Painted Glass Goblet from the Begram Hoard

A painted glass goblet from Room 13 of the Begram hoard, one of hundreds of objects sealed into two locked storerooms at Begram, north of Kabul, and excavated by a French mission led by Joseph and Ria Hackin between 1937 and 1939. Made by blowing colourless glass and firing polychrome pigment onto its surface, the goblet belongs to a class of painted vessels attributed to a workshop in Roman Egypt, most likely Alexandria, and is one of roughly fifteen such goblets among a wider hoard of some 180 glass vessels, alongside Indian ivories, Chinese lacquer and Roman bronzes.

What the sealed rooms actually were remains disputed: the Hackins read them as a Kushan royal treasury, Sanjyot Mehendale has argued for a merchant's warehouse of trading stock, and Lauren Morris's more recent research questions the ritual-versus-utilitarian framing behind both readings. The goblet's own modern survival is equally dramatic. While the wider museum collection was devastated during Afghanistan's civil war, a portion of the treasure, hidden in a Central Bank vault from 1989, was found intact in April 2004 and later exhibited internationally, including a run at the British Museum in 2011, before returning to Kabul.

This record covers only this one goblet. The Begram hoard's other glass, its ivories, lacquer and bronzes are separate objects with separate histories, and no image of them should be mistaken for this piece.

One goblet from a hoard of hundreds

This record covers a single painted glass goblet from the Begram hoard (also called the Begram Treasure), held by the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. The hoard itself runs to hundreds of objects in several materials: Indian ivories and bone carvings, Chinese lacquerware, Roman and Alexandrian bronzes, plaster medallions, and roughly 180 glass vessels of many types. This page describes one specific object within that glass group, recorded with the findspot Room 13. It is not a record of the hoard as a whole, and no photograph of another Begram object, glass or otherwise, should be read as showing this piece.

The goblet is a blown glass vessel decorated in fired polychrome paint, a technique associated with workshops in Roman Egypt. It survives, along with the rest of the Begram hoard, as one of the most extraordinary and most contested archaeological finds from Kushan-era Afghanistan: extraordinary for what it says about first-century trade between Rome, India, China and Central Asia, and contested because scholars still disagree about why it was sealed into a locked room and never retrieved in antiquity.

How a painted goblet like this was made

The Begram painted goblets, of which this is one, were made by blowing a vessel in colourless glass and then decorating the surface with pigment, most likely powdered coloured glass suspended in a flux, which was fused to the body by a second, lower-temperature firing. The technique produced durable, brightly coloured figural scenes on a transparent ground, a specialism closely associated with Roman Egypt and, in particular, with Alexandria.

Alexandria's reputation for inventive glasswork was noted by writers in antiquity. The Greek author Athenaeus, writing around 200 CE, records that the people of Alexandria worked glass into many varied shapes of cups, copying the shape of every kind of pottery imported to the city from elsewhere. The passage is a general statement about the industry's virtuosity and its habit of imitation across materials; it does not describe this goblet, and it is not evidence for what this particular vessel depicts, but it is contemporary testimony to the reputation of the workshops now credited with producing the Begram painted-glass group.

The find: two sealed rooms at Begram

Begram lies north of Kabul, on the site of ancient Kapisa, also known in the Hellenistic and Kushan periods as Alexandria ad Caucasum. Between 1936 and 1940 the Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan (DAFA), directed by Joseph Hackin, excavated the site. Within a building on Begram's Site II, the mission's excavators, led on the ground by Ria Hackin, uncovered two rooms that had been bricked up and sealed in antiquity: Room 10, opened in 1937, and Room 13, opened in 1939.

Inside were hundreds of luxury objects packed together: Indian ivory and bone furniture fittings, Chinese lacquer bowls, Graeco-Roman bronze statuettes and plaster medallions, and glassware from Alexandria and the eastern Mediterranean coast, including the painted goblets. This object is recorded as coming from Room 13, the later of the two sealed chambers to be opened.

What the rooms were: a dispute that has never closed

Joseph and Ria Hackin, who found the rooms, read them as a royal storeroom, proposing that Begram served as a summer residence of the Kushan kings and that the two chambers held a royal treasury, sealed up, in their reading, to protect it from the Sasanian Persian army that threatened the region in the mid-third century CE. For most of the twentieth century this was the standard account of the hoard.

Sanjyot Mehendale, whose doctoral research and subsequent publications reassessed the Begram ivories, has argued instead that the two rooms are better explained as a merchant's shop or warehouse of trading stock rather than a royal treasury. On this reading the glass, bronze and other Mediterranean goods travelled by sea from Roman Egypt and the Levant to ports on the western Indian coast, then overland by caravan to Begram, a node on the routes now loosely grouped under the label Silk Road; the ivories, in turn, were plausibly worked by itinerant Indian craftsmen conversant with several regional carving traditions rather than accumulated as royal gifts.

A third position complicates both readings rather than choosing between them. Lauren Morris, in a 2021 doctoral dissertation on the Begram hoard and a subsequent public lecture, has questioned the underlying assumption, shared by the Hackins and by Mehendale, that a sealed deposit of valuables must be read as either a pragmatic, utilitarian concealment or a ritual, votive one. Morris argues the categories themselves are not as clean as the debate assumes, and proposes that the hoard's deposition could postdate the mid-third-century Sasanian threat invoked by the Hackins, extending as late as the end of the third or the start of the fourth century CE. No consensus exists among these three positions, and this record does not adjudicate between them.

This goblet within the wider Begram glass corpus

The glass historian David Whitehouse, reviewing Michael Menninger's 1996 monograph on the Begram glass, put the surviving corpus at roughly 180 vessels, many represented only by fragments, sorted by Menninger into thirteen typological groups. Painted, or enamelled, goblets of the kind catalogued here form one recognisable class within that corpus: figural scenes documented on other examples from the same hoard include the abduction of Europa, Zeus and Ganymede, gladiators in combat, a hoplite, and figures harvesting dates, alongside cut and relief glass in other groups entirely.

What this specific goblet depicts is not identified in the sources consulted for this record. Where other Begram goblets are individually named for their subject in museum and photographic documentation, the surviving record for this piece, tied to a single 2011 photograph taken during its loan to the British Museum, describes it only as a large painted goblet from Room 13. That is recorded here as a gap, not filled with a guess.

How Roman glass reached a Kushan trading post

Whichever interpretation of the sealed rooms is correct, the presence of Alexandrian glass, Chinese lacquer, Indian ivory and Roman bronze in the same building is itself evidence of Begram's position on a long-distance exchange network linking the Mediterranean, South Asia and East Asia in the first centuries CE. Mehendale's reconstruction of the glass and bronze's route, sea carriage from Roman Egypt and the Levant to ports near the modern coasts of Pakistan and western India, then overland by caravan, is argued rather than documented at the level of an individual shipment, but it accounts for the physical evidence: Mediterranean luxury goods arriving intact and in quantity at a Central Asian city with no glass industry of its own.

A single painted goblet is a small, portable, high-value object exactly suited to that kind of trade: light enough to carry a long distance, valuable enough to be worth the journey, and durable enough, unlike many contemporary trade goods, to survive nearly two thousand years intact.

The 1922 partage and two national shares of one hoard

Under an agreement signed in 1922 between France and Afghanistan, finds made by French archaeological missions in Afghanistan were divided between the excavating institution and the Afghan state, with the Musee Guimet in Paris receiving a share and Afghanistan retaining the unique and exceptional pieces for the National Museum in Kabul. Begram material excavated under this framework in 1937 and 1939 was split accordingly. This goblet remained part of the Kabul collection. Other painted goblets from the same excavation, including examples depicting the abduction of Europa and combat scenes, are today held by the Musee Guimet under the French share of the same 1937-1939 finds; several are illustrated among the related works below for comparison, not as views of this object.

Survival through war: a hoard hidden while a museum was destroyed

The National Museum of Afghanistan's public operations were disrupted by the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, and the collection suffered catastrophically once civil war reached Kabul in the early 1990s. Fighting damaged the museum building directly; by the mid-1990s an estimated seventy percent of its roughly 100,000 objects had been looted or destroyed, ancient pottery collections were damaged by a 1993 rocket strike, and by 1994 the building itself, by then also used as a military position, was largely wrecked. Surviving material was moved to the Kabul Hotel for safekeeping.

Against that record of loss, part of the treasure survived by a different route. In 1989, before the worst of the fighting, museum staff removed a portion of the collection, described in the sources consulted as the Bactrian hoard and other artifacts, to an underground vault at the Central Bank of Afghanistan, an operation supervised by the museum's director, Omara Khan Masoudi. Begram glass goblets are recorded among the objects later found in that vault. The sources consulted document this at the level of the object class, Begram glass generally, rather than confirming that this specific goblet, as opposed to some other custody route through the museum's disrupted 1979-2001 history, was part of the vaulted group. That distinction is recorded here rather than smoothed over.

Rediscovery, April 2004

In April 2004 a team of roughly thirty archaeologists and Afghan cultural officials assembled at the Central Bank to open the vault. Six safes had been sealed since 1989, and the keys were missing; a locksmith cut one open with a circular saw in about fifteen minutes. The American archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, present that day, later recalled the tension of the moment: I could just imagine opening the safe to find a big, hot lump of melted gold. Roughly 2,000 objects were inventoried, and none had been damaged in the years underground.

Back on display: the international tour

Objects from the rediscovered Afghan national collection, including material from Begram, subsequently toured internationally under the title Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. In the United States the exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in May 2008 and closed there in September 2008, and was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from June to September 2009, with further American venues at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Renamed Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World for its British showing, the exhibition appeared at the British Museum, London, from March to July 2011. This goblet is specifically documented at that venue: it was photographed there by a museum visitor on 2 June 2011, the image now held on Wikimedia Commons and used as the lead plate for this record. The sources consulted do not establish a precise date for the object's return to Kabul after the exhibition closed, nor a full list of any further cities the loan group visited into 2012 or 2013; that gap is recorded in the open questions below rather than filled with an assumed itinerary. This loan tour is a separate matter from the unrelated 2012 restitution to Kabul of a group of looted Begram ivories that had been illicitly trafficked out of Afghanistan and recovered by UK authorities; nothing in the sources consulted links this glass goblet to that theft-and-restitution case.

The museum today

When the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, the National Museum of Afghanistan's director, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, moved quickly to secure the building, enlisting Taliban fighters as guards; the museum reopened to visitors on 25 November 2021. Rahimi and his staff, including women, kept their positions but went unpaid in the months after the takeover, and the museum reported frequent power outages.

International cultural bodies responded publicly to the change in circumstances rather than offering a verdict on any individual's conduct. UNESCO's Director-General, Audrey Azoulay, said the organisation was committed to exercising all possible efforts to safeguard Afghanistan's cultural heritage. The International Council of Museums' president, Alberto Garlandini, warned of a very real risk to the personal safety of Afghan heritage experts and of the danger of robberies and looting at heritage sites where security had broken down. Greece's culture minister, Lina Mendoni, said publicly that no one could, at that point, guarantee the safety of collections in Kabul, and the archaeologist Ute Franke reported hearing of attacks on heritage sites at Bamiyan. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on cultural rights, Karima Bennoune, called protecting Afghan lives and cultural heritage the top priority and urged safe passage for cultural workers. None of the sources consulted for this record reports damage to the Begram material specifically since the museum's 2021 reopening.