In denial over its Buddhist past, the birthplace of the Buddha and one of the earliest to adopt and spread the Dharma to the west, Afghanistan's fanatical Muslim Taliban tried to erase history (Afghannetwork.net). Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban, an exhibition opened at the British Museum this week showcasing more than 200 examples of Afghanistan's cultural heritage over the last 4,000 years.
The exhibition, which has toured internationally since 2006, was inaugurated by President Karzai on Tuesday.
Among the items on show are 2,000-year-old artefacts from the ancient city of Bagram, north of today's capital, Kabul. "These are an extraordinary set of ivories stolen from the National Museum in Kabul, bought by a London dealer specificallyto return them, restored by conservators at the British Museum… and after the exhibition they will go back," says Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.
According to estimates, more than 70% of the artefacts at the National Museum in Kabul were looted and destroyed during the civil war of 1990s. The Taliban ransacked and destroyed much of our cultural heritage and the surviving items are a credit to the bravery of some Afghans who risked their lives to save them.
If you are in London, do visit the exhibition to see the richness of our cultural heritage, and a different picture from Afghanistan than the headlines of war.
It was not the looting of the museum in Kabul that brought the brutalities of the Taliban to the world's attention, but the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. More>>
World's largest statue of the Buddha (note red truck for scale), in what was once a monastic cave complex in the northernwestern frontier of India, ancient Gandhara, near the real Kapilavastu, where the historical Buddha grew up (Afghannetwork.net)
The Path to Destruction
(Observer.co.uk, 2002) In his latest online Afghanistan dispatch, Jason Burke returns to Buddha-less Bamiyan and reflects on how the Taliban's act of cultural destruction marked a turning-point for the regime.
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan - It is an astonishingly beautiful place. Overhead a keen, high altitude wind hauls thin streaks of cirrus across the bright, clear blue sky. To the south there are high mountains, covered in thick spring snow. Beneath them there are the rocky brown slopes of the rolling hills sliced by steep, narrow valleys that finally broaden into one plain ten miles wide and full of fields and low mud houses and slender ash trees that are painfully graceful.
Their faces were tall and sharp, their clothing woven with patterns never seen in ancient China. Nothing about them made sense.
For centuries, old chronicles spoke of “yellow-haired tribes” roaming China’s far west — tales dismissed as wild exaggerations or legend. But these bodies proved the stories were real.
