And more....A tale of two treasures
(Filed: 15/01/2004)
telegraph.co.uk
The museums of Iraq and Afghanistan had to go to great lengths to protect their ancient treasures from their rapacious rulers. But what is the future for these fabulous riches? asks Martin Gayford
There were many features common to both the Iraqi campaign and the Afghan conflict: American hi-tech weaponry, vigorous anti-war protests all over the world, the sudden collapse of opposition forces - and, less obviously, archaeological catastrophe. Great publicity was given to the looting of the Baghdad and Kabul museums, and also to the criminal destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban.
Less attention has been given to the unexpected reappearance a few months ago of two fabulous hoards of ancient golden objects with oddly similar histories. Both have been compared to the objects found in the tomb of Tutankhamun; neither has ever been seen except very briefly.
In each case, the initial rediscovery was made just before the fog of war descended and the treasures were hidden away again, only to re-emerge in circumstances of Tintin-like daring-do. The tales of the two hoards involve tombs bearing chilling curses, high political drama, bank vaults with uncrackable locks, and - just for full measure - a peripheral role for the author of Death on the Nile.
On July 3, 2003, in the Assyrian galleries of the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, a small part of the treasure known as the gold of Nimrud was shown to a select group of journalists and dignitaries. Among the precious items were a gold crown and a diadem, 79 earrings, 90 necklaces, 14 amulets, 30 rings, 15 gold vessels and more of rock crystal.
That brief exposure was the first time in 14 years that the treasure had been displayed publicly, and only the second time in its 2,800-year history. For most of that time, it had lain unnoticed by successive looters, tomb-robbers and archaeologists in a series of tombs beneath the harem in the Assyrian Palace of Nimrud.
This treasure trove is not only the very best example of Assyrian jewellery to have survived, it is also virtually the only one. "Very little Assyrian gold work has been discovered at all," explains Dominique Collon, a specialist in the subject at the British Museum.
"It was all carted away and melted down in antiquity. So previously, the only evidence we had for Assyrian jewellery was representations on reliefs. Then suddenly, there we were with the real McCoy."
The Nimrud treasure is regarded as the finest jewellery of the 8th and 9th centuries BC from any part of the ancient world.
The existence of this hoard - like the discovery of Tutankhamun's burial regalia in the 1920s - was an enormous surprise to the scholarly world. The North-West Palace of Nimrud - near modern Mosul - had been excavated in 1950 by the British archaeologist Max Mallowan (the husband of Agatha Christie). But he had failed to notice tell-tale irregularities in the floor of a room used by the royal Assyrian women.
Mallowan was not the first to have missed these clues - they had also been overlooked by the hostile Medes and Scythians, who had sacked the palace in 612 BC. Very few people had probably known what lay beneath those rooms - since only a handful of royal eunuchs and trusted servants would have been allowed inside these female quarters.
Then, in 1988, Muzahim Mahmud, an Iraqi archaeologist, noticed that the floor tiles had been relaid sometime in their history and looked beneath. Over the next two years he found a series of tombs, including those of Mullissu, the queen of Assurnasirpal II who reigned from 883-859 BC and built the palace (he also plays a starring role in many of the celebrated Nimrud reliefs in the British Museum).
There were also inscriptions recording the names of two other queens from the following century - and one threatening anyone who lays hands on the jewellery or breaks open the seals of the tomb: "Let his spirit wander in thirst." One tomb alone yielded 450 items, some 50 lbs of gold and silver.
Mahmud's finds were briefly exhibited in Baghdad in 1989, but because of a lack of suitably secure cabinets they were never put on permanent display. The cabinets were on order from a specialist German supplier, when the situation dramatically changed.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States launched Desert Storm early in 1991, and the gold vanished from view into the most secure vault of the Iraqi Central Bank, which was then flooded with sewage.
The treasure was next seen last summer, after a team of Iraqi investigators assisted by National Geographic had pumped out two million litres of water (a process that required three pumps operating for three weeks). The Nimrud finds were in three boxes with intact seals, exactly where they had been left.
But some mystery still surrounds the exact motives for flooding the vault. It has been suggested that it was done deliberately by Iraqi officials in order to prevent the Baathist regime from removing the treasure - and also the large quantity of bank notes stored in the same place.
"I think they were rather afraid that Saddam Hussein would get his hands on it and turn it into gold taps for his bathroom," says Dominique Collon. She is convinced that key people in the Iraqi museum service and international specialists always knew that the treasure was safely stored away. "It wasn't written or much talked about precisely because we didn't want Saddam to get it."
A similar story of ancient riches from antique lands being protected from a malign government comes from Afghanistan. In the late 1970s Russian archaeologists working at a site in the north of the country made a staggering discovery of 21,000 precious objects.
This so-called Bactrian gold is even more dazzling than the Nimrud hoard. It is made up of the burial riches of Kushan tribes from the area known in ancient times as Bactria, which were buried around the 1st century AD. And, like much of the now tragically depleted Afghan heritage, they show evidence of a unique cultural fusion.
Some of the objects - a griffin in white chalcedony, a representation of Aphrodite, a man riding a dolphin - show clear signs of the influence of Alexander the Great, whose Greek armies had passed through Bactria and left colonies three centuries before. Other pieces are in the style of Siberian cultures; coins come from India and ancient Iran. The Russian archaeologists made over this amazing array of riches from the crossroads of Asia to the Kabul Museum - just before the war began in 1979.
Little was heard of the treasure for the next decade or so, though it was briefly glimpsed in 1989, when President Mohammad Najibullah showed it to group of ambassadors. In 1996, when the Taliban took Kabul, they sought out the ex-President, castrated him, dragged him around behind a lorry and hanged him. There was no trace of the Bactrian gold. It was widely assumed to have disappeared in the looting and almost total destruction of the remaining collection of the Kabul Museum in February 2001.
It now appears that the Bactrian gold had been put in a secure vault of the Afghan national bank beneath the presidential compound in Kabul. Considerable confusion still surrounds the circumstances of its rediscovery. It was initially reported that the treasure, together with part of the Afghan bullion reserves, had been hidden in a vault whose locks - turned by seven keys held by seven different holders - the Taliban were unable to open.
The current issue of The Economist, on the other hand, reports that though the vault was indeed sealed, it had been done by the director of the bank having deliberately broken his key in the lock, thus jamming it. As coalition troops were poised to take Kabul in 2002, Taliban officials had tried in vain to enter the vault. What they could not have known is that although the gold bars were in the vault, the Bactrian treasures were, in fact, stored in a room upstairs, in a number of ordinary travel trunks underneath bags containing old coins.
The Taliban had walked straight past the treasure. But four months ago, Hamid Karzai, the new President of Afghanistan, and a number of his ministers inspected the vault, which had finally been opened by a local locksmith, and announced to the world that everything was safe.
It appears that they did not actually see the Bactrian gold (as they claimed) but even so, according to The Economist, it is apparently intact. And it is also possible - according to a source who spoke to Martin Bailey of the Art Newspaper - that some of the other most important pieces from the Kabul Museum may also have been hidden there safely.
But when will these astonishing objects next be seen, and where? That, too, is highly controversial. In neither Baghdad nor Kabul is the security position good enough to allow museums to reopen - and the Kabul Museum is a ruin. It has been mooted that both the Bactrian and Nimrud treasures should go on international tour to museums in America. The Musée Guimet in Paris - which has a magnificent Afghan collection - has expressed interest in the Bactrian gold.
But these are highly sensitive proposals. To parade the Nimrud jewellery around the USA, insists Dominique Collon, would "not be at all a tactful thing to do. Let the Iraqi people see their treasures first."
But then magnificent antiquities usually are linked in one way or another to high politics. That is one reason why they have such strange and complex fates. |
