National Museum of Afghanistan

The National Museum of Afghanistan, in the Darulaman district of Kabul, holds one of the great collections of the ancient world. Founded in 1919 and moved in 1931 into a building opposite the Darul Aman Palace, it gathered finds from archaeological missions across the country: Greek objects from the city of Ai Khanum on the Oxus, ivories from Begram, Buddhist sculpture from Hadda, and the inscription of Surkh Kotal, written in Bactrian, an Iranian language, in Greek letters, under the Kushan kings.

Its most famous treasure is the Bactrian gold of Tillya Tepe in northern Afghanistan, excavated in 1978 by a Soviet-Afghan team led by Viktor Sarianidi from the graves of a nomad prince and five women of the first century CE. Some twenty thousand pieces of gold, crowns, belts, clasps and ornaments set with turquoise, mix Greek, Iranian, Indian and steppe styles.

During the civil war of the 1990s the museum was shelled and looted, and a large part of the collection was lost. In 2001 Taliban officials smashed many of its statues. Yet some of the staff had quietly hidden the most precious objects, including the Bactrian gold, in vaults of the Central Bank, and in 2003 the boxes were opened and the gold found intact. Since 2006 the treasures have toured museums abroad in the exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures, and objects stolen from the museum continue to be traced and returned.