The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb made 1922 a magical vintage for archaeology. The fact is less known, but that year also marked the official entry of this science into Afghanistan, this great crossroads of Central Asia where the Indian, Chinese, Persian and Turkish worlds meet, not to mention the distant influences, in space and time, of Greece and Rome. The National Museum of Asian Arts-Guimet (Mnaag) is taking advantage of this centenary to offer a new Afghan exhibition recounting these hundred years of archaeological excavations largely carried out by French people.
Why France anyway? As Nicolas Engel, curator of the Afghanistan-Pakistan collections at the Mnaag and co-curator of this exhibition, reminds us, “In 1919, following the third Anglo-Afghan war, the country regained total independence. King Amanullah, in love with modernity, wants to develop Afghanistan on the European model, through two vectors: education and culture. He appealed to France, renowned for its network of French high schools and for its excavations in Persia, Syria and Lebanon. » In 1922, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA) was born.
The convention on which it is based provides for the sharing equally between the two countries of the objects discovered, with the exception of unique pieces and those made of precious materials, which will remain in Kabul. Even if this sharing gradually ceased from the 1950s, it enriched the Afghan collection of the Guimet Museum and, therefore, that of this exhibition. Fortunately, moreover, because, due to the latest upheaval in the tumultuous history of Afghanistan, the said exhibition had to do without some of the works originally planned: “All loans from Kabul were made impossible by the return to power of the Taliban on August 15, 2021”, explains Nicolas Engel. Never mind: the objects that could not travel are present through photographs.
Bruises and the dark side
In the title of the exhibition, “Afghanistan: Shadows and Legends”, the word “shadows” also speaks of the difficulties of working in the country during the past century: Soviet invasion, war civilian, two seizures of power by the Taliban separated by a military intervention of the United States and NATO after the attacks of September 11. So many dark periods during which archeology went into hibernation. To this must be added the destruction of some 2,500 statues by the Taliban, including the famous monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were blown up in 2001.
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