the close look: the ancient art of afghanistan

Plate depicting Cybele, a votive sacrifice and the sun God. early 3rd century BCE, Ai Khanoum (Takhar Province), Kabul, National Museum of Afghanistan (photographed when it was part of a temporary exhibition at Musée Guimet, Paris, in 2006). Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, is accompanied by the winged Nike, the personification of Victory, on a chariot drawn by two lions through a mountainous landscape. These Hellenistic figures are combined with motifs from the art of the ancient Near Eastern including the parasol (a royal symbol); the stepped altar; the shape of the chariot; the scalloped pattern indicating mountainous terrain; and the moon crescent and the star. Other Hellenistic elements are the bust of the sun god Helios and the naturalistic rendering of the drapery and the lions, although the composition - lacking any indication of perspective - is more typical of Near Eastern art. — *Plate depicting Cybele*, a votive sacrifice and the sun God. early 3rd century BCE, Ai Khanoum (Takhar Province), Kabul, National Museum of Afghanistan (photographed when it was part of a temporary exhibition at Musée Guimet, Paris, in 2006). Cybele, the Greek goddess of nature, is accompanied by the winged Nike, the personification of Victory, on a chariot drawn by two lions through a mountainous landscape. These Hellenistic figures are combined with motifs from the art of the ancient Near Eastern including the parasol (a royal symbol); the stepped altar; the shape of the chariot; the scalloped pattern indicating mountainous terrain; and the moon crescent and the star. Other Hellenistic elements are the bust of the sun god Helios and the naturalistic rendering of the drapery and the lions, although the composition - lacking any indication of perspective - is more typical of Near Eastern art.

As US and other foreign troops leave Afghanistan and the fighting escalates, we look at the country’s extraordinarily rich material culture, dating back several millenia. In addition to over 1,000 important archeological sites, the National Museum of Afghanistan was, until the start of the civil war in 1992, one of the richest in Central Asia with a collection of some 100,000 objects. Since then it has been looted and attacked by rockets several times, notably between February and March 2001 when it was targetted by the Taliban who banned all representations of the human form. There has also been good news in the intervening period. Since 2007, UNESCO and Interpol have helped to recover over 8,000 artefacts, including a limestone sculpture from Germany and 843 artefacts from the British Museum in July 2012, including the famous 1st Century Begram Ivories. In April 2021, a hoard of objects seized from a New York-based art dealer was returned to the museum.

Many of the artefacts returned by the British Museum had been smuggled into Britain after some 70 per cent of the National Museum of Afghanistan’s contents were stolen during the civil war. They included twenty of the Begram Ivories, a statue of Buddha from the second or third century, painted clay heads of female bodhisattvas, Bactrian Bronze Age items, and Greco-Bactrian and medieval Islamic coins. Read British Museum curator St John Simpson’s blog about the objects, research on them conducted at the British Museum, and their return to Afghanistan here. Simpson has also written about the restitution process in the International Journal of Cultural Property. Pictured right is one of the returned artefacts, the ‘fire Buddha’, found in 1965 at Sarai Khuja, north of Kabul. It was exhibited in the National Museum until it was wrenched from the wall one night in 1996.

Detail, Folio from a Khamsa (Quintet) by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi (d. 1325); The abduction by sea; Detached manuscript folio; Artist: Attributed to Kamal al-Din Bihzad (ca. 1467 - 1535); Timurid period, 1496; Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper; Afghanistan, Herat; Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment; Freer Gallery of Art F1937.27.

Google arts and culture: the incredible history of afghanistan

Khanish Tharoor looks at the country’s cosmopolitan history as a crossroads between South Asia and Central Asia, a land of settled and nomadic peoples, and a place where Zoroastrianism, Hellenism, Buddhism and Islam all converged.

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul

Between 2006 and 2014, the exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, toured cities in the USA, Europe and Australia. It revealed Afghanistan as the meeting point for diverse ancient cultures, giving rise to objects such as the Hellenic disk depicting Cybele (pictured above) from the second-century B.C. city of Aï Khanum; the trade goods found in the city of Begram which flourished at the heart of the Silk Road in the first and second centuries A.D.; and the roughly contemporary necropolis of Tillya Tepe, where a nomadic chieftain and members of his household were buried with thousands of stunning gold objects and ornaments, many inlaid with turquoise and other semiprecious stones. Here are some of the highlights. For more information about these and other objects visit the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition website.