AFGHANISTAN, LES TRESORS RETROUVES. Musee Guimet, Paris, until April 30.
Bagram, or Begram as the historians prefer to call it, was a famous place long before the War on Terror. In the late 1930s, archaeologists of the Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan (DAFA), excavating the site of the ancient city known variously as Kapisa or Alexandria in the Caucasus, discovered the "Begram Treasure", an astonishing miscellany of Chinese lacquer-ware, Indian ivories and glass, bronze and plaster artefacts from the Roman Empire. To whom, king or merchant, Greek or Kushan, the hoard had belonged, and when or why they had stashed it away, is no clearer now than when it was dis-covered. But what it vividly illustrated was the strategic centrality of a city that controlled the trade route from Central Asia to the Subcontinent through the Hindu Kush. To the ancients, Begram was known as the Gateway to India, as valid a description today as when Alexander gave his name to it.
The Begram Treasure was shared between the National Museum in Kabul and the Musee Guimet in Paris, in accordance with a convention signed by King Amanullah in 1922 which established the DAFA, delivering a neat snub to his interfering British neighbours in the process. To call it a fruitful partnership is an understatement: spectacular French discoveries followed at Hadda, source of some of the finest examples of the Gandharan style (a Greco- Buddhist artistic synthesis), and Ai Khanum, a fully functioning Greek city with theatre and gymnasium on the banks of the Oxus, founded around 300 BC, destroyed by invaders in 150 BC, and rediscovered by the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, who stumbled on some intriguing architectural remains while hunting. The Guimet was thus the obvious place for Afghanistan, les tresors retrouves to start its European tour.
The exhibition brings together material from four remarkable Afghan sites: in addition to Begram and Ai Khanum, Fullol, a Bronze Age funerary deposit of gold vessels, and Tillya Tepe, the aptly named "Hill of Gold" which is the focus of the exhibition. Here in 1978 an Afghan-Soviet team (archaeology continued to echo politics) brought to light the burials, fabulously opulent, of what appeared to be nomadic royalty, probably of the first century AD. It is breathtaking stuff, the craftsmanship as stunning as the precious materials, and it illustrates even more dramatically than Begram the pivotal position occupied by ancient Afghanistan.
There are garnets from Rajasthan, turquoise from Iran; the gold alone can be traced to locations as diverse as Mongolia, China, Russia and the Altai.
Apparently only the lapis lazuli was local, and the rich sources of the stone in eastern Afghanistan may also explain the prosperity of the Fullol culture, already benefiting in 2000 BC from a trade network encompassing Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley.
The artistic styles represented by the Tillya Tepe artefacts are as kaleidoscopic as their raw materials. The sole male occupant of the necro polis wore a necklace with a cameo of Eucratides I, a Greek king of Bactria, while his shoe buckles depicted an unmistakably Chinese figure with mandarin collar and bell sleeves; the most beautiful item of all, a belt of gold mesh, features the "Scythian" motif of a man mounted on a lion executed to the very highest standards of Hellenistic three-dimensional art. The organizers of this exhibition would like us to see in the eclectic masterpieces of Tillya Tepe a paradigm of inter-cultural tolerance for today's Afghanistan, but that is a little idealistic. It must have been nomads much like these who sacked Ai Khanum after just a century or so of existence. The melancholy truth of Afghanistan is that its spectacular cultural heritage is a function of its turbulent history, numinous Gandharan Buddhas unthinkable without Alexander the Great. But this is ultimately an exhibition about exhibitions, a celebration by one museum of the resilience of another. What makes Les tresors retrouves so moving is that there is very little on display in Paris that had not been assumed lost. Up to 80 per cent of the holdings of the National Museum in Kabul had gone missing, and plenty had indeed been destroyed or marketed to foreign collectors. What the Taleban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan they also did in the Museum, wielding pickaxes, chisels and rifles against "idols"; meanwhile, a chronic lack of central control left Ai Khanum, Begram and Hadda prey to systematic looting. The trade in antiquities, we are reminded, is rather more lucrative than that in opium.
