afghanistan

Afghan show at the British Museum

Museums do make life easy.  Four years ago I tried to reach the fabled site of Aï Khanum on the shores of the River Oxus in north-eastern Afghanistan, the Greek city built by the followers of Alexander the Great.  Despite having Ahmad Shah Massoud’s ex-bodyguard with us, we were beaten back just a few miles from the site by the turbulent security situation close to the Tajik border. Even if we had got there, we might not have found much: recent photographs show that the lower half of the city has been comprehensively looted in recent years.

.
.

Now the finest pieces excavated from that site are on display rather more accessibly just up the Holborn road.  The British Museum’s superb new exhibition of the treasures of Afghanistan illustrates the extraordinary cross-cultural influences that one might expect from this crossroads of Asia:   an Aphrodite with an Indian bindi mark on her forehead;  another Greek goddess riding a Persian chariot across a silver lunar landscape;  Corinthian capitals beside Indian ivories.

.

.

But the exhibition also raises some interesting wider questions.  It has only been made possible by some brave Afghan curators who hid the artefacts while the National Museum of Kabul was looted by mujahedeen in the civil wars.  For the past five years, the treasures of ‘Alexandria on Oxus’ have been homeless, on a permanent roving international exhibition that keeps them in perpetual exile but also has the effect that they are seen by far many more people than if they had remained at home.

Afghan thoughts

[An expanded version of recent article for the Times]

Three years ago I was preparing to go to Afghanistan to make a Despatches Special for C4 with the intrepid Pakistani journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy about what conditions for ordinary Afghans were like. We wanted to make it in the winter of 2006-07 because there was talk of a Spring offensive from the Taleban – which indeed came – and came – and has kept coming ever since.

The difference in the country between then and now is striking. 

Scroll to Top