The British Museum’s role as communicator of global culture continues with its latest exhibition, Afghanistan: Cross-roads of the Ancient World. The curators have approached the subject with the institution’s usual conceptual diversity, bringing together a range of artefacts from the Bronze Age to the first century AD. The position of this land-locked country is across trade-routes linking cultures from as far afield as China and the Mediterranean, whose disparate influences are apparent throughout the British Museum’s presentation.

Cross-cultural influences permeate the exhibition, which presents items discovered in four sites in northern Afghanistan, including the ancient region of Bactria. In the making of material culture, distant and local cultures are merged; a winged Aphrodite has a pinched Indian waist and a bindi specific to local tribes, while Cybele’s chariot shows Persian rather than Greek origins. Corinthian capitals from Afghanistan, enamelled Roman glass from Egypt, and Indian carved ivories and inlaid jewellery are only some of the objects on display.

Tillya Tepe means ‘hill of gold’, a six-grave site that yielded over 20,000 gold artefacts and semi-precious stones. The breathtaking crown of a nomadic princess, comprising hundreds of gold pieces with granulated decorative features, rightly takes centre stage. Yet for all its sophisticated intricacy, it can be carefully dismantled into six flat pieces, a clever nomadic design feature to aid travel.

The artefacts on display have only survived thanks to a few courageous and dedicated curators who secreted them during the civil war in 1992-94 to prevent iconoclasm and vandalism by the Taliban. The British Museum display follows the reopening of the National Museum of Afghanistan in 2003, which has loaned the items out of a desire to share its rich and thought-provoking heritage with the world, and indeed everyone benefits from the survival of these treasures.

Until Jul 3

MARIA GRASSO