Afghanistan exhibition opens 3 March
On the eve of the exhibition opening, we’re now very excited about seeing this exhibition opening to the public too.
Over the last month, we have been working with eight colleagues from Afghanistan who, as curators, conservators, archaeologists and specialists, travel with the objects on loan from Afghanistan’s National Museum to oversee their installation and deinstallation at each exhibition venue.
At the Museum, they were welcomed by the Middle East department and introduced to many other departments across the Museum before we got down to working on the objects themselves, which range from Greek style Corinthian capitals to delicate gold jewellery.
We established a system of condition checking each object with Yahya Mohibzada (Deputy Director, Kabul Museum) and Abdullah Hakimzada (Conservation Dept, Kabul Museum) with our Curatorial and Conservation departments before installing the exhibition. This checking process can sometimes give the opportunity for us to learn a bit more about the objects before installing them in the exhibition space.
One of the display cases in the exhibition will show the first tomb to have been discovered at the first century AD site at Tillya Tepe. The skeleton was of a woman aged between 20 and 30 years, buried lying on her back. Her clothes were covered in hundreds of gold ornaments, stitched on to the cloth.
British Museum scientists and conservators worked with Afghan colleagues to analyse four black beads on a necklace from this hoard. The beads had been previously described as wood – but there was some doubt about this. Although they were covered in consolidant (which made it difficult to obtain accurate readings as we weren’t able to take samples) the team discovered that the beads were in fact probably made of jet.
With this discovery made, the Museum assistants Sarah Price and Xavier Duffy were then ready to recreate within the exhibition space the layout of the earrings, headdress and gold appliqués on the figure as she appeared in the tomb.
In addition to working on the installation, we have also been visiting some of the many museums and institutions in the UK that have wonderful collections of material from Afghanistan acquired from the nineteenth century onwards.
We visited the British Library where curator John Falconer showed us photographs by John Burke, official photographer to the British Army in Afghanistan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) and detailed drawings by Charles Masson, the first of the European travellers to Afghanistan to record sites and monuments. Masson deserted the East India Company in 1827 and pioneered archaeology in Afghanistan. His accurate drawings of monuments such as Babur’s Tomb, Minar-i-Chakari and the Buddhas at Bamiyan have helped with modern research.
We also went to Oxford to look at Gandharan Buddhas and Kushan coins in the Ashmolean Museum. In the Pitt Rivers Museum we were shown wooden carved figures from Nuristan. The National Museum in Afghanistan has a collection of these figures on display, some mounted on horseback, but several were damaged by the Taliban.
تعليقات
إرسال تعليق