When resellers of jewelry in 1880 showed gold antiques to the British Inspector General Alexander Cunningham, he immediately recognized the fake. No, the authenticity of the most precious metal was beyond doubt. But the experienced eye cannot be fooled: the jewelry was made quite recently. It was just right to detain the swindlers and bring them to justice.
Gift for Captain Burton
… The Samarkand merchants equipped another caravan in the spring of 1880. The path was not short, but the route was familiar: through Kabul to the capital of Pakistan, Rawalpindi. However, stopping in front of the Amu Darya for the night - the lands of the Afghan ruler Abdarrahman began across the river - the merchants learned that he had issued a decree on the confiscation of money from all those who entered. Goods - please, but cash - only in the minimum amount.
What to do? The merchants decided to buy jewelry in the nearest city of the Bukhara Emirate using surplus gold and silver coins - this is not prohibited. When the merchant laid out the jewelry in front of the buyers, they were very surprised: where did such beautiful old jewelry come from? It turned out that the inhabitants of nearby villages secretly from the authorities traded on the ruins of the Bactrian city of Kobadian - everything from there.
The merchants hid the purchased jewelry in bales of silk and other fabrics and safely passed the border. The trouble happened near the town of Sekh-Baba - robbers attacked the caravan and took away all the goods. Miraculously managed to escape the senior drover, who managed to quickly reach the representative of the British Empire in Afghanistan, Captain Francis Burton. He with a detachment of British soldiers gathered the residents of Sekh-Baba and nearby villages and delivered an ultimatum: either everything stolen is given to merchants, or all houses without exception will be burned.
There was nothing to do: by morning, almost all Samarkand goods and gold items were on the central square. The robbers were from the local - do not let the relatives down! Grateful merchants presented Burton with the most beautiful bracelet and set off - they reached Rawalpindi without incident. The trade was successful, and the price for jewelry was good.
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True, the guests from Samarkand did not know that they had sold almost 180 antique gold items to professional dealers. They decided to increase the already considerable profit: they not only raised the price, but also ordered a duplicate of each jewel of a slightly smaller size. Then they offered this remake to the British Inspector General Alexander Cunningham: in Pakistan and India they knew that he was collecting antique jewelry and there would be no business for money.
Immediately exposed, the fraudsters were forced to give Cunningham the original products. Subsequently, they were acquired from him by the London antiquary Augustus Franke, who donated the entire collection to the British Museum and partly to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Experts have confirmed that these are unique jewels produced by jewelers of ancient Bactria, and they are very expensive. As well as gold coins of this kingdom are expensive - not so many of them survived. Hence the corresponding collection value of millions of pounds. There was hope that new treasures could be found, but doing so in a traditionally turbulent region proved challenging.
Graves outside cemeteries
Bactria is worth talking about in more detail, because it is a truly legendary kingdom. Back in the 6th century BC, it became part of the Achaemenid Empire. Then Alexander the Great incorporated Bactria into his empire. Moreover, in 327 BC, he married the fifteen-year-old Bactrian princess Roxana. True, it was not without political overtones: although the girl was indeed surprisingly beautiful, in addition to this, the conquered kingdom became a bridge between the Hellenes and the barbarians. After all, Bactria at that time, not without reason, was considered the most developed kingdom in the East.
But 200 years later, it was invaded by nomadic tribes. They did not begin to destroy the cities of Bactria, but switched to a sedentary lifestyle, gradually adopting the Hellenic culture. Recent nomads, and then their descendants, paid special attention to jewelry made by masters invited from Greece. Moreover, the peculiarity of these products was that they intertwined motives inherent in different peoples: not only Greek, but also Egyptian, Iranian, Roman and even Siberian. In a word, it was an original style - a symbiosis of several cultural traditions.
As in a number of other ancient states, when the rulers and nobles were buried in Bactria, jewels, coins, expensive utensils were placed in the tombs. However, the mourning procedure itself was different: at night, slaves, right in the city limits, hastily dug secret pits - graves for the deceased and everything he needed in the afterlife. Then the slaves were killed, and only the closest relatives knew about the place of burial. Subsequently, they were forbidden to come to the grave, and it was considered a mortal sin to tell strangers about where it was. In other words, the cemetery as such did not exist for noble persons, and therefore the intruders could not plunder the rich burial.
Inhabitants of nearby villages stumbled upon several graves on the ruins of Kobadian, mentioned at the beginning of the article. Samarkand merchants acquired the jewelry from there.
Super warehouse
Almost a century later, just as accidentally, treasures were discovered near the town of Tillya-tepe, which means "golden hill". To be more precise, excavations at the sites of settlements of ancient Bactria have been conducted since 1969 by a Soviet-Afghan archaeological expedition looking for monuments of the Bronze Age.
But unexpectedly, in November 1978, a major success fell to the group of Tashkent archaeologist Zafar Khakimov. During the planned excavations, they came across a burial filled with gold items. For nine years, the pits were dug very close, and finally we got lucky! An expedition headed by the renowned specialist Viktor Sarianidi, consisting of six archaeologists, a restorer and three assistants, began work. All that was found was handed over to representatives of the Afghan government - excavations were carried out on the territory of this country. From mid-November to February 8, 1979, six burials were discovered, from where about 20 thousand (!) Gold objects were recovered, many of which were inlaid with precious stones.
Alas, further excavations (the seventh burial site had just been found) was prevented by the well-known events in Afghanistan. Moreover, local workers and guards, taking advantage of the confusion, worked hard on this seventh grave, appropriating and then selling jewelry in the markets of large cities …
But what was found by archaeologists did not disappear - everything was put in the safe of the Central State Bank in Kabul. Surprisingly, the Taliban who came to power could not find the Bactrian collection. This gave rise to a lot of rumors: either it was allegedly taken to Moscow by the Russians who entered Afghanistan, then the transfer operation was carried out by French intelligence, which successfully operated in the country before the arrival of Soviet troops.
Clarity came in 2003: President Hamid Karzai announced that the treasure had been found. In 2004, Viktor Sarianidi, who arrived in Kabul, confirmed the authenticity of the jewelry.
"Golden" tour
Since 2006, the Bactrian collection has been transformed into the exhibition “Afghanistan. Hidden Treasures”and began to travel around the world: Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, New York … Each stop - an average of six months. Dozens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors. On the one hand, it is the concern for the safety of the unique collection belonging to Afghanistan, and on the other, the opportunity to replenish the country's budget: all the funds earned by the exhibition go there.
Another thing is that periodically gold items and coins of ancient Bactria emerge from the same 7th tomb plundered in 1979. Moreover, no one knows how great it was - there is no information about it. But since the 1980s, characteristic jewelry has surfaced in Germany, Japan, France and other countries - they were offered by immigrants from Afghanistan or professional resellers.
From the end of December 2015 to June 19, 2016 the exhibition “Afghanistan. Hidden Treasures”visited Japan - in Kyoto and Tokyo. It featured 231 exhibits. The collection's journey to the Land of the Rising Sun ended with its replenishment: representatives of the Ministry of Information and Culture of Afghanistan were handed over 102 gold items that were illegally taken out of Kabul during the civil war, and they ended up in Japan. Most likely, this is not the last find of this kind.
Oleg Nikolaev