Afghanistan - Crossroads Of The Ancient World
British Museum, London WC1
Friday 04 March 2011
by Mike Cattell

This touring exhibition displays some of the most important archaeological discoveries from ancient Afghanistan, with the money raised to be used in funding the reconstruction of the National Museum in Kabul, whose laudatory motto is "A Nation Stays Alive When Its Culture Stays Alive."

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is supporting this unique opportunity to see rare treasures of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. But don't let this, or the opening of the exhibition by Afghan President Hamid Karzai put you off, because on show are over 200 stunning objects from the Kabul museum. In some ways the show gives the lie to the perception that chaos is the norm - there is more to Afghanistan than cliched footage of tanks rolling through bombed-out villages. The earliest objects on show are part of a treasure found at the site of Tepe Fullol from 2000 BC. The later finds come from sites in northern Afghanistan, dating from between the third century BC and the first century AD.

There are works from Ai Khanum, a Hellenistic city on the Oxus river and on the modern border with Tajikistan, Bagram - capital of the local Kushan dynasty whose rule extended from Afghanistan into India - and Tillya Tepe ("Hill of Gold"), the discovery place of an elite nomadic cemetery. The artefacts from Bagram, now the site of the notorious US military base, were found in two sealed storerooms which were either the treasuries of the ruling elite or the stock room of traders. If they were indeed the general stock in trade of merchants then Bagram must have been amazingly wealthy. Enamelled Roman glassware has been reconstructed from shards found on the site, with the colours as fresh as the day they were sealed up. The artefacts from Ai Khanum show life in a vibrant classical Greek city "a years march from Greece." Looted in 145 BC and again in 130 BC it was undisturbed until the modern era when untold damage was done in the chaos of Western efforts to overthrow the progressive government of the 1980s.

The "Hill of Gold" provides the dramatic golden artefacts of which the golden crown from two millennia ago has grabbed the headlines. The crown is in fact collapsible like all the artefacts because a nomadic people needed their wealth to be easily portable when not on display.

Reminiscent of Schliemann's words, "I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon!" when he discovered a gold death mask at Mycenae in Greece, the leader of many Afghan-Soviet excavations Viktor Sarianidi was moved to say of the finds that "an ancient Bactrian princess looked straight at us after being hidden for 2000 years." All of these objects, found between 1937 and 1978, were hidden away at an unknown location after the Soviet military pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989.

Yet despite the occasional reference to Soviet invasion, it becomes clear that not only were the majority of the finds discovered by joint Afghan-Soviet archaeological teams but the only risk to the artefacts occurred because of the unmentioned Western support for the "freedom fighters" who later metamorphosed into the Taliban.

Elsewhere in the museum is the sobering statement that in Iraq the Baghdad museum - also under "Western protection" - has suffered systematic looting and over 10,000 artefacts are missing.

But, even with this sad context, this is a wonderful exhibition of strikingly beautiful objects.

Runs until July 3. Tickets £5-£10. Booking office: (020) 7323 8181.