Every piece of antiquity that is restored to the halls of the bombed, pillaged and now rebuilt National Museum of Afghanistan sends a message of defiance and resilience.
These are messages to the Taliban, who in 2001 smashed every museum artefact that they could find that bore a human or animal likeness. But these are messages for others as well: to the warlords who looted the museum, some of whom are still in positions of power in Afghanistan; to corrupt custodians of the past who stood by while some 70,000 objects walked out the door.
Just a few years ago, the National Museum here was defined by how much it had lost — some 70 percent of its collection destroyed or stolen, including precious objects dating back to the Stone and Bronze ages, through Zoroastrianism and Buddhism to early Islam, and documenting some of the world’s most mysterious ancient cultures.
Now, it might better be defined by how much it has regained.
Three hundred of the most important of the 2,500 objects the Taliban had smashed have been painstakingly reassembled in recent years, and many of the others are arrayed in boxes and trays, awaiting their turn for restoration.

The looted objects have also been returning, as word has gotten around to customs agents worldwide about how to identify Afghan artifacts. In recent years, Interpol and UNESCO have teamed up with governments around the world to interdict and return at least 857 objects - some of them priceless, like 4,000-year-old Bactrian princess figurines that had disappeared from the National Museum. Another 11,000 objects have been returned after being seized by the border authorities at Afghanistan’s own frontiers.
A recent security upgrade at the museum financed by the U.S. government was just completed, at least some hedge against the kind of pillaging that has plagued the institution repeatedly over the past 3 1/2 decades.
And a team of archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute are halfway through a three-year-long grant from the U.S. government to register every object in the museum’s collections, creating a digital record. Intended to guard against future theft, the project will also help with restorations, and serve as a resource for scholars worldwide.
“If you don’t know what you have, you can’t protect it,” said Michael T. Fisher, the American archaeologist heading the Chicago team. “When you do, the whole story opens up, and it’s incredible what you can see. A lot of the collection is world class.”
Presiding over this institution is Omara Khan Masoudi, who does not have a degree in archaeology, but has even more impeccable credentials: he is one of the key keepers. These are the men who kept the keys to the vaults where some of the museum’s greatest treasures were hidden, including the Bactrian Hoard, a collection of exquisite gold and silver artifacts dating back more than 2,000 years.
Through guile and deception, Masoudi and his fellow key keepers kept many such valuables - the ones most easily melted down - safe during the country’s wrenching civil war and the following stretch of Islamist rule.
They hid some of the best statues in rooms at the Ministry of Culture, or in obscure corners of the storerooms scattered around the museum, preserving many before the Taliban’s rampage in March 2001. In those few weeks of fury, Islamist fighters raced to destroy images of people or animals, which they considered sacrilegious, including the giant ancient Buddha statues of Bamian province.
Afterward, people like Abdullah Hakimzada, a restorer who has spent the past 33 years working at the museum, were on hand to sweep up the fragments of the objects that the Taliban smashed - sorting many of them hurriedly into sacks and boxes that later would help the reassembly work.
“If we had enough time and resources at our disposal, we could restore everything,” he said.
Hakimzada was also one of the key keepers, to three safes inside the presidential palace that the Taliban never found.
After years of damage by the Taliban and the warlords, many of whom looted the museum’s collections on demand for wealthy collectors, the museum was a mess when it reopened in 2004. Its storerooms were stuffed with boxes and bags of fragments, and even intact objects had deteriorated during the years the museum’s roof was largely missing.
Since then, a series of archaeological teams, mainly French, have helped put it back together again. Restorers like Hakimzada were sent abroad to study the techniques of restoration at museums in Europe and America. When Fisher’s team went to work registering and digitizing the collection in 2012, it was like doing archaeology on the museum itself. “Sometimes we feel like we’re excavating the present, going through the museum and seeing what has happened,” he said.
Along the way there have been striking discoveries, many of which are yet to be put on display for lack of exhibition space and resources. A new home for the museum is planned, but it is still in the fundraising stage