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Afghanistan: A Treasure Trove for Archaeologists
By Aryn Baker / Ai Khanoum Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009
By Aryn Baker / Ai Khanoum Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009
A newly discovered site at Tepe Zargaran, an ancient jewelers'
hub near the city of Balkh
Photograph for TIME by Adam Ferguson
Roland Besenval is a magician. With a few words and expansive
hand gestures, the French archaeologist conjures a magnificent
city from the millenniums-old ruins that crown a windswept plateau
in Afghanistan's far north. Stabbing a finger in the direction
of misshapen hillocks made of eroded mud brick, he describes massive
battlements built to repel barbarian raiders from the north. Balkh,
as the city was known, would have needed them. More than 1,000
years before Marco Polo visited its ruins, Balkh was renowned
throughout the ancient world for its fabulous wealth and advanced
culture. It was the birthplace of one of the world's first monotheistic
religions, and the city where Alexander the Great took his second
bride, Roxanne. Seemingly oblivious to the recently spent ammunition
rounds dislodged by his footsteps, Besenval — who heads the
French archaeological delegation to Afghanistan — paints
over the war-scarred landscape with his colorful descriptions
of Zoroastrian fire altars, Buddhist monasteries, Christian shrines
and Muslim mosques. "Here, you are standing on 3,000 years
of life," he says, as he walks over scattered shards of blue
and green glazed pottery that he casually dismisses as "early
Islamic, 11th century or so."
In Afghanistan, history literally crunches underfoot. The country's
location at the crossroads of Asia's major trade routes drew merchants,
artisans, nomads and conquerors. The ruins of Balkh, along with
those of hundreds of other ancient cities and religious sites,
speak of a rich heritage that spans centuries as well as cultures.
Artifacts unearthed at these centers of commerce shed light not
only on Afghan history, but that of Western civilization. Ai Khanoum,
established by Alexander in 328 B.C., still bears remnants of
columns that wouldn't look out of place in the Parthenon. Bamiyan
was the seat of a vast Buddhist civilization whose artisans dressed
their idols in Greek fashions, leading academics to wonder if
Buddhist philosophy influenced Greek thought as much as Greek
styles had an impact on local art. Excavation of the earth around
Masjid-i-No Gumbad, a 9th century brick mosque thought to be the
oldest still standing in the world, could illuminate many of the
mysteries regarding Islam's spread to Central Asia. In 1978, a
Russian archaeologist uncovered a vast trove of gold ornaments
in a 2nd century nomad necropolis. The find, which included a
collapsible crown, golden daggers and thousands of jeweled buttons,
"speaks to the riches of the trade routes across Afghanistan,"
says Brendan Cassar, UNESCO's culture specialist in Afghanistan.
"If nomads had this kind of riches, you can only imagine
the wealth of trade going through Afghanistan."
Burying the Past
Imagining may be all that future archaeologists will be able to
do. In the seven-year battle since 2001 to set Afghanistan back
on its feet after more than two decades at war, the country's
historical sites have been ignored. Its ancient heritage has fallen
victim to an epidemic of pillaging on par with the depredations
of Genghis Khan's army that in 1220 left the city of Balkh in
ruins. Unauthorized excavation on the scale of organized crime
is carried out by professional gangs supported by local warlords
and even government officials, with ties to the international
black market in antiquities. While estimates of this illicit trade
vary widely, government authorities put it at as high as $4 billion,
roughly on par with the country's drug trade. This hurts not only
historians and archaeologists who are just starting to understand
the country's important role in the development of Central Asian
civilization — many experts say that Afghanistan compares
to Egypt in terms of the historical value of its archaeological
sites — but also Afghans themselves.
The mid – 20th century blossoming of archaeological research
in Afghanistan uncovered treasures of unimaginable value: carved
ivories, Greek statues and Buddhist icons that mesmerized the
world. Those findings also ignited gold fever in the country,
inspiring hundreds of freelance "archaeologists" to
dig for treasures of their own, with a black-market value that
far exceeded a farmer's annual earnings. Then, starting in 1979,
war uprooted whatever fragile government protections had been
put in place and thousands of priceless artifacts, some even looted
from the national museum in Kabul, were spirited out of the country.
But it was the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, and the subsequent
power vacuum, that unleashed the most devastating rape of Afghanistan's
heritage to date. "Ironically, poverty and war are what kept
these sites safe," says Jolyon Leslie, head of the Aga Khan
Trust for Culture, which promotes the rehabilitation of Afghanistan's
cultural heritage. In times of conflict, civilians were afraid
to leave home, he says, and the fear of land mines kept many from
digging. Now that a nationwide campaign to clear the mines is
bearing fruit, looters are returning to sites that have been untouched
for years, and are even discovering new ones. "Given the
price land mines exact, you don't exactly want to promote them,"
muses Leslie. "But it is tempting to put up warnings just
for preservation."
Related Photos
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882179,00.html
Treasure-Hunting
in Afghanistan Books with Missing Pages
At Tepe Zargaran, a newly discovered site near Balkh, there is
no need to put up fake signs to ward off looters — most of
the local diggers now working with the joint Afghan-French excavation
team were once raiders themselves. Besenval shrugs: "That's
the best way to neutralize them: give them a job."
Philippe Marquis, who leads the French archaeological team, points
to a 26-ft.-deep (8 m deep) pit carved from the hill that exposes
a cross section riddled with holes — like an ant farm pressed
between panes of glass. He shows how looters dug wells, then tunneled
horizontally when a promising layer was reached. (Looters, like
archaeologists, know to look for signs such as ash or brick flooring
for evidence of human habitation.) One such gallery has collapsed,
so that it now seems just a jagged scar interrupting the smooth
transition of history's layers. "It's like you are trying
to read a book and some of the pages are missing," says Marquis.
"Here we have lost an entire chapter in the archaeological
novel."
As Marquis contemplates the mysteries of Tepe Zargaran that he
will never be able to unravel, a shout rings out from the other
side of the excavation site. Ahmad Basir, a grinning 19-year-old,
holds aloft a clay urn the length of his forearm. It took Basir
several hours of painstaking work with a scalpel to free the artifact
from the earth where it had lain. Before the archaeologists came,
he explains, looters would simply hack away at a site with axes
and shovels until they found statues or gold jewelry. "We
didn't care about pots," he says. "We would just throw
them out, or break them to look for things inside." Marquis
places the urn in a large ziplock bag and labels it with the date
and exact location of the find. Once the dig is finished, all
the artifacts will be shipped to Kabul where they will be analyzed
and placed in a historical context, enabling the archaeologists
to reconstruct what life once looked like at Tepe Zargaran. "We
never knew this was important before," says Basir. "Now,
when I find something like this, I am happy. A part of my history
comes alive."
For every legitimate excavation like Tepe Zargaran, there are
many more ransacked in search of treasures destined for the living
rooms of rich collectors. The vast plain of Ai Khanoum, once the
easternmost center of ancient Greek culture, is pockmarked with
thousands of looter pits, some still containing fragments of clay
or shattered lumps of marble — remnants of statues that didn't
survive the excavation process. There is little left of the Corinthian
columns that once lined the city's main thoroughfare, though at
least two of the elaborately carved pedestals can be found at
a nearby restaurant, where they form part of the foundation.
A Looter's Story
Ustaad Nasrullah, 65, considers himself an expert on Afghanistan's
northeastern archaeological sites, not because he has been studying
them, but because he has been looting them for 40 years. Ai Khanoum
was one of his specialties, and he describes in detail the treasures
that have passed through his hands. Coins and smaller items he
sold to tourists, but anything substantial, like a stone statue
of a naked woman, possibly a fertility goddess, went to brokers
who were able to smuggle the items to Pakistan, where they fetched
higher prices. Nasrullah is proud of his country's rich heritage,
and struggles over the moral implications of his business. "It's
true that we lose our culture by selling these things to foreigners,"
he admits. "But poverty is also awful. Most people don't
know the meaning of these objects; they just know that if they
find them they can buy food." He blames those who allow the
practice to continue: corrupt government officials, warlords and
the businessmen who market Afghan artifacts to the world. "They
are the educated ones. They are stealing from Afghanistan. The
poor are just trying to eat."
Afghan archaeologist Zaffar Paiman blames the Western art market
for fueling looting. At a dig near Kabul, he has uncovered a 5th
century Buddhist temple replete with exquisite plaster sculptures
of the Buddha. He has seen similar statues, selling for upward
of $10,000, at Parisian art galleries. "Looters dig because
of international demand. Looters loot because a collector wants
something nice for his living room. It's the same as opium in
this country — we grow it because junkies want heroin."
If the scourge of opium can't be eliminated from Afghanistan,
what hope is there for the country's disappearing antiquities?
In 2005 some four tons of Afghan artifacts were intercepted at
London's Heathrow airport. Authorities there are eager to return
the cache, which is still stored by British customs — but
to where? Afghanistan's one national museum doesn't have the security
to protect the items, and many experts fear it wouldn't be long
before several of the pieces returned to the black market. Archaeological
sites are even more difficult to protect, says UNESCO's Cassar.
"You have a government that can't extend its authority outside
of the capital, so how can you expect it to protect sites far
from the center? These are areas that would be difficult to manage
for any government, and here there is a lack of funds."
Surprise — and Hope
The news is not all grim. seven years after the Taliban blew up
Bamiyan's 1,500-year-old standing Buddhas, a French-Afghan team
has found a third buried at the base of the cliffs where the others
had been carved. Last winter, Japanese experts discovered the
world's earliest known oil paintings in nearby caves, reversing
common understandings about the origins of the art. Emilie Chicroun,
a French mural specialist, calls it "a small revolution."
Mixing oil with pigments had long been considered a European innovation,
started in the 9th century; the Bamiyan paintings predate that
by a few hundred years. "Now we will have to reconsider everything
we think we know about the history of painting," says Chicroun.
The potential for a better understanding of history is reason
enough for saving Afghanistan's archaeological heritage, says
Cassar. But it goes deeper than that. By preserving its past,
Afghanistan also has a hand in protecting its future. "The
greatest contribution of these artifacts is that they show a different
aspect of the Afghan story," says Cassar. "They are
a symbol of the hope that one day Afghanistan can be known for
magnificent pieces of cultural history and art, rather than terrorism."
— with reporting by Ali Safi/Kabul
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