WASHINGTON
They kept the secret for years. A dozen men, the "key-holders" of a fabulous treasure, told no one about the gold they'd buried deep in a palace vault, hidden from the ravages of war, looting and a regime bent on destroying Afghanistan's cultural heritage.
Now, about 20 years later, that collection thought lost forever is being exhibited for the world to see. Opening in the United States with a show in Washington this weekend, it spans the beginning of the Silk Road trade through a country most Americans associate with violence and destruction.
"The story of the hidden treasures is like the story of Afghanistan," said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States. "It is about precious culture and traditions covered by the ashes of war and neglect. You don't know what remains under the ashes, and when you see the glitter of gold, you almost can't believe it."
The exhibition is filled with artifacts of almost unbelievable artistry -- collapsible gold crowns that belonged to nomad princesses, a chubby Aphrodite figurine with wings and a forehead mark in the Indian tradition, a golden tree hung with pearls for fruit.
Accompanying the collection as it travels to Washington, San Francisco, Houston and New York are some of the key-holders, the men who protected the collection from the violence of the mujahedeen and Taliban. According to Afghan tradition, they must oversee the unpacking and repacking of the treasures they once hid.
"In Afghanistan there's a different curatorial system -- these men are bonded by law to their collections, and they bear personal responsibility for them," said Fredrik Hiebert, curator of the U.S. exhibition.
Sitting beside him on a couch in the National Gallery of Art, looking somewhat ill at ease, Abdullah Hakim Zada, one of the key-holders, said that when he and his comrades packed away the treasures, they could not have foreseen that there would be a civil war followed by the reign of the Taliban. "At times during the years, we worried that we hadn't put the right materials in the boxes for them to be stored so long," he said.
Throughout his career as a Central Asian archaeologist, Hiebert said everyone in the field thought the famous Afghan collection lived on only in legend. Rumors abounded: that it had been taken to Moscow after the Soviet invasion, that it had been looted or stolen, that the gold had been melted down.
Afghanistan's National Museum, which at times had been used as a military base, had been shelled and set on fire, and its storerooms had been looted.
The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by a Russian archeologist named Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert's mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 pieces of beautifully crafted jewelry and ornamentation of pure gold.
Before Sarianidi could study the pieces, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they were put in the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them.
Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the Communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers made a decision. They packed the most important artifacts from the museum into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a deep basement vault.
"Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them," said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul, in a telephone interview. "When the mujahedeen took power, some went to Pakistan, some went to Iran, and some were killed. Only a few of us remained in Kabul."
It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered -- in a huge Austrian-made vault, alongside the government's gold bullion -- a pile of sealed boxes. Hiebert heard about these and traveled to Kabul that October with his colleague Thomas Barfield, now chairman of the anthropology department at Boston University. They met with then-Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani and the minister of information and culture.
"The question then was, did it really exist?" said Barfield. The archaeologists remained skeptical -- until, two hours before their plane was supposed to leave, Ghani took them to the palace basement. "'Well, boys,' he said, 'I can't show you the gold, but I can show you the silver.' And he opened his hand and showed us this two-headed ancient Greek coin, almost as big as his palm, that we had also thought were completely gone. That was when we thought, if this stuff exists there's no reason to doubt the Bactrian gold was there, too."
Ghani told Hiebert that if he agreed to do a scientific inventory on the items, they would open the boxes thought to contain the gold.
A group of ministers and scholars, including Sarianidi, who had flown in for the occasion, gathered to open the sealed boxes with a power saw, sparks flying. "We literally didn't know what we would find," Ghani said in a telephone interview.
"When we saw that it was actually what we hoped, it was the feeling of regaining a part of your being, of connecting our generation to those who lived thousands of years before us and for millennia to come."
What they found, in piles of small plastic bags with old labels, wrapped in some cases in toilet paper, were perfectly preserved pieces of gold jewelry and ornamentation.
Yet further squabbles erupted before the collection left the country for the exhibit. Some feared letting it out at all. Others thought Afghanistan should negotiate for more money. American and European diplomats jousted over who should get it first.
"I pushed the idea that no matter where it goes, it should be touring for the next ten years," said Tim Moore, cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. "It was planned with less advance notice than most exhibits. But there was this feeling that all of a sudden it was out of the vault, and people jumped on it."
In the end, it is the story of the hidden treasure that remains and the fact that it survived. "It was our job," Masoudi said. "Even if we just saved one piece or 100 pieces, we cannot be too proud, because it is just our job. Archaeological pieces belong not to one person, but to the world."
