The unsettled political conditions apparently encouraged clandestine diggings, and it seems that the ancient Bactrian region, centred in the Oxus valley which lies to the north of the Hindukush range, has been a good source of trade in illicit antiquities. In fact, the looted Bactrian graves, or rather, their antiquities surfacing in the western market, have been the major factor behind the postulate of an Oxus Civilization from the second half of the third millennium BC to about the middle of the second millennium BC.
Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003)
The national museum in Kabul which was inaugurated in 1924 and the most important repository of the excavated material from Afghanistan, has been systematically looted. To put this looting in its proper perspective we have to consider some recent events of Afghan political history. The Soviet troops were in Kabul in 1979 to protect the pro-Communist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In late 1988 or early 1989 these troops went back to Russia, after fighting a losing war against the Afghan rebel groups or the Mujahideen who were liberally supported by Pakistan and the USA. The Islamic State of Afghanistan was established in April 1992, but there was no love lost among the rival factions of the Mujahideen. Kabul witnessed considerable fighting, and in the ensuing chaos the museum was looted, perhaps on several occasions. In an article (museum under siege’) in Archaeology in 1996 Nancy Dupree (1996), a well-known American scholar on Afghanistan, offered a list of the important looted material. This amounts to about 70 per cent of the museum’s material comprising most of its vast gold and silver coin collections, stone statuaries and ivories and also the famous Islamic metalwork of the Ghaznavid dynasty.
Dilip K. Chakrabarti - Archaeology in the Third World, A History of Indian Archaeology Since 1947. (2003)
