An Afghan Collection Rebuilt Twice

The museum that Afghans call the Kabul Museum began as a royal collection under King Amanullah in the early 1920s, formalised as a national museum and moved into its present building near the Darulaman Palace on the edge of Kabul in 1931. Its core collections were built through twentieth century excavation, much of it led by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, which worked sites from the Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum to the multicultural trading post of Begram, whose ivories, Roman glass and Chinese lacquer became some of the museum's most famous holdings. Gandharan Buddhist sculpture, recovered largely from the region around Hadda near Jalalabad, gave the museum an important collection of the Greco-Buddhist art that grew where Hellenistic and Indian traditions met along the old trade routes into Central Asia.

The museum's twentieth century growth was undone within a few violent decades. Rocket fire during the civil war of the 1990s destroyed much of the building and its contents, and after the Taliban took Kabul, an edict in 2001 against pre-Islamic and figural imagery led to the deliberate smashing of thousands of remaining Buddhist and Hindu sculptures, an act condemned internationally alongside that year's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. What the museum now shows is therefore not a single continuous collection but a reconstructed one, built from objects staff managed to hide, from pieces recovered after being smuggled abroad, and from conservation work supported by foreign governments and museums after 2001.