the ethnic diversity resulting from invasions and peaceful migrations alike. Structured to focus on four important excavation sites, this show is the latest phase in a close working relationship between the National Geographic Society and the Kabul museum. It has been organized by the society in collaboration with the National Gallery and overseen by Fredrik Hiebert, a National Geographic Society fellow.

It begins and ends with gold objects separated by more than two millenniums. The first group consists of three rare Bronze Age gold bowls, one intact and fragments of two others. They were found in 1972 at a single site, Tepe Fullol, in northeastern Afghanistan, but their very different styles reflect influences from across Asia. The designs on the intact bowl are abstract, a square divided by an X; each quadrant contains a stepped square found on artifacts from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. One bowl fragment is strictly local, with motifs of a wild boar, trees and mountains. The other fragment features a majestic bearded bull, an image common to Mesopotamia, 1,200 miles to the west.

Subsequent displays contain objects from the Greco-Bactrian city of Ai Khanum, founded in 300 B.C. by a follower of Alexander the Great and excavated by French archaeologists from 1964 to 1978. (Destined for Kabul’s Institute of Archaeology, which was completely destroyed, these finds survived, unnoticed, in crates that never got farther than the Ministry of Information and Culture in Kabul.) This gallery contains two leafy Corinthian capitals; lidded, partitioned bowls (for unguents and perfumes); and a full-length statue of a man named Stratos who grasps the folds of his robe in one hand, a gesture that might have influenced centuries of statues of Buddhist sculptures.

The showstopper in this section is a large ceremonial plaque in silver and gold from the third century B.C. that might have been part of Alexander’s entourage (image at beginning of article). It represents Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, riding in a chariot driven by the winged goddess Nike, seen in profile. Their high, lion-drawn chariot seems Syrian, but the naturalism of the figures is largely Greek. This naturalism is at its best in the priest who walks behind the chariot, carrying a large parasol. He leans back with his head tilted up — making sure the deities are properly shaded — in a pose that has the alert springiness of a circus juggler. Also marvelous: the gold rocks and incised flowers underfoot.

Rest of article.

The Key-Holders: Guarding Priceless Cultural Treasures with Their Lives

From The Chicago Tribune: To guard Afghan treasure, silence golden By Bay Fang Washington Bureau 11:48 PM CDT, May 13, 2008 WASHINGTON—For years they kept the secret. A dozen men, the "key-holders" of a fabulous treasure, told no one about the gold they'd buried deep in a palace vault, hidden from the ravages of war, looting and a regime bent on destroying Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Now, some 20 years later, that collection thought lost forever is being exhibited for the world to see. Opening in the U.S. with a show in Washington on May 25, it spans the beginning of the Silk Road trade through a country most Americans associate with violence and destruction. "The story of the hidden treasures is like the story of Afghanistan," noted Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S. "It is about precious culture and traditions covered by the ashes of war and neglect. You don't know what remains under the ashes, and when you see the glitter of gold, you almost can't believe it." The exhibition is filled with artifacts of almost unbelievable artistry—collapsible gold crowns that belonged to nomad princesses, a chubby Aphrodite figurine with wings and a forehead mark in the Indian tradition, a golden tree hung with pearls for fruit. Accompanying the collection as it travels to Washington, San Francisco, Houston and New York are some of the key-holders, the men who protected the collection from the violence of mujahedeen and Taliban. "In Afghanistan there's a different curatorial system—these men are bonded by law to their collections, and they bear personal responsibility for them," said Fredrik Hiebert, curator of the U.S. exhibition. Sitting beside him on a couch in the National Gallery of Art, looking somewhat ill at ease, Abdullah Hakim Zada, one of the key-holders, said that when he and his comrades packed away the treasures, they could not have foreseen that there would be a civil war followed by the reign of the Taliban. "At times during the years, we worried that we hadn't put the right materials in the boxes for them to be stored so long," he said. Throughout his career as an Asian archeologist, Hiebert said everyone in the field thought the famous Afghan collection lived on only in legend. Rumors abounded: that it had been taken to Moscow after the Soviet invasion, that it had been looted or stolen, that the gold had been melted down. Afghanistan's National Museum had been shelled and set on fire, and its storerooms looted. The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th Century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by Russian archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert's mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 beautifully crafted pieces. Before Sarianidi could study the items, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they went to the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them. Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers packed the most important artifacts into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a vault. "Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them," said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul. It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered — in a massive Austrian-made vault, alongside the government's gold bullion — piles of sealed boxes. Hiebert heard about these and traveled to Kabul that October with his colleague Thomas Barfield, now chairman of the anthropology department at Boston University. They met with then-Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani. "The question then was, did it really exist?" said Barfield. The archeologists remained skeptical – until, two hours before their plane was supposed to leave, Ghani took them to the palace basement. " 'Well, boys,' [Ghani] said, 'I can't show you the gold, but I can show you the silver.' And he opened his hand and showed us this two-headed ancient Greek coin, almost as big as his palm, that we had also thought were completely gone. That was when we thought, if this stuff exists, there's no reason to doubt the Bactrian gold was there too." Ghani told Hiebert that if he agreed to do a scientific inventory on the items, they would open the boxes thought to contain the gold. A group of ministers and scholars, including Sarianidi, gathered around to open the sealed boxes with a power saw, sparks flying. "We literally didn't know what we would find," Ghani said in a telephone interview. "When we saw that it was actually what we hoped, it was the feeling of regaining a part of your being, of connecting our generation to those who lived thousands of years before us and for millennia to come." Still, further squabbles erupted before the collection left the country for the exhibit. Some feared letting it out at all. Others thought Afghanistan should negotiate for more money. "I pushed the idea that no matter where it goes, it should be touring for the next 10 years," said Tim Moore, cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In the end, this is the story of the hidden treasure, and the fact that it survived. "It was our job," key-holder Masoudi said. "Even if we just saved one piece or 100 pieces, we cannot be too proud, because it is just our job. Archeological pieces belong not to one person, but to the world." **************************************************************************************** See The History Blog for further information on the Bactrian hoard's visit to the U.S. Info page on the exhibit from the National Gallery of Art.

Friday Afternoon Miscellany

Hola! Just a few quick posts. dondelion is here and we've got a full schedule planned, so I am not sure how much time (or inclination) to post until after Christmas. Tonight we're going to see a play, tomorrow it's the art museum, Sunday the Packer game is the Number One Priority, on Monday we will do our visit to the mall and lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, on Tuesday it's dinner with the family - the rest of the time we spend talking and cooking (we both like cooking). Some items that caught my eye during the past week (enjoy!): The Bactrian Gold hoard discovered in Afghanistan in 1978 is going to be touring the United States for the first time ever, beginning in May, 2008. The National Geographic has an article and some stunning photos of the objects and jewelry. The treasures will begin a 17-month tour of the U.S starting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where they will be on display from May 25 to September 7, 2008. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City have also tentatively scheduled stops along the tour. Oooohhh, a trip to San Francisco or New York to see this - hmmm... The thought of scientists (or anyone) tinkering around with "artificial DNA" creating new life forms is something VERY disturbing and scary to me. Here's a quote: "We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Won't those guys EVER learn? Maybe they all need to go see "I Am Legend" or revisit the 1970's version, "Omega Man" - or read Stephen King's classic "The Stand." Geez! These guys might genetically engineer an "artificial life form" that could wipe out every single living thing on the planet, and they're worried about frigging property rights! Honestly, have certain people lost ALL sense of proportion - not to mention their sense of humor? Borders under fire from evangelicals for a promotional Christmas card that says "Oh come all ye faithless... ." LOL! I think that's hilarious! The Norwegian government has plans to build a "doomsday" vault to house seeds of all the known food crops. Gee, nice to know that our seeds will be safe even though the scientists may wipe us all out with their genetically engineered "artificial life forms." We'll leave the seeds for some future instellar travelers - assuming the "aritficial life form" doesn't also knock them off should they ever land here in the future... The Haunted Internet: be afraid, very afraid... Everything you never wanted to know about crystal skulls. I understand a crystal skull will be featured in the new Indiana Jones movie and no, I'm not referring to Harrison Ford who is looking rather skeletal to me these days; he hasn't aged well and even with all the makeup they pile on him he is too old looking to be playing the formerly hunky main character! Harrison, darling, it's an unfortunate fact of life that we all grow older and greyer. Sixty-something you should not be portraying thirty-something Indy!