WASHINGTON: You can go see Indiana Jones and the temple of whatever if you like, but it’s probably not going to be as good as the Bactrian Gold and the Secret of Tillya Tepe.

The former is at any multiplex. The latter is only at the National Gallery of Art.

It’s one of those ripping good yarns of yesteryear, the kind you used to see on cliffhanger serials before the main feature. This one is set in a dusty corner of Afghanistan. It’s about ancient art, sealed rooms, looters, gravediggers, the Russians, the French, the Taliban, an invasion or three, civil war, the Silk Road, the Dragon Master and 22,607 pieces of gold and ivory and lapis and turquoise. There’s a princess in Tomb I, a surprising role played by pink Chinese toilet paper and six mysterious safes in a sealed underground vault at the presidential compound.OK, so the plot gets a little crowded. That tends to happen when your story is true and covers more than 2,000 years.

The show is “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul,” and it is a remarkable display from a remote outpost in the world of antiquity: a dusty land of foreign traders, violent nomads, dangerous women and the unmistakable glint of gold. It has a great subplot of archaeologists winning one against the black market. It opens Sunday and plays until Sept 7. Like any good archaeological thriller, this one features valuable antiquities and modern twists, set into world-shaping international politics. After being covered by dirt and mud for nearly 2,000 years, most of the artifacts in this show were discovered in digs made during the 1930s or the 1970s. Then, once found, they were lost again, as the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the rise of the Taliban in 1996 raised successive clouds of dust over their whereabouts. Most archaeologists feared they had been lost forever to the black market or destroyed by the Taliban.Then, three years after the Sept 11 attacks and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban, the sealed cases and footlockers were opened in vaults in the Arg, the Afghan presidential compound in Kabul.

Nobody was sure what was in them the keys had been lost until they were broken open with a hammer, crowbar and finally a power saw.

“This power saw starts going bbbrrrzzzzttt!!! and the sparks are flying, and at first I thought we were going to open them to find a couple of potatoes in a sack with a note saying, ‘We got here first! Your friends, the Taliban,’ ” says Frederik T. Hiebert, the show’s curator, who was representing the National Geographic Society when the safes were hacked open. “Or I thought the sparks would set something on fire, and it would burn up all these great artifacts inside.”

Hiebert’s worries were well founded. It turned out much of the ivory and gold and glasswares had been packed in pink Chinese toilet paper. Which did not catch fire, and instead had preserved tens of thousands of items the wider world has not seen since the time of Christ.

Here was the fabled Bactrian gold, named for the region in Afghanistan where it was found, in the graves discovered at a place called Tillya Tepe (“hill of gold”): Bracelets. Necklaces. A golden belt. A woman’s crown, thin hammered orbs of gold, designed to be pulled apart into five pieces and stored flat. Pendants depicting the Dragon Master of lore, a nomadic man holding a dragon’s foreleg in each hand. Here, in another case, ivory carvings from the ancient warehouses found in archaeological digs in the city of Begram. A woman astride a mythical leogryph. A fish-shaped flask, made of glass, stunningly blue. A bronze statue of the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis-Heracles. More than 23,000 objects in all. Goods that had been passing through here from China, Egypt, India, Greece, or made in workshops in Bactria itself. Historians were dazzled at the testament to the mix of cultures that artisans there worked with: Here, a golden Aphrodite, Greek in concept, but with an Indian forehead mark denoting marital status and the wings of a Bactrian deity. Northern Afghanistan had gone multi-culti 2,000 years ago.

“This is probably our best picture of how the Silk Road actually worked,” Hiebert is saying, giving a walk-through of the exhibit. He gets enthusiastic, pointing to a series of decorative plaques. They are flat and rectangular and carved of ivory. They depict women in various poses, sitting, standing, reclining. All these were part of an elaborate chair or throne, the rest of which is missing. On the adjacent wall, a flat-screen monitor shows a rotating three-dimensional re-creation of how all the pieces would have been placed together on the throne. “This is the first time in 2,000 years anyone has seen that throne,” Hiebert says.

The Silk Road of which you’ll hear much in this exhibit was not actually a single thoroughfare, but a series of trails, pathways and trading routes that ran from Rome, Greece and Egypt, and stretched all the way to China, with connections to Siberia, India and Persia. Those roads pretty much all ran through northern Afghanistan. Alexander the Great came and founded Greek cities. The exhibit showcases a snapshot of what some of life would have been like in that remote era.

“Nowhere in antiquity have so many different objects from so many different cultures Chinese mirrors, Roman coins, daggers from Serbia been found together in situ,” Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist who made the historic find at Tillya Tepe in 1979, wrote in National Geographic in 1990.

As recounted in that article, he was the leader of a joint Soviet-Afghan project that had been digging among ancient ruins in the region, off and on, for nine years. In 1978 he spotted a bit of painted potsherd on a nearby hillock.

They dug beneath it. They uncovered a confusing site, as layers of villages from about 300 B.C. were lying atop the ruins of a massive edifice of walls and turrets more than 1,000 years older. That edifice had been built and collapsed and rebuilt, and apparently sat unused for more than 600 years. And amid these ancient ruins, they made a remarkable discovery: Tombs, from perhaps the 1st century A.D.

“Soon a grave emerged from beneath our picks and scoops. Staring at us were the hollow eye sockets of a skull, a young woman between 25 and 30, perhaps a princess,” he wrote.

Layers of gold and jewelry lay about her collapsed skeleton. Nearby, five more graves were unearthed, the remains of a well-to-do nomadic family, apparently all of whom died at the same time.

It was a historic find, but civil war and the Soviet invasion were closing in. Sarianidi got the artifacts from the first six graves to Kabul before war broke out. He left in February 1979. Two more graves had been discovered, but were “apparently looted” by the guards hired to guard them, he wrote. “Artifacts similar to the ones we discovered have turned up for sale.”

He photographed the items he had found in 1982 in Kabul, but they were not seen again.

In the intervening years, the national museum was bombed. Tons of Afghan artifacts turned up in Europe, traded on the black market. The Taliban, which did not allow graven images, destroyed more than 2,500 pieces of artwork in the museum. Archaeologists figured Sarianidi’s historic find had been sold off, melted down or destroyed.

Also missing were artifacts from Begram that had been unearthed by a French and Afghan team in the 1930s. Digging north to south along the site of an ancient city, archaeologists discovered a series of rooms. Two of them were bricked off in ancient times. No one knows why. There is a sepia-toned photograph from 1937, taken at the entrance of chamber known as Room 10, the mud wall twice as tall as a man in the doorway. Inside was a warehouse of ancient trading goods: ivory carvings, statues, figurines, jewelry, glassware, from all over the ancient world. At first thought to be a treasure hoard of a royal family, it is now believed to be simply the warehouse of a trader, storing goods between expeditions.

The find was thrilling in its day, but again, war intervened: World War II ended the dig. The artifacts were shipped to the national museum in Kabul and duly lost.

It turns out they were in the footlockers in that vault in the Afghan presidential compound, the same place the goods from Tillya Tepe were taken. A small society of “tahilwidars”, or keyholders, had kept them safe, never saying a word about the treasure. Omara Khan Masoudi, the director of the national museum, was one. After the country was stabilised, they informed Karzai, and the world found them again.

“To me, this exhibit isn’t just about archaeology, it’s about keeping culture alive, about real heroism in hiding and saving these artifacts,” Hiebert says.

Well, of course. Every story, even a 2,000-year epic, has to have a lean-jawed hero. Those guys never say much.—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post