THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
05 June 2008
Afghan Art Treasures Begin U.S. Tour at National Gallery
Hidden for decades, works epitomize nation’s cultural heritage
Washington -- “A nation stays alive,” the words emblazoned on the gallery wall proclaim, “when its culture stays alive.”
That sentiment is the motivating force behind the exhibition now starting a nationwide tour at the National Gallery in Washington -- Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul.
And it would be difficult to say which is the more remarkable: the hundreds of exquisite works of art themselves -- golden ornaments inlaid with turquoise, items of bronze and marble and ivory and delicate glass -- or the story of their survival in hiding through years of war and terror.
Virtually all of the 228 objects on display date back some two millennia or more; some originated as early as 2200 B.C. All were thought to have been lost or stolen during more than two decades of conflict that continued from before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 through years of Taliban repression after the Soviets were expelled.
Indeed, the National Museum in Kabul, former home to most of the items, had been hit by rocket fire and virtually gutted in 1994.
But finally, after the installation of Hamid Karzai as interim president in 2002, came an astounding discovery.
Fredrik Hiebert, curator of the traveling exhibit, told America.gov that Karzai, new to the presidential palace, set about exploring it with his ministers. “When he got to the palace bank vaults, he found that the doors were still locked. And when they finally got them unlocked, they found the national reserves of the Afghanistan bank were intact -- big bars of gold and all sorts of things that one would have expected to have been stolen,” Hiebert said.
And along with that, he said, Karzai came upon a set of museum boxes containing the bulk of the missing art treasures. They had been preserved “primarily by what we call a code of silence,” the curator said. “A series of people knew about these boxes, but didn’t tell anybody.”
Hiebert termed it “a phenomenal act of nobility and of cultural heritage for these people to have known that these treasures existed there during all that warfare and to have kept their mouths shut about it.”
Dispatched by National Geographic Mission Programs, Hiebert traveled to Kabul in 2004 to help direct an inventory of the items -- most notably some 20,000 gold objects, known collectively as the Bactrian Hoard.
Incredibly, he and his colleagues accounted for every single piece of the “hoard” that originally had been cataloged in 1979, soon after Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi unearthed the cache from a nomad sepulcher in Tillya Tepe.
In a forward to the richly illustrated exhibition catalog, Karzai called the U.S. exhibition “nothing less than a miracle.”
“Held hostage in our own country seven years ago, we could not even dream that the finest American art museums would soon be celebrating Afghanistan’s rich culture and heritage,” he wrote.
Noting that the works once were described as “the ‘lost’ treasures of Afghanistan,” Karzai said they never were really lost.
“Priceless artifacts were hidden throughout Kabul, in dry wells, and behind false walls. Miraculously, our cultural inheritance was preserved and protected by a brave and selfless group of Afghan heroes. A single piece of gold would have been a ticket to escape the war and destruction that afflicted our country, but not a single piece was lost,” he recalled.
Karzai observed that the range of items on display illustrates Afghanistan’s historical position “at the crossroads of many civilizations” -- at the heart of the ancient Silk Road trade route, and a link between China, India, Persia, the Middle East and the West.
National Gallery officials counted an impressive 4,300 exhibition visitors on May 25, the opening day for Hidden Treasures.
Attesting to the multicultural influences reflected in the artwork, the three rooms of exhibits include fragments of gold bowls stylistically linked to Mesopotamia and Indus Valley cultures; bronze and stone sculptures and a gilded silver plaque from the former Greek outpost at Ai Khanum; bronzes, ivories and painted glassware imported from Roman Egypt, China and India and excavated in the last century in Begram -- and 100 of the gold ornaments from the Bactrian Hoard.
Exhibition visitors paused to admire a golden crown found at Tillya Tepe -- collapsible for ease of nomadic transport -- its intricate design capped by a motif of five pointed trees; a set of heart-shaped gold ornaments inlaid with turquoise, also from Tillya Tepe; a fish-shaped flask of yellow and blue glass, complete with tail and fins, unearthed at Begram. All date to the first century.
Another item from Begram, an elaborate bracket, simultaneously jumbles the animal kingdom and cultural influences. It shows a leogryph -- a mythical creature with the body of a lion, wings of an eagle and, here, the beak of a parrot -- emerging from the mouth of a makara, a combination of crocodile, elephant and fish. Winged monsters like the leogryph are common in Near Eastern art, but the parrot’s beak and makara add a distinctively Indian note.
The exhibition is supplemented by a 12-minute video documentary, produced by National Geographic and narrated by Afghanistan-born American author Khaled Hosseini, that includes footage of the 2004 recovery of the antiquities.
Many of the same items in the U.S. version of the exhibition were displayed at museums in Paris, Turin, Italy, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2007.
After the exhibition completes its U.S. premiere at the National Gallery in September, it will move on to stays of about three months each in San Francisco, Houston and New York, concluding its showing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2009.
In the meantime, Hiebert said, work is proceeding on restoring Afghanistan’s National Museum in Kabul, and on training the museum’s staff to prepare for the day when the art treasures will return to permanent display in the country where they originated and were so miraculously preserved.
For more information about the exhibition, visit the National Gallery of Art Web site.
