Woman on a Makara
Think of all the wondrous lessons about war that curious lump of central Asia, today’s “Afghanistan,” has taught us.
Along the banks of the Oxus, man learned to tame and ride warhorses. So came the Chariot Empires. So, too, on saddle, rode Tamerlane, slayer of worlds.
John Keegan wasn’t wrong to remind us that Turk warriors crossing the Oxus battered down Rome, Hungary and much of Eastern Europe, Asia and Arabia, too.
Afghanistan inspired both Abdur Rahman and Flashman. It’s been conquered by Medes, Aryans, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Sassanians, Indian Buddhists and Muslim Arabs, and in its own odd way sort of conquered the Soviets, too.
I suppose we’re also getting something of an Afghan primer written in blood, but as Americans we give more than we get.
Often nicknamed (bone-headedly) the “Graveyard of Empires,” in reality Afghanistan is a pathway of invaders who most often make parts of it the impoverished rump of their kingdoms.
Just another one of those unfortunate spots on the globe across or from which go land armies in search of spoils in China, India, Persia or the Steppe. Some of those gems polished by invasions one way or the other are on display in London through mid-July at The British Museum.
That show is called, more appropriately, “Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World.” And I would love to see it.
*****
Unfortunatley, parsimonious Military.com won’t send me to London to take it all in, so I’ll have to review the Greek gildings, Bactrian baubles and Bamiyan Buddhas online. The British Museum was swell enough to put much of the show on virtual display, perhaps a gesture to cheap-assed milblogs everywhere.
We’ll begin with what “Afghanistan,” the museum show, wants to be before getting to what it most fantastically and satisfyingly becomes.
The show is obviously designed as sort of a cultural ambassador of Kabul under the current, probably temporary, rule of a Karzai kleptocracy that’s preserved only by NATO arms and money.
The jug-eared scoundrel Hamid Karzai opened the show. Two minutes into his address, I noticed that my wallet had been shuffled under his flowing violet and green robe, most probably to fund his favorite opiate charity.
How he picked my pocket through an internet connection is beyond me, but there you have it, one of the great wonders of Afghanistan! Whatever he dunned me for, however, I guarantee he’s gotten much more from the NATO taxpayer.
With cameras rolling, Karzai fibbed gently about the “heritage” of a “peaceful Afghanistan” as a “nation” that was being “revitalized” — and I would’ve applauded the sheer chutzpah of his cant almost as loudly as the polite London dignitaries, but I was still looking for my wallet.
In a cheery short film confected by National Geographic in 2008, Afghanistan’s Deputy Minister of Information and Culture, Omar Sultan, dutifully echoes Karzai by saying he would “like to show the world that we are going from the culture of war to the culture of peace.”
To drive home that branding effort, the newsreel ends with a raggedy banner flapping in the Afghan dust, “A Nation Stays Alive When Its Culture Stays Alive.”
In other words: “Keep Karzai Alive!”
*****
Perhaps Karzai’s hard sell is why this Afghan antiques roadshow reminds me of so many “national” museums I’ve visited in Africa and Asia, edifices built in the years following the collapse of European colonialism to house whatever the white men didn’t ransack for their own dusty halls.
These third world museums become repositories of whatever the dominant tribes, dictators or political parties currently in power invented to sanction their rule. Most often, the myths of nationhood are spun from sheer fiction.
But they might be essential legends for the survival of ersatz states composed of ethnically diverse peoples corralled into faux colonial borders drawn up in Paris or London hundreds of years ago.
If a few untrue captions and a grab-bag of repurposed artifacts help a strongman prevent a country from imploding into sectarian violence, well so be it. But that doesn’t mean I have to buy into the taxonomy of myths when I visit his museum, right?
None of what I say above is original. For several decades, anthropologists and other scholars have been reminding us about just how politicized museums can be, often waterboarding us with the opaque jargon of “hegemonic control” and “conflicts of cultural politics,” “ethnomimesis,” “cellularity,” “discursive meaning” and “silent texts in potentia.”
Because deep down I love you, I won’t do that here. And there’s no need for the post-modern jack hammering anyway.
You see, what’s so wonderfully unusual about the Afghan galleries in London is how splendidly the treasures on display rebel against the ham-handed efforts of the British politicians and Karzai’s emissaries to make them serve their current foreign policy goals.
The ancient Afghan media, it appears, aren’t very good messengers. But they have intriguing messages from their ancient past (with all apologies to Marshall McLuhan, of course).
*****
It’s certainly a jumbled lot, those Afghan artifacts.
A golden crown from the 1st century ACE excavated in Tillya Tepe is supposed to be the show stopper, but I much prefer the part-Greek, part-Indian “Woman Standing on a Makara,” an ivory and bone inlay sculpture from Begram, plus all the bestial deities London has imported for us.
Of course, I’m something of a sucker for bare-breasted women with blue horns on their heads.
Click here for the 3rd century BCE “Ceremonial Plate with a Representative of Cybele,” a dream-like plate rendered in silver and gold from Ai Khanum, a fortified city along the Oxus that was the farthest outpost of Greek civilization in the ancient world.
Or, as the British Museum’s archivists remind us, as far away from Athens as Tasmania would be from London.
*****
Along those seams of empires – and Afghanistan has long been the seamiest of the lot – Bactrian mixed with Greek, Buddhism with Islam, Hindus with Zoroastrians, Chinese dragons with Egyptian porphyry.
Because all these influences are so tossed together in the art, we begin to see just how halved the truth becomes when Karzai and his ambassadors speak of an “Afghanistan” or a “culture” or one “people.”
Like its art, the curious geography of the fictional state we term “Afghanistan” really has created many cultures and nations, and we should rather bless the goodly men who preserved those works for us.
The online show pays homage to the half-dozen surreptitious curators of the Afghan Museum who saved these last handfuls of artwork from war, looters and the Taliban during the darkest days of Kabul’s recent past.
But I would’ve played them up more. These brave and crafty gents are the real heroes emerging from the galleries, men in mustaches and ties who dared to defy the men in beards and bandoliers, and against all odds actually won.
I might be willing to fight a thousand wars for these honorable fellows, not the Karzai flunkies and warlords on holiday likely to visit the galleries. I envision the latter quietly mulling how they might melt the artifacts down to gold to store in their Swiss vaults, if they could just find a way to do it.
But that’s probably mere cynicism. They likely would be moved by the art, too, even if the works aren’t going back to Afghanistan, where it’s far too dangerous for them to be stored.
Every day, illiterate warlords order bulldozers and peasants with pick-axes to peck from the earth priceless funerary bowls, Greek erotica and lacquered Han vases, all contraband for sale to culturally illiterate bond traders in Manhattan or software engineers in Shanghai.
So perhaps London’s temporary treasures will be crated up and moved from one NATO member’s capital to another, vagabonds shuffling along the railways of global high culture, golden and gleaming hobos protected forever by our well-meaning curators and constables.
*****
When the first U.S. Special Forces parachuted into Afghanistan in 2001, very few of them likely realized that tens of millions of people divided into 55 distinct ethnic groups sprawled out beneath them.
Or that those many sorts of conquered people would combine to speak 45 different languages. Or that the eldest amongst them had lived under 17 different national flags.
We often don’t ask our SF teams to curate museum showings, but after nine years of bustling about the Hindu Kush they likely would rename the London show.
“Conduit of Conquests” would be a better title because invaders often brought their language, culture, religion and DNA through “Afghanistan” on their way to where they really wanted to go, destinations like India, China or Iran.
These cultural, theological and linguistic markers remain sprinkled haphazardly in the crannies of Afghanistan’s mountain valleys, hills and hollows that are hardly impermeable but rather quite porous, which is why the warmaking innovations mentioned at the top of this essay percolated along the Oxus and were used to flay other, softer peoples ripe for conquest.
There is no more a “national” culture of Afghanistan than there is a “nation” of “Afghans,” although we’re trying vainly to build one and all, which might be half our problem.
We seem to buy into that fluttering sign in Kabul, stenciled in English, signaling what we want to hear, not what Afghans are shouting at us in their many dozens of tongues.
The noun “Taliban” is plural. There’s no more a single sort of “Taliban” than there is an Afghan National Army that represents all 55 disparate peoples.
Perhaps because it’s so meaningless to say that one is an “Afghan” so many souls in the failed county will tell pollsters that they’re one of those useful fictions.
And Americans and Brits have been the quickest to actually believe them!
If you go to the London show, stay for the fantastic hodgepodge of gods and jewels and blades and Buddhas. But don’t buy the politics behind the baubles or the slogans wheezed cynically at you by the very Karzai kleptocrats who ransacked Afghanistan’s treasures to feed their war machine against the Taliban in the first place.
Enjoy the excavated wonders in spite of all of them, even in defiance of them.
The artifacts surely will help you do just that.
Tags: Afghanistan, art, artifacts, bestial goddesses of Greece, Hamid Karzai, The British Museum
