Hidden Treasures

Is it a cement or steel vault, or just a room that is locked?
You have to go through a series of doors that all have keys. Every door had somebody who had the key. So you unlock one door, then you unlock another door, and then you unlock another door. And then there's this big old Austrian bank vault door, made of steel. I wasn't allowed behind that. But the important people who knew what was going on would go down into that and bring out these safes. There were six of them. These were the safe treasures of Afghanistan. But they were locked, and we didn't know quite what to do at first. I was a little worried when they came upon the idea of using a circular saw to open up the first box. We didn't know what the contents of the safes were. I was worried that if it was soft gold, and they used a circular saw, we might find a puddle of gold at the bottom of the safe from the heat generated from the circular saw. Separately, I was concerned there'd be a little note inside, saying, "Ha ha, we got here first." So it was a nervous point for everybody in the room. I had brought along Viktor Sarianidi, the Soviet archaeologist who had originally found the Bactrian gold, because most of the people in the room had never seen it before. Most of the people couldn't verify what it was we were going to open. The moment came. The circular saw opened up the box, the door opened, and out literally poured plastic bags with small gold appliqués, jewelry, fine pieces of gold. They hadn't melted, and that was it. The emotional level in that room at that particular moment was so energized. It was a magical moment.

What are the crown jewels of this collection?
The first six safes that we opened held the gold of the great Bactrian hoard that had been found in 1979: some 20,000 pieces of gold, truly a king's ransom. Unbelievable—not only in terms of the quantity of gold, but the artistry of these objects was just fantastic. One or two of those pieces are of world importance. There's a crown, a collapsible nomadic crown, which is similar to what we think of as being European crowns. The only difference is that this crown is 2,000 years old.

Some of the hoard was also ivory and carvings. Is that correct?
When we were done with the inventory of the Bactrian gold, we were packing up. We had been there for three and a half months, and I was tired, I was out of money, I wanted to go home. But the museum director, Mr. Omara Khan Masoudi, said, "No, no, no, you can't go home … There's more." That's when the other crown jewels of Afghanistan came out. We started opening up boxes with extraordinarily fragile ivories, extraordinarily fragile glass and bronze from a separate site called Begram that had been excavated in 1937 by French archaeologists. It's a site whose artifacts we thought had been destroyed when the National Museum was destroyed and looted—or in 2001 when the Taliban ordered all graven images of humans to be destroyed. But when we opened these other boxes that were saved in the bank vault, we saw these absolutely sumptuous ivories, with depictions of courtly scenes: women sitting, dancing, talking.

What do these objects tell us about the story of Afghanistan?
We often have a misunderstood concept of what trade was like across Asia at this metaphorical time and place called the Silk Road. There's no road, of course; it's just trade between East and West. But the concept that it was only Rome that was interested in the objects of China, and only China interested in the objects of Rome—this collection shows us that's not true. In Afghanistan there were merchants, there were artisans, and they were creating their own Silk Road style, and it was being traded East and West.

How many Afghan museum pieces were lost during this recent period of war and chaos?
We have two ways of gauging that. These heroes who hid away the masterpieces of the Kabul museum did a masterful job. They took the really valuable pieces and hid them away. Of that group, we have about 95 percent preserved. That's fabulous. The museum, of course, had storerooms and maybe had a total of about 100,000 objects. Unfortunately, when we finished our inventory, we inventoried only about 33,000.

Do you have a sense of how much of that was destroyed by the Taliban?
We know the Taliban smashed about 2,000 statues. But the thing is, these Afghans are kind of obstinate, right? And as soon as the Taliban smashed these things, other Afghans went about picking up the pieces and gluing them back together. It's kind of a remarkable story. This is a group of people we should tell the world about.