Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  The 2,000-year-old Bactrian Gold is one of the largest hoards of gold ever discovered, and the story behind its loss and rediscovery is as extraordinary as the treasure itself. The Bactrian Gold, a cache of gold jewelry, ornaments, and coins from northern Afghanistan, was excavated in the late 1970s, only to go missing during the chaos caused by the foreign occupation and civil war that were to grip the country for the next two and a half decades or so. During this tumultuous period the National Museum of Afghanistan was looted several times, resulting in a loss of 70 percent of the estimated 100,000 objects on display. Had the same fate overtaken the Bactrian Gold? Or had it been taken to Moscow by the Soviets, or smuggled out to Europe or the United States, or—worst of all—melted down? It seemed impossible that such important and priceless artifacts could vanish without trace. During the 1990s and up until the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban had made repeated attempts to recover the treasure, but had been unsuccessful. Then in June 2004, an announcement was made that a number of supposedly lost treasures of Afghanistan had been recovered, and the astonishing story behind the Bactrian Gold was revealed to the world.

  10.1. Gold earrings from Tillya Tepe. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 on Wikipedia.

  The Bactrian Gold (also known as the Bactrian Treasure or Bactrian Hoard) was excavated in 1978 near the oasis town of Sheberghan, in northern Afghanistan, by a Soviet-Afghan archaeological team led by the Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi. The team discovered the artifacts, which date to around the first century BC in six simple chambers inside a burial mound under a hill known as Tillya Tepe (the Hill of Gold), near the Oxus River in what was once Bactria. Tillya Tepe was in fact the earth-covered mud brick ruins of a fire-worshippers’ temple dating from the Iron Age (1500 BC–1300 BC). The historical region of Bactria was located between the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the ancient Oxus River, in what is now part of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Bactria became especially important between c600 BC and c AD 600 as a crossroads where international trade and cultural exchange between East and West took place. In fact, the Silk Road, an ancient network of trading routes that ran from China all the way to the Mediterranean, with connections to Siberia, India, and Persia, ran straight through the area.

  The fabulous objects that were uncovered at Tillya Tepe accompanied the burials of six wealthy nomads (possibly Sakas—Asian Scythian nomads), probably a chieftain and five female members of his household. The burials were arranged in typical steppe nomad fashion, with the prince in the center, and the graves of the five women in a ring around his tomb. Although the coffins, clothes, and skeletons had mostly rotted away, thousands of pieces of gold jewelry, funeral ornaments, and personal belongings survived intact. The male burial in the group, Tomb IV, was a chieftain who was accompanied by a rich array of grave goods including turquoise-studded daggers and sheaths, two bows, a long sword, a leather folding stool, the skull and bones of a horse (the remains of a horse sacrifice), and an Indian medallion that, in the opinion of Véronique Schiltz, a French archaeologist with the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, bears one of the earliest impressions of Buddha.

  Another of the burials, known as Tomb VI, was that of a 25- to 30-year-old woman, who was accompanied by a thin hammered gold leaf crown with detachable peaks, making it suitable for storage during travel. Clasped in her left hand was a gold coin of Parthian King Gotarzes I (95 BC–90 BC), and a silver coin had been placed in her mouth—in keeping with the Greek tradition of paying a toll to Charon to be taken across the Styx into the underworld. Sarianidi believed this young woman to be a nomadic princess. Tomb II at Tillya Tepe held the remains of a woman in her 30s wearing a signet ring depicting the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, Athena, with her name inscribed in Greek letters written in reverse, indicating that the ring was used as a seal. She was also wearing elaborate pendants of gold with turquoise, garnet, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and pearls, which depicted a man (dubbed the “Dragon Master”) in typical nomadic clothing grasping two dragons. Other important treasures from the burial mound included a silver Chinese mirror, an Indian ivory comb, a magnificent intricately worked gold and turquoise boot buckle, gold and turquoise belt buckles depicting a boy on a dolphin, a detailed gold figure of a winged Aphrodite with an Indian bindi (ornamental dot) between her eyebrows, an iron dagger with a gold and turquoise handle depicting animals and a dancing bear, and a gold coin of the Roman emperor, Tiberius, minted 3,000 miles away in Lyon, southern France, between AD 14 and AD 37. This latter coin is the first of its kind to be found in all of Central Asia.

  After examining the vast collection of about 20,600 gold ornaments retrieved from the necropolis at Tillya Tepe, the archaeologists realized that they represented an extraordinary range of influences from China, Siberia, Persia, India, Rome, and Greece, and also reflected the wide sphere of nomad migration and contacts. American archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, of the National Geographic Society, has noted how the nomads of Tillya Tepe had taken the iconography from these far-flung cultures and blended it together into their own unique style of art.

  In the winter of 1978–1979, while the archaeologists were carefully photographing and recording every last piece of the treasure from Tillya Tepe, they became aware that news of the value of their discovery had leaked out. Soon the Afghan army had to be called in to guard the site from looters and armed tribesmen. In February 1979, Sarianidi decided to abandon the site, before he had the chance to excavate a newly discovered seventh grave (this was later robbed by looters) and took the treasure to the National Museum in Kabul. On December 24, 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, leading the country into 23 years of war and chaos, which would leave 1.7 million people dead.

  In 1989, after the Soviet withdrawal from the country, President Najibullah’s government and National Museum officials planned to transfer many of the objects from the Kabul Museum to secret hiding places for safety. But nothing more was heard of this plan, and no one seemed to know if it had been carried out. In the absence of news of the Bactrian Gold it was speculated that during the years of turmoil in Afghanistan the artifacts had either been melted down to buy arms, sold on the black market, or stolen and taken to Moscow by Soviet troops. Following the departure of the Soviets, years of civil war reduced parts of Kabul to ruins, and the museum suffered terribly at the hands of looters and vandals, with thousands of irreplaceable artifacts destroyed or missing. In 1994, while the museum was being used as a military base, it was shelled, its roof and top floor destroyed.

  Researchers wondered how the Bactrian Gold could have survived such chaos. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Najibullah, by then in hiding after the collapse of his government, was tortured and murdered. The Taliban then turned their attention to Da Afghanistan Bank (the country’s Central Bank). They forced employees to open the vault used for keeping national treasure and went inside to check that the country’s gold reserves were intact. Satisfied that everything was in order, they left. However, the Taliban later began a systematic destruction of non-Islamic art and, in February 2001, ordered that all idols, including the two monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan Valley, central Afghanistan, were to be destroyed. The Buddhas were dynamited in March of that year, and many thousands more irreplaceable artifacts throughout the country were lost.

  In November 2001, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban made a desperate attempt to get at the gold bullion from the vault inside the Central Bank; although they managed to steal millions of dollars in cash, they were unable to break in to the vault. Eventually they were forced to flee in the face of approaching Northern Alliance and American forces.

  On August 28, 2003, Afghanistan’s new government arranged to have the vault opened, and after doing so informed the world that everything was safe (in all, $90m in gold bars and coins and another $20m in cash). There was no mention of the Bactrian Gold. But it was there, hidden in six ordinary museum trunks, buried under crates
of old coins, exactly where it had been placed by museum staff in 1989, along with a total of 200 crates of ancient artifacts from the National Museum. How had such a priceless treasure been missed by the Taliban? The story that emerged was both heroic and inspiring, and not a little reminiscent of a Dan Brown novel or an Indiana Jones movie.

  When the hoard had been moved from the museum to the Central Bank at the Presidential Palace in 1989, the doors of the underground vault were locked with keys that were given to five trustworthy museum guards and curators. The treasure was under the supervision of Omara Khan Masoudi, the museum’s director, and one of the five “key holders,” and the vault door could only be opened if all the keys were used. Each of the key holders (called “tawadars”) was sworn to secrecy and put their lives at risk in not revealing the location of the keys or the treasure, or handing the keys over to the Taliban. If any of the key holders died, they were to pass the keys on to their eldest sons. When the Taliban came to check on the vault in 1996, it was the job of one of the key holders, known as “Mr. Mustafa” (to protect his identity), to lock the steel door behind them when they left. Taking his life in his hands Mr. Mustafa decided that the Taliban must be prevented from getting their hands on Afghanistan’s ancient treasures, so he turned the key backward in the lock, snapping it in two and leaving a fragment jammed inside. Mr. Mustafa told no one what he had done. When the Taliban returned to the vault in 2001 and attempted to open the door again, they were unable to see the fragment of broken metal inside the lock from Mr. Mustafa’s key. Thus they went away empty-handed. If this had been discovered it would certainly have meant instant execution.

  Before Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government could open the vault in 2003, it was faced with a problem: One of the key holders had disappeared a number of years before. For a while the government considered breaking open the vault, but eventually decided to appoint a judge from the Ministry of Justice as a substitute key holder. After the crates were opened in March 2004, their contents had to be authenticated and catalogued. For this purpose a team of local and international experts, which included archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, was assembled. In 2004 it was announced to the world that the Bactrian Gold had been recovered completely intact; indeed the artifacts were found still wrapped in the same tissue paper in which the museum staff had put them 15 years earlier.

  Later that year there came another astonishing episode in the drama of Afghanistan’s ancient past when it was announced that some of the Begram Ivories, stolen in 1992 from the National Museum in Kabul at the height of the Afghan civil war, had been recovered. The Begram Ivories are a priceless series of 2,000-year-old intricately carved and colored Indian ivory inlays excavated in the 1930s from ancient Begram, a trading city on the Silk Road about 80 miles north of Kabul. More than a thousand of these ivories were found by French archaeologists as part of a spectacular hoard that also contained bronzes and glassware from Roman Egypt and Syria, and lacquered bowls from China. Since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the pieces from the Begram Ivories had been sitting in the same vault inside the Central Bank as the Bactrian Gold. In 2010, further ivories from the Hoard, which had been sold on the black market to buyers abroad, were recovered and sent back to the National Museum at Kabul.

  Since 2004 selections from the Bactrian Gold and other pieces from Afghanistan’s ancient treasures have been displayed at some of the world’s finest museums. The incredibly successful exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul traveled first to the Guimet Museum in Paris in December 2006, then to the Museo di Antichità in Turin, Italy, and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. In 2008–2009 the exhibition visited the United States and Canada, traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; and the Canadian Museum of Civilization Gatineau in Quebec. In 2010 the exhibition reached the Bonn Museum in Germany and in 2011 the British Museum in London.

  In recent years the National Museum in Kabul has been rebuilt with the aid of UNESCO and various international donors, who gave in excess of $350,000 to the project. It is hoped that one day the Bactrian Gold will be displayed either in the renovated museum or a new building built in Kabul especially for the purpose. Organizers of Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul have described the story of the Bactrian Gold as “a triumph of culture and beauty over vandalism and bigotry.”1 Indeed it is a not only a story with a happy ending, but is also a symbol of hope for the future of Afghanistan, a country with a rich archaeological heritage, testament to its position at the crossroads for trade on the ancient Silk Road.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Staffordshire Hoard

  In July 2009 a local metal detectorist scanning a field in Staffordshire in the English Midlands came upon a large group of metal objects. What he was about to uncover was to change English history. The collection of about 1,500 late-sixth- to eighth-century gold and silver objects is the biggest Anglo-Saxon hoard of metalwork ever discovered anywhere in the world. Moreover, much of the metalwork is decorated with precious stones, some of which came from as far away as India or possibly even Sri Lanka. Parallels were immediately drawn with the magnificent objects from the world-famous Sutton Hoo ship burial, the seventh-century grave of a king buried in his wooden ship, discovered in East Anglia in 1939.

  What is most surprising is that the vast majority of the items in the Staffordshire Hoard are weapon parts and martial items; there are no domestic or feminine pieces at all. It has been speculated that the treasure is a collection of war trophies stripped from defeated enemies, but if so, who looted the items and why did they bury them together afterward? Was it pagans or Christians? The treasure points to a battle or battles fought by one of the kings of Mercia (an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of central England) but whether this was Penda (the last pagan king of Mercia), Wulfhere, or Æthelred, or, more interestingly, a previously unrecorded monarch of the area, only future research will tell.

  On the morning of July 5, 2009, Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old former coffin maker from Burntwood, was searching a recently plowed field in Hammerwich, near Lichfield in Staffordshire using his 14-year-old metal detector. Just before noon Herbert’s machine indicated something interesting below the soil and he began to dig down with a spade, eventually unearthing a piece of what he first thought was brass. On closer examination, however, he realized it may be gold and excitedly carried on digging until he had discovered several more pieces. Throughout the next five days, Mr. Herbert, who lived alone in a council flat on disability benefit, had filled 244 bags with the extraordinary finds and decided he needed help. As he was obliged to do under the 1996 Treasure Act, Herbert contacted Duncan Slarke, the Finds Liaison Officer for the Staffordshire and West Midlands Portable Antiquities Scheme, who is based at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (BMAG). An arrangement was then made with landowner Fred Johnson for an archaeological excavation to search for any remaining pieces from the hoard. All this had to be done in extreme secrecy to protect the site from so called “nighthawkers” (thieves with metal detectors who remove objects at night from protected sites), which was a difficult undertaking, as the location of the hoard was close to major roads and thus was extremely exposed to the public.

  The excavation of the field, funded by English Heritage and Staffordshire County Council, was undertaken between July 24, 2009, and August 21, 2009, by Birmingham Archaeology. By the end of the excavations the Staffordshire Hoard numbered 3,940 separate fragments and objects including silver, gold, and garnet-inlaid sword hilts, pommels, sword pyramids (toggles that may have been used to suspend scabbards belts), helmet fragments, and gold Christian crosses, all of extraordinary craftsmanship. There is so much material in the hoard that it doubles the amount of Anglo-Saxon metalwork so far discovered in England. In weight the hoard totals 11.2 pounds of gold, 3.2 pounds of silver, and includes an astonishing 3,500 cloisonné garnet
s. (Cloisonné is a style of enamel decoration where the enamel is applied and fired in raised cells on a metal background.) The outstanding items in the collection include a gold pectoral cross decorated with a circular filigree pattern with a red garnet in its center (such an item would have been worn by senior clergy or by wealthy Christian laypeople); an exquisitely adorned silver helmet cheek piece decorated with four bands of running, interlaced animals; a gold sword pyramid decorated with cloisonné garnets and blue glass; a gold sword hilt plate with zoomorphic decoration; a gold stylized horse or seahorse with exquisite filigree decoration; and a silver gilt strip inscribed with a verse from the Latin Bible “Surge domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua” (“Rise up, o Lord, and may thy enemies be scattered and those who hate thee be driven from thy face”).

  11.1. Hilt fitting from the Staffordshire Hoard. Photo by Daniel Buxton, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license on Wikipedia.

  The vast majority of the objects from the hoard are damaged in some way (either bent, twisted, scratched, or broken); although a small amount of this can be attributed to plow damage, most seems to have occurred before the items were deposited. Experts have theorized that this damage may have happened when the fittings were removed from their original settings (like the gold hilt plate, for example), and when objects were folded or compacted (as was one of the Christian gold crosses) to fit into the chest or vessel that probably once contained the hoard.

  Because there has been no similar find in terms of size and quality, drawing comparisons with the Staffordshire Hoard has been difficult. The closest parallel to the hoard comes from the site of Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, in Suffolk, in the east of England, which was first excavated just before the outbreak of WWII. The burial from Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo (one of many burials at the site) is thought to be of the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon King Raedwald, who died around AD 624, and was discovered under a large mound that contained a 90-foot-long wooden ship. The grave produced a stunning collection of finds, including gold and garnet weapon fittings, gold coins, silver vessels and silver-mounted drinking horns and cups, an iron sword with a gold and garnet pommel, and a magnificently decorated paneled helmet. The burial also contained domestic items such as bronze cauldrons, an iron-bound tub, and a bucket. There are certainly close similarities between the types of artifacts from the Staffordshire Hoard and those from Sutton Hoo, including the sheer quality of the craftsmanship evident in the items, their design, and the presence of a rare Anglo-Saxon helmet (though only fragments in the case of the Staffordshire Hoard). However, there are also many differences, such as the presence of coins and domestic items at Sutton Hoo. Unfortunately as the contexts of the two finds are so different, comparisons between them can only tell us a limited amount about the Staffordshire Hoard.