Legacy of muted gold

They survived the collapse of civilisations and crossed the known world on camelback.

Some lay buried for centuries in an Afghan nomad's sepulchre.

Others were spirited out of a museum in modern-day Kabul under siege from looters and religious fanatics and then hidden in secret vaults under the presidential palace.

Now, a selection of Afghanistan's ancient artistic treasures — from a dagger hilt carved with a Siberian bear to Greek coins from an excavated city called Woman of the Moon — is scheduled to come to Washington soon and continue on a 17-month national tour, according to an announcement by the National Geographic Society and the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibit will be on for nearly four months before travelling to museums in New York, San Francisco and Houston.

Glimpse of lost creativity

It aims to provide a rare glimpse of the long-lost, creative melting pot that Afghanistan once represented — centuries before it became known to most Westerners as a grim, Cold War battlefield and a victim of horrific Islamic repression under the Taliban.

“We hope this exhibit will help overcome the darkness of Afghanistan's recent history and shed some light on its rich past, thousands of years old, as a crossroads of cultures and civilisations,'' said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador in Washington.

“We also hope it will showcase the courage of people who put their lives on the line to safeguard and preserve these treasures.''

As a trove of history, the artefacts are as edifying as they are beautiful.

Selected from four sites, they span 3,000 years, beginning circa 2500BC (during the Bronze Age), and include designs, scripts and images from cultures as far-flung as India, China and Rome.

The exhibition is dominated by gold: bowls with Afghan and Mesopotamian motifs, coins minted in the Greco-Bactrian era of the first and second centuries BC, a floral crown with collapsible leaves and a four-pound belt showing a man astride a mythical beast.

There are thrones and table legs of carved Indian ivory, glass pieces from Rome and ornaments made from local Afghan turquoise.

The accounts of concealments that preserved and excavations that unearthed these objects are as fascinating as the ancient cultures that produced them when foreign pilgrims, warriors and kings travelled the legendary trade route known as the Silk Road across Afghanistan.

The national museum in Kabul, from which many of the artefacts come, endured rocket attacks during the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, an orgy of idol-smashing under the radical Islamic Taliban regime in the spring of 2001 and a final bout of looting during the United States-led assault that toppled the Taliban the same winter.

It was rumoured that museum officials and employees had retrieved some objects and hidden them for safekeeping; other pieces were said to have been stolen and smuggled abroad.

In 2003, a group of boxes from the museum was unexpectedly located in a sealed vault under the presidential palace.

A year later, a team of international experts and Afghan officials began opening them.

“We had no idea what treasures were inside. It was a fantastic moment of rediscovery,'' said Fredrik T. Hiebert, a National Geographic fellow who is curating the US exhibition and has travelled to Afghanistan to organise it.

“We kept finding more and more boxes. There were objects from the Palaeolithic era to the Buddhist period. It took us three months, working seven days a week, to inventory everything.''

One of the exhibit's four original sources was an abandoned and half-buried city in northern Afghanistan known as Woman of the Moon, built by Greco-Bactrian nobles who passed through Afghanistan more than 2,000 years ago.

It was lost to history until the 1960s, when a French archaeologist began a painstaking, 15-year excavation. Hiebert said the exhibit will recreate parts of the city, including the treasury, theatre and gymnasium.

Discovered in death

Another equally exotic locale was the walled-up, basement tomb of a first-century noble Afghan nomad, discovered by chance in 1978.

It contained six mummies — one man and five women — adorned with elaborate gold ornaments and other pieces with designs from Rome and Scythia, a region of what is now southern Russia, as well as the dagger hilt with the Siberian bear.

“Nomads are so hard to find archaeologically. They don't have houses or temples.

"So this discovery was a real victory. It showed what a crossroads Afghanistan once was,'' Hiebert said.

The walled-up burial site, which he also inventoried, contained 22,000 objects as well as the carefully preserved remains of the noble and five “princesses'', who, he speculated, might have died from drought or plague.