Chapter 1034: Exquisite Central Asian Cultural Relics
Chapter 1034: Exquisite Central Asian Cultural Relics
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As a former British colony, Afghanistan obviously has a tradition of using pounds.★∷Xia Ke Chinese Network▲℡
However, the remaining 45 sacks contain a lot of U.S. dollars, the international currency! With all the 100-dollar bills, there are a full 225 million U.S. dollars in banknotes stored here!
Comparing the current exchange rate between the US dollar and the British pound, the value of the two is not much different!
After Liu Dong put away the gold, pounds and US dollars, which most directly represented the units of wealth, the entire treasure room suddenly felt a lot empty.
The only thing left was the large wooden box in the center of the room!
After untying the tarpaulin covering it, most of what appeared in front of Liu Dong were long wooden boxes arranged together, with a length of 1.5 meters and a width and height of about 60 centimeters!
Of course there are some big ones, but they are only a few of them!
After a brief inspection, Liu Dong discovered that the outer edges of these large wooden boxes were sealed with iron nails!
Judging from these storage traces, many of these large wooden boxes have been piled here for a long time! There is already faint rust on many of the iron nails!
Only a few of them look relatively new, as if they were just stored there not long ago!
After opening the wooden board on the top of the large wooden box, a faint musty smell first rushed into Liu Dong's nostrils, making him frown.
After removing the hay-shaped anti-shock cushion in the wooden box, something that originally only had a faint golden light appeared in front of Liu Dong!
This is a Medicine Buddha statue made entirely of gold and about 70 centimeters in height. However, Liu Dong has never seen such a delicate and wonderful Buddhist statue.
The Buddha sitting on the scab is smiling, his lips are slightly open, and a golden lotus comes out of his mouth. The lotus extends from the corners of his mouth to both sides, and the lotus petals are connected to his hair like beards. The idea is extremely clever! On the Buddha statue The decoration is also extremely exquisite, with more than a dozen gems inlaid all over!
Judging from the aura emanating from the Buddha statue, this is a Buddhist statue left over from the powerful period of the Kushan Kingdom that occupied Afghanistan, dominated Central Asia and northwest India more than 1,600 years ago!
If calculated in terms of time, it is equivalent to the Southern and Northern Dynasties of China!
The long history, coupled with exquisite workmanship, ingenious conception, and precious materials, constitute an art treasure that can be called a national treasure!
Liu Dong, who was delighted to see the hunting spirit, held the golden Buddha statue in his hands and admired it carefully before putting it away with some reluctance, and picked up another golden Buddha statue from the box again.
In comparison, this Buddha statue is slightly smaller in size. The height is only about 40 centimeters, but the casting is equally skillful. The decoration around the Buddha's head is not the lotus that is common in Buddhist statues and decorations, but sunflower petals. This Probably the most peculiar Buddhist sculpture!
However, both Buddha statues come from the Kushan Kingdom in the fourth century AD!
In addition to these two gold Buddha statues, there are no less than 70 gold Buddhist statues of various sizes in the entire box! The largest one is the 70-centimeter lotus statue of Medicine Buddha that Liu Dong first saw, and the smallest one is also Only about 10 centimeters! But these Buddha statues are almost equally exquisite. They reflect the once prosperous Buddhist culture in Afghanistan’s history!
And they are almost identical in that they all come from the Kushan Kingdom 1,500 years ago, which was also the only period when Mahayana Buddhism flourished in the history of Afghanistan.
By the time the Kushans were destroyed by the Kushans, Zoroastrianism rose, and later the Western Turkic Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty ruled Afghanistan, Buddhist culture had almost disappeared here.
After the Battle of Henglus and the Arabs replacing the Tang Dynasty and establishing rule here, Islam completely replaced Buddhism here!
To this day, people can only remember the prosperity of Buddhism in the Kushan period more than 1,500 years ago from many Buddhist sites!
However, even if it only lasted for less than 500 years in its prosperous period, Buddhism has left a rich cultural treasure to Afghanistan today.
We can see the clues from the golden Buddha statues that Liu Dong saw in front of him!
Moreover, these Buddhist statues from the Mahayana Buddhist country recorded in Tang Xuanzang's "The Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" are also very different from domestic Buddhist statues in terms of casting technology and cultural connotation, which greatly enriched Liu Dong's collection!
Then Liu Dong opened the second box with excitement and anticipation. When he got to the 13th box, there were almost all large and small Buddhist statues of different shapes. The materials of these Buddhist statues included gold and silver.
, platinum, ivory, bronze, stone, wood, jade and other materials that Liu Dong can think of, the total number is no less than 800!
Together, so many large and small Buddha statues can be regarded as a history of Buddhist statues in Central Asia!
The only thing that makes Liu Dong feel a little pity is that many of the statues have become incomplete due to the long time ago, and some even have only a solitary Buddha head left!
However, deep down in Liu Dong's heart, his expectations for the cultural relics in the remaining wooden boxes outweighed these slight regrets!
When he opened the 14th wooden box, what appeared was no longer a Buddhist statue, but a sculpture with obvious Greco-Roman cultural style.
Historically, since Alexander's Eastern Expeditions allowed Greek culture to influence the entire Central Asia, the influence of Greek culture has been deeply engraved on this desolate land for at least a thousand years!
The later Seleucid dynasty and Bactrian dynasty made this influence even more profound!
The full-length and half-length marble and bronze statues that Liu Dong saw at this moment with obvious Greek cultural styles are the best proof of this period of history.
Of course, as the hub of the intersection of Eastern and Western civilizations and the only place that the Silk Road must pass through, Afghanistan obviously has a lot of cultural relics from China left over. Among these boxes, Liu Dong discovered porcelain with obvious oriental culture.
Gold ware, bronze ware! And the most typical one is blue and white porcelain!
Although there is no exquisite product like the "large jar with human figures", Liu Dong still found a lot of blue and white porcelain from the official kilns of the Yuan Dynasty among them!
It’s just that there are not many cultural relics with obvious Greek and Roman culture and Chinese culture. The total number of them does not exceed 10 boxes and the number of pieces does not exceed 600! But every one of them is a fine product!
In addition to the remaining approximately 9 boxes of gold and silver jewelry, ancient coins, and gemstones, nearly half of the boxes contain precious artworks left over from various dynasties in Afghan history under the influence of Islamic culture!
Including the icon of Allah of Islam, as well as the four archangels Jibrael, Mikael, Azrael and Israfil, plus Adam and Noah mentioned in the Quran
, various sculptures of the six messengers including Ibrahim, Musa, Jesus and Muhammad!
Of course, there are also Qurans from various periods after the Arab Empire took control of Afghanistan in the early eighth century, from the Abbasid Dynasty to the Shir Dynasty, the Safar Dynasty, the Samanid Dynasty, etc.!
In addition to the thousands of pieces of gold and silver jewelry, there are nearly 2,900 pieces of various statues, murals, porcelain, stoneware, jade and other cultural relics in the sixty-seven wooden boxes!
It spans the ages from stone tools and bone tools from the savage era of more than 5,000 BC to various Islamic cultural relics in modern times! And almost every piece is a masterpiece, as if it has been carefully selected before being placed here.
pass!
Among the nearly 3,000 antiques, Liu Dong thinks there are three in total: one of them is a 1-meter-high colored glass bottle from the Roman era in the third century BC!
Glass is also colored glaze. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period in ancient China, colored glaze was equivalent to gemstones, and there were very few large pieces! Likewise, in the West, where productivity levels were more backward, the time and energy it took to make a piece of colored glaze was extremely high! It is so huge.
Liu Dong saw this glassware from BC for the first time!
No matter which museum in which country a precious object like this is placed, it will undoubtedly be a treasure!
Two out of three precious ones are not so much one piece as a set!
A gold spear about 250 centimeters long, plus a gold round shield 80 centimeters in diameter!
Both the golden spear and the golden shield have an obvious Hellenistic style. For example, the spear is engraved with olive patterns, and the surface of the round shield is engraved with the image of Ares, the god of war, one of the twelve main gods of Greece!
If that were the case, Liu Dong would not regard these two weapons as the most precious treasures, even if they are all made of gold!
But it would be different if these two weapons were related to Alexander the Great, the ‘one emperor through the ages’ in Western history, especially for something as highly symbolic as a weapon!
When Liu Dong obtained these two weapons, he carefully compared the Greek text on them. The meaning of the text on the golden spear was "Arahosia will forever surrender to the king who rules all territories under the sun, the great Emperor Alexander!"
"
Alachosia is not the name of a person, but the name of a province under the rule of the ancient Persian Empire. It includes present-day southeastern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan and northwest India. The Helmand River flows through Alachosia and provides
The most fertile land in southern Afghanistan, the largest city is now Kandahar!
Of course, after Alexander conquered the Persian Empire and destroyed the Persian Empire, Alachosia naturally surrendered under Alexander's command and became a province of Alexander's empire!
Same as the golden spear, the Greek text inscribed on the golden shield means: "Bactria honors the King of Macedonia and the Emperor of Alexander as its eternal master!"
Bactria and Alachosia here have the same meaning. Before being conquered by Alexander, they were both provinces under the rule of the Persian Empire, but Bactria is located north of the Hindu Kush Mountains.
Northeastern Afghanistan!
………………………………………………………………(To be continued.)
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