Rescued relics revealed in Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures exhibition
WORKS protected by courageous staff of the National Museum of Aghanistan in Kabul have come to the Art Gallery of NSW.
IN the National Archaeological Museum of Cyprus, in Nicosia, there is a handsome marble statue of Apollo from the ancient city of Salamis with what the casual visitor assumes to be signs of damage sustained, perhaps, in the course of an earthquake or the collapse of a temple roof. On closer inspection, however, one realises that in this, as in many other cases, the truth is much more sinister: the face and the genitals have been deliberately mutilated, hacked away by early Christian vandals, enraged by the calm beauty of the pagan god. They smashed his arms and legs too.
This was perhaps around the same time that a Christian mob in Alexandria — whipped up by Bishop Cyril, who was later canonised — murdered Neoplatonist philosopher and teacher Hypatia and, according to Gibbon’s account based on contemporary sources, stripped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells. If this sounds like the savagery we now associate with vicious islamist fanatics such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, it is no coincidence.
The early Christians were in many respects the Taliban of their day, and if they later became more civilised it was only because they were forced to assimilate much of the humanist heritage of the ancients. How Christ’s teaching could be so deeply perverted into a doctrine of hatred and resentment, of course, must seem to a modern Christian as incomprehensible as a Sufi mystic would find the idea of a suicide bomber. But the truth, as I have suggested before, is that monotheism is a philosophical and theological concept suitable for the learned but dangerous for an ignorant populace, in whom it inevitably fuels intolerance and violence.
As for the Taliban of our own day, we all remember the horror of their destruction of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001, perhaps the single greatest act of vandalism against an artistic monument of modern times. And since then, we have had all too many opportunities to contemplate the darkness of inhuman nihilism in a country where girls are shot for attending school and people going about their business are murdered at random on a daily basis in the name of religion.
Life was once very different in this land. Alexander the Great established here, about halfway along what became known as the Silk Road, the farthest outposts of the Hellenistic world. Together with the later Indo-Greek kingdom in the Indus Valley, this became a crucial point of contact and exchange between the greatest centres of human culture in the east and west of the Eurasian continent; it was in Gandhara, for example, that Buddha was first represented anthropomorphically, adapting the image of Apollo and beginning an iconographic evolution that extends all the way to Japan.
Alexander was fond of naming cities after himself, and the greatest of these still survives under this name in Egypt. But there were several others in the east, the most remote, in what is now Tajikistan, known as Alexandria Eschate, literally, “furthest Alexandria”. To the south, in what was then Bactria, another was founded at the end of the 4th century BC by his successors, Alexandria on the Oxus, perhaps the site now known as Ai Khanoum. This was evidently a substantial and very important city until its destruction by barbarian invaders in 145BC. By then, fortunately, Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius had conquered the lands to the south and established the Indo-Greek kingdom that endured in northwestern India until the beginning of the new millennium.
What was spared by the nomadic hordes was forgotten until the site was rediscovered and excavated by French archeologists from in the 1960s and 70s. In the successive wars that have racked the country since that time, much has been destroyed or looted. The final threat was the iconoclastic fury of zealots driven by a primitive dread of the power of idols.
In the face of danger, courageous staff of the National Museum of Aghanistan in Kabul hid the most precious objects in bank vaults, and it is these works that have come to the Art Gallery of NSW as part of a national and international tour through some of the world’s greatest museums. It was moving to hear National Museum director Omara Khan Masoudi speak at the opening of this beautiful and important exhibition, and to realise how many people like him are committed, against all the odds, to a better future for their country.
We enter the exhibition to encounter at once a pure embodiment of the Hellenic spirit: a small torso of a naked youth, which speaks of the instinctive Greek love of life, their sense of the beauty of the body, and their belief in the union of mind and body. Nearby is another small statue believed to represent the master of the gymnasium, which by then was an important educational institution, not merely a centre for athletic practice. These two figures, thus juxtaposed, represent the image of the humane and harmonious citizen and the education — paideia — by which these good citizens are formed.
An explicit articulation of the underlying values of such an education is preserved — almost miraculously when so few fragments remain from an entire city — on the stone pedestal of a lost funerary statue. The inscription is carved with care but is not the work of a highly skilled epigraphist. It describes the appropriate behaviour for the ages of man: as a boy, one should be orderly or well-behaved (kosmios); coming to manhood, one should be self-controlled (enkrates); in middle age, just (dikaios); in old age, of good counsel (euboulos); and finally, in reaching the end of our lives, we should be without grief or perhaps regret (alupos).
A further inscription, scratched less carefully to the left and harder to read, informs us that these precepts were copied from Delphi, the seat of the oracle of Apollo, and brought by a man called Clearchos to this remote outpost of civilisation, where he engraved them in the sanctuary (temenos) of Kineas. If the latter was, as has been suggested, the founder or oikistes of the city, this would be especially appropriate, since Apollo was associated with the founding of new colonies.
These first things tell us so much about the spirit of the city, and the massive marble capitals that follow — all that remains of once-impressive colonnades — give us a sense of its scale, confirmed by archeological evidence of a vast palace, theatre and other structures.
Other fascinating objects, again chance survivals that must represent a minute fraction of the material wealth of Ai Khanoum in its heyday, include a small bronze Heracles, a beautiful and solemn clay head, perhaps of Hermes, and an intriguing gilded silver relief of Cybele, the mother goddess of eastern origin, in a chariot drawn by lions.
As so often in the history of the Eurasian continent, from Persia to China, barbarian invaders were eventually civilised by the people they had conquered, and one such group, of Iranian stock, formed the Kushan Empire, which became the successor state to the Greco-Bactrians and Indo-Greeks, and even adopted the Greek alphabet to write their language. They took as their capital another city named after the great conqueror: Alexandria of the Caucasus or Begram (modern Bagram).
Here French archeologists made an unexpected discovery in 1937 and 1939, when they came upon two walled-up chambers containing a great number of extraordinary objects from Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, India and as far away as China. It is still uncertain why these treasures were collected together and hidden, and whether they are simply evidence of the extraordinarily cosmopolitan tone of Bactrian life under the Kushans, or perhaps the stock of a Silk Road trader in luxury goods from across the continent.
What may support the latter hypothesis — which does not invalidate the former — is that all the objects are now thought to be more or less contemporary, and to belong to the 1st century AD. But this is a matter for specialists, and it is certainly beyond most of us to hazard any guess about the dating of the exquisite glassware from Roman Phoenicia or Egypt or the remarkable ivory carvings that show such a fascinating fusion of Greek elements with an entirely Indian voluptuousness in the modelling of the female form.
Among the most intriguing objects in the Begram Treasure is a collection of small circular plaster reliefs of mythological scenes, which may have come from earlier Hellenistic originals and have been used as models for silversmiths or potters. These include a remarkable high-relief bust of a youth, a scene of Ganymede offering a cup to Zeus in the form of an eagle, and an erotic image of Selene, the moon goddess, making love to the sleeping Endymion. Most memorable and mysterious is the large head of an infant, eyes closed and clutching in its arms a huge butterfly, identified not entirely plausibly as Eros and Psyche.
The last part of the exhibition is devoted to a third archeological site, which represents the more fragmentary persistence of Hellenistic Bactrian culture in the work of nomadic people whose ancestors were perhaps the barbarians who overran Ai Khanoum two centuries earlier, but who by then had become wealthy Silk Road traders and sophisticated craftsmen. The site, discovered in 1978, revealed a rich burial in which an evidently powerful chieftain had been interred with his wives and concubines, no doubt all put to death to accompany him into the next world. The graves had been undisturbed, and all their contents are laid out in separate display cases, giving a vivid sense of the way the dead bodies were adorned with gold and jewels.
These were not civilised people and presumably were illiterate. But, in their love of decorative design, they were drawn to an eclectic mixture of stylistic elements, and in particular gathered, like magpies, fragments of the old Bactrian civilisation. It is not only precious carved gems and coins that are made into rings or sewn into garments but sculptural motifs such as Dionysus and Ariadne riding on their panthers that are reproduced on ceremonial belts and other items of personal adornment.
All these themes of civilisation, transmission and survival are acutely relevant to the Afghan people today, and indeed the motto of the National Museum is that a nation stays alive while its culture stays alive. In Afghanistan, it is unfortunately no figure of speech to speak of life and death, and it is unclear when it will be possible for the hidden treasures to return home, when these precious vestiges of human life and historical memory will be safe from the lovers of death and oblivion.
Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, to June 15