Bringing home the loot: repatriating Afghanistan’s stolen treasures

I
N NOVEMBER 2013, Nora von Achenbach, curator at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, Germany, examined the catalogue for an upcoming auction by the Paris-based dealer Boisgirard-Antonini. The glossy pages offered a bevy of antiquities for sale: bronze figurines, jewellery and a statue from ancient Egypt estimated at more than €300,000. But von Achenbach was interested in a pale marble tablet, carved with arabesques, vines and Persian
script. Lot 104, an “important epigraphic panel with interlacings from the palace of Mas’ud III”, was date to the 12th century, from the capital of the Ghaznavid Empire, in what is today Afghanistan.

Curators must be wary of buying fake or stolen art, particularly when it comes to ancient artefacts, which may have been illegally excavated in countries plagued by war and corruption. Boisgirard-Antonini’s catalogue simply stated that the marble’s provenance was “a private French collection”. But von Achenbach – who did not respond to requests for an interview – may have been reassured by the lengthy description of the archaeological site where the marble was originally found, the royal palace in Ghazni, where a legal, Italian-led excavation broke ground in the 1950s.

Moreover, as the catalogue noted, three panels from the same site were held by the Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Von Achenbach decided that the marble could form part of her museum’s collection in Hamburg. She sent in a bid, the equivalent of around $US50,000, and won.

Boisgirard-Antonini shipped the panel to Germany. While it was still in storage at the museum, von Achenbach invited Stefan Heidemann, an expert on Islamic art at Hamburg University, to view the panel. Heidemann thought it was magnificent, but unease crept over him as he wondered how, exactly, it had come from Afghanistan to Europe. He had worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where, as chance would have it, a colleague of his, Martina Rugiadi, wrote her doctoral thesis on the Italian excavation in Ghazni, and the fate of the marbles during the war years that followed.

When Heidemann got in touch, Rugiadi told him the Hamburg marble had indeed been stolen from the Afghan government. Numbered C3733 during
the excavation, the marble disappeared during Afghanistan’s civil war, when the country’s museums were robbed by guerrillas. Moreover, Rugiadi had already heard about the auction, and had emailed Pierre Antonini to warn him around the time of the sale. He replied asking for more information. But the auction house shipped the panel to Hamburg anyway, without informing the museum of the evidence that it was stolen.

“The question I ask of every object is, ‘Are you stolen or not?’ ”

“This I find quite a scandal,” Heidemann told me. As it so happened, Claude Boisgirard was being investigated in connection with a series of thefts from
the venerable Parisian auction house Hotel Drouot, where he spent decades as an auctioneer; he would be given a 10-month suspended sentence for fraud and conspiracy in 2016. (Boisgirard-Antonini did not respond to requests for comment.) The Hamburg museum notified German authorities, but did not pursue legal action against Boisgirard-Antonini; it kept the marble in storage and out of sight.

In August 2018, I received an email from Tobias Mörike, a curator of Islamic art, introducing himself and the marble. Von Achenbach had retired in 2017; the museum was now planning to exhibit the marble as part of a series called Looted Art? – a mea culpa, of sorts – and wanted to return the artefact to the Afghan government. There were still many unanswered questions that surrounded the marble, he told me. How had it gone from the hands of looters to the showrooms of Paris? What did this say about the other Ghazni marbles held by prestigious institutions? Mörike had read my stories on smugglers and corruption in Afghanistan. Would I be interested in visiting for the exhibition’s opening?

Two months later, I stood in central Hamburg in front of the three-storey
former vocational school that housed the Museum of Arts and Crafts (or MKG, as it is known by its German initials). Silke Reuther, the museum’s provenance researcher, led me on a tour of the collection. She explained that, like London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the MKG was intended, in an era before Wikipedia and Google, as a reference for design and manufacturing, illustrated with a collection of masterworks spanning geography and time: Kashan tiles, Etruscan vases, Coptic funerary-cloth embroidery. “The question I ask of every object,” she said, “is, ‘Are you stolen or not?’ ”

Almost 100 pieces of Ghazni marble vanished from Afghan government hands during the civil war. Credit: Getty Images

If we listen, objects have their own stories to tell. The question of provenance – the chain of ownership from creation to the present – was originally concerned with establishing authenticity, and therefore value. You
might know that a painting was really a Velázquez, say, if you could find its original bill of sale. But in recent decades, provenance research has come to be wielded against the perceived wrongs of the past.

Like many professions pushed by a new generation of activists and scholars, the museum world is coming to grips with thorny issues of power and inequality. One of them is the concentration of valuable antiquities from around the world in the hands of Western museums. A fierce debate is underway about whether some of these objects should be returned to their former owners or places of origin, in what is known as “restitution”.

Near the museum entrance, a pallet with a crate had been placed on the floor. Inside, nestled amid a raft of packing material was the carved marble panel, two feet long. Crouching down, I saw that the sandy-coloured stone was delicately veined and faintly translucent. The panel was carved in relief in three sections: at the bottom, there was a delicate band of interwoven vines; in the middle, arabesques formed a pattern of three-leaved curls; and the top held a fragment of Persian, in Kufic script: wa alam-e sufli, “…and the world of the dead”.

A thousand years earlier, the Ghaznavid emperors and their horsemen ruled an empire stretching from Iran to India. The Persian words carved in the stone were part of a verse extolling the dynasty that scrolled along the wall of the imperial court. It was there that the poet Ferdowsi, whose stature in Persian letters is comparable to Shakespeare’s in English, presented his epic work, the Shahnameh, to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. The Hamburg marble was a fragment of that distant universe.

Today, pieces of the palace’s architecture are scattered around the world. Using old pictures taken by the archaeological mission, as well as auction records and catalogues, Rugiadi and her Italian colleagues had compiled a database of the Ghazni marbles, listing their original location and, if known, their current one. It was available online, and browsing it, I was surprised to see more of these panels at museums in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Some had been stolen from the Afghan government; others were taken from sites in the countryside and spirited abroad.

Decades of conflict have devastated Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries. Looters have stripped its archaeological sites bare. “There are tens of thousands of objects from Afghanistan that entered the market in the mid-1990s,” St John Simpson, a curator at the British Museum who studies antiquities trafficking, told me, “and all of those were almost certainly illegally exported or stolen.”

The stolen marble panel, C3733, was returned to Afghan officials in Germany before being repatriated.Credit: Getty Images

In the northern summer of 2019, I flew to Kabul to investigate the marbles’ journey. Fighting raged between the government and insurgents; even as
American troops withdrew, the violence was getting worse. People fled their homes and went hungry; looters scoured the countryside for artefacts. One day, I got a call from Ghulam Rajabi, a native of Ghazni who worked on the original Italian dig that excavated the Hamburg marble, saying that he had arrived in the capital. Amid the crowds of shoppers on Qala-e Fatullah’s main street, I spotted an elderly, snow-bearded man leaning on a cane, wearing the
heavy white turban of a rural elder. It was Rajabi, who had just made the short but dangerous trip from Ghazni City.

Rajabi was a young man when they unearthed the marbles; he was 81 now. He grew up the son of a poor cobbler, and expected to follow his father’s trade until the Italians arrived, offering good wages to those who could work carefully with a pick and shovel. Legal archaeological excavations began in Afghanistan after the 1919 war of independence freed the country from the diplomatic isolation imposed by the British.

At the time, little physical evidence existed to back up the fabulous legends of the country’s three millennia as a crossroads of empire. When the Italian archaeological mission arrived in Ghazni in 1956, it was a sleepy provincial capital several hours from Kabul, with mudwalled homes that lacked electricity and running water.

But it was known, from historical sources, to have been the seat of Sultan Mahmud and his heirs; it was there that, after centuries of Arab dominance, the Persian language was revived in literature and government. The only visible traces that remained were two elaborate brick minarets that dominated the arid plain below the town.

Three hundred metres to the east of the largest minaret, the archaeologists discovered the remains of a complex built around a courtyard, with pillars and vaulted passageways. When they unearthed its splendid marble décor, the Italians were convinced they had found the royal palace constructed by Mas’ud III, Mahmud’s great-grandson.

Under the agreement between the Italian mission and the Afghan government, a portion of the excavated antiquities were shipped to the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale in Rome. The remainder, including the Hamburg panel, numbered C3733, belonged to Afghanistan; some were displayed in the new Rawza Museum, housed in a 16th-century mausoleum, in Ghazni. Other marbles were shipped to Kabul, where they were exhibited in the Islamic gallery at the National Museum of Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan’s archaeological treasures also stoked appetites in the West. In the spring of 1978, Johannes Kalter, head of the Oriental Department at the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, set off to visit Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on what he called a “collecting trip”, which, he wrote in the museum’s journal, “at comparatively low prices brings a wealth of otherwise
scarcely obtainable and well-documented material to the museum”.

At the time, a trade in illegally excavated antiquities was carried out openly in Kabul’s bazaars, which were crowded with foreign buyers.

Today, the Linden Museum owns a number of marbles from Ghazni, five of which were photographed in Afghan holy sites by the Italian mission. When the locals foraged for bricks in the mounds that dotted the plain, sometimes a piece of carved marble turned up, often bearing Koranic inscriptions. These were given places of pride in shrines and mosques, which the Italians documented but for the most part left in situ as they were integral to the sites, like the marble niche with a carved oil lamp that was placed as the mihrab, which indicates the direction of Mecca, at a mosque in Ghazni.

Afghanistan had laws to protect its cultural heritage, but they were not well enforced. At the time, a trade in illegally excavated antiquities was carried out openly in Kabul’s bazaars, which were crowded with foreign buyers, some of them backpackers off the Hippie Trail.

You could walk through downtown’s Chicken Street and, along with hand-woven rugs and lapis lazuli bracelets, browse artefacts thousands of years old – if you weren’t shown one of the many fakes on offer. In Kabul, I spoke to Sayed Jafar, a carpet seller and the son of an antiques dealer. When I showed
Jafar photographs of Ghazni marbles, he recognised them immediately. Both his father and their neighbour, Noor Shir, sold antiquities to foreigners during the 1970s, and Jafar recalled seeing such marbles in Shir’s shop. “Noor Shir would encourage people to bring them from Ghazni, to steal them from the shrines and graveyards, and to dig for them,” he told me.

Exporting antiquities required permission from the government, but border controls were lax, and bribery common. It was easy to smuggle artefacts out of the country, if you knew what you were doing. “They would mix old and new items and ship them in metal trunks from the airport, or by land to Pakistan,” said Jafar, who bears a scar on his jaw from the rocket strike that killed his father during the civil war.

During his visit to Kabul, Kalter, who died in 2014, was helped by a young
German antiquities dealer named Joerg Drechsel. Jafar didn’t recognise
Drechsel’s name, but a senior Afghan archaeologist told me that he remembered Drechsel dealing with the shopkeepers in town: “He was working with Noor Shir.”

When I contacted Drechsel, he denied being involved in illegally exporting antiquities. “In fact, I was not involved in the export of objects at all,” he wrote, “since I acquired objects from established dealers and the export
clearance and shipping was entirely their responsibility.” He said that his last
visit to Afghanistan was in either 1978 or 1979. “The Ghazni marbles were offered to me much later by an intermediary in Germany.”

Annette Krämer, who is preparing an exhibit on the history of the Linden’s
Afghan collection, told me the museum has no record of how the marbles acquired from Drechsel were exported. Drechsel, who worked closely with a
number of prominent German institutions, also obtained a Ghazni marble
that is currently held by the Reiss Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, according to the scholarly volume Islamic Art in Germany; the museum said its marble was donated by a local carpet dealer in 1988.

After the Afghan civil war, it became too dangerous for staff to work in the National Museum in Kabul.Credit: Getty Images

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The countryside rose against it, and American-supplied arms fanned the flames of war higher. The Italian mission stopped coming to Ghazni; Rajabi traded his shovel for a Kalashnikov and joined the guerrillas. After 10 years of bloodshed, the Soviets withdrew, but the civil war continued.

In 1992, the Afghan communist government collapsed, and the mujahedeen entered Kabul. The rival parties turned on one another, and the capital was divided up by checkpoints run by aggressive fighters. It became too dangerous for the staff to work in the National Museum, on the southern edge of the city. “The museum closed, and the area fell under the control of the parties,” said Shirazudin Saifi, a retired conservator at the museum. “Nobody could go there.”

During the war, almost 100 Ghazni marbles, including the Hamburg panel, disappeared from the government’s possession. “The pieces that were missing were the big, complete pieces,” Rugiadi told me. Though we cannot be certain, it seems probable that the Hamburg marble ended up on the black
market in Pakistan, which was awash with Afghan antiquities. During the ’90s, commanders and other wartime entrepreneurs invested in heavy
machinery and labour to systematically excavate the richest sites. “That’s when you have the looting of sites across the whole country,” said Simpson, the British Museum curator.

“What the Ghazni case shows is that recent acquisitions are as problematic as historical acquisitions.”

Historically, collectors and museums in the West were rarely concerned with – or challenged over – the provenance of antiquities, as long as they were
legally bought and sold in their own destination countries. That began to change after 1970, when a UNESCO treaty against antiquities trafficking made buyers responsible for checking that artefacts were legally exported from their countries of origin. But norms and national laws changed slowly, spurred by high-profile court cases, such as that of the Italian dealer Giacomo Medici, who was accused in 1997 of running a ring of tomb raiders and convicted in 2004.

For the marbles that were taken from the countryside, the lack of an identifiable former owner makes the question of restitution more difficult. But the Hamburg panel had both a clear legal case for its restitution and someone to return it to – a “classic theft”, as Reuther, the MKG’s provenance
researcher, termed it.

In October 2019, at a brief ceremony in Hamburg, the museum returned the Ghazni panel to the Afghan Embassy. “There was a feeling of relief that this piece was finally repatriated,” Mörike, the curator, told me. “What the Ghazni case shows is that recent acquisitions are as problematic as historical acquisitions,” he said. He questioned why museums needed to acquire new antiquities from the art market at all.

In the near future, the Hamburg marble will complete its circular journey
by jet aircraft, returning to the National Museum in Kabul. But will it be safe
there? The spectre of past destruction hangs over Afghanistan’s future. During my trip to Kabul, I walked around the museum with Saifi, the conservator, and he pointed out where smoke marks had been painted over, the discolouration still visible. Fire left the museum roofless, its windows gaping holes. “You can see up top, right there, how the museum burned,” he said. “From the outside, it was just a ruin.” By the end of the civil war, much of Kabul looked the same way.

By risking their lives, the museum’s staff members had managed to preserve
many of the most important items from its collection, such as the Bactrian Hoard, now touring as an exhibition abroad, and they were actively seeking the return of more stolen objects like the Hamburg marble. “Restitution is important to us,” Fahim Rahimi, the museum’s current director, told me. He alluded delicately to the involvement of some of his country’s power brokers in looting. “We have to struggle against a very difficult situation.”

Hundreds of important objects have been returned to the Kabul museum; hundreds more are still at large. Rahimi told me they were establishing a cultural protection office that would pursue restitution claims abroad. The museum’s archives had burned, making it difficult to know exactly how many objects were missing, but a project to catalogue its holdings, assisted by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was nearly complete.

“You have to bear in mind what happened to this museum,” Alejandro Gallego, the project’s field director, told me. “That the museum is still standing, and that it still has its objects and artefacts – it’s the epitome of resilience.”

When Gallego showed visitors around the museum, he would shuttle back and forth among the various donor rooms, trying to link the objects into the familiar story line from Stone Age to Medieval Age. But amid the reconstructed, preserved and restituted artefacts, an alternate narrative would emerge: of cycles of human endeavour in the face of repeated destruction, with the scars of the building and the people themselves as the exhibits. “There’s the story that the museum tells,” he said. “But sometimes the story that the museum doesn’t tell is more interesting.”

Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times Magazine. © 2021 The New York Times Company.

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