Explore Afghanistan's treasures ten years on from the Taliban

The British Museum exhibition Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, serves as a rich reminder that, despite the seemingly constant conflicts of recent decades, Afghanistan was once a cultural and trading hub of major significance. 

Located at the centre of the Silk Road, in antiquity this was a cosmopolitan land, familiar – so the exhibits reveal – with Roman glass, Egyptian porphyry, Indian ivory and Chinese lacquer. In many cases, the cultural fusion even existed in one and the same object – for instance, in the gold appliqué of Aphrodite with an Indian bindi mark on her forehead.  

With poignant timing, Afghanistan arrives exactly 10 years after the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, two Afghan treasures that deplorably haven’t survived to the present day. Both statues had been in the Gandhara style, with the Enlightened One wearing a Greek-style toga, further examples indeed of artistic interchange between east and west.

For the Taliban government of 2001, though, Afghanistan’s history began with the advent of Islam; a pair of giant, sixth-century monuments to the founder of another faith had no place. All notions of cultural and epochal pluralism went out of the window. 

The town of Bamiyan in north Afghanistan had been a busy junction on the old Silk Road, but the Taliban chose to wave a fundamentalist V-sign in both directions from it – east and west, at both Buddhism and Hellenism. The country’s entire past was to be re-interpreted in myopically Muslim terms. 

The Buddhas, carved into the Bamiyan Valley’s sandstone cliffs, were just the two most notable of 3000 pre-Islamic statues and artefacts systematically destroyed by the Taliban. This most illiberal of regimes – rooted in a reductive interpretation of Islam – considered the Buddhas as offensive a sight as an uncovered woman and demanded that they be likewise obscured from public view. 

Once standing at 38 and 55 metres tall respectively, the statues were reduced by dynamite to myriad tonnes of rubble, leaving only their vast, empty niches as legacy. The world stood aghast, incredulous that such iconoclasm wasn’t even the product of a live conflict with a rival faith – there hadn’t been serious Buddhist worship in Bamiyan for centuries. 

The tallest Buddha statues in the world – one originally painted pink, the other white, both adorned with garments of clay – stood sentinel over the valley and town of Bamiyan for 1500 years, witnesses to countless fluctuations of empire and conquest below. They represented a creativity of expression anathema to the Taliban.   

By November 2001, of course, the Taliban had been overthrown after US invasion, and since then hopes have been raised continually that – true to the Buddhist principle of reincarnation – the statues may yet rise again from the rubble. Every few months or so, an exciting story appears about the latest plan to rebuild them. Last month it was the turn of Erwin Emmerling, professor of Conservation science at the University of Munich, who declared the goal “fundamentally achievable” by injecting the fragments with synthetic chemicals designed to aid their binding.

Emmerling’s proposal comes on the back of collaboration since 2003 between UNESCO and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, which has ensured the stabilisation of the cliffs and niches – as well as conservation of the Buddhas’ remains on the valley floor. Indeed, the Bamiyan site is set to be removed from UNESCO’s “Danger” list this summer, meaning reconstruction could theoretically soon begin. 

Yet, how realistic a prospect is this? For the most part, the remains consist of mere rubble, while many of the larger, potentially recognisable fragments were smuggled away after the explosion to art dealers in Pakistan. 

The Buddhas’ reconstruction would serve as a powerful metaphor for the reconstruction of Afghanistan as a whole, as President Karzai – a long-time proponent of rebuilding – is well aware. What more potent symbol than their unveiling could there be for US withdrawal from the country in 2014? Yet, one suspects such talk may be letting political emotion get in the way of reason.

Creating replicas of the two statues has also been mooted – out of sandstone or even concrete – which would make a more practical, if less satisfactory, solution. And there have been no end of wacky ideas from contemporary artists too, most notably that of Japan’s Hiro Yamagata, who proposes setting up a laser system that would project 3D images of the Buddhas into their erstwhile niches. 

Others, meanwhile, have suggested leaving the niches empty, as Buddha-shaped holes, conspicuous by what’s absent, as gaping testaments to Taliban barbarity. But theirs are rare voices indeed. The world lamented as one the loss of two treasures of our shared cultural heritage. And, in some form or other, it seems intent on a Humpty Dumpty act that’ll piece them back together again.  

Alastair Smart is the Arts Editor for The Sunday Telegraph