Chapter 1034 Exquisite Central Asian Relics

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As a former British colony, Afghanistan clearly has a tradition of using the pound sterling.

There are not a lot of dollars in the international currency in 45 sacks! With all the $100 bills, there are $225 million worth of 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 these gold, pounds and dollars, which most directly represent the units of wealth, the entire treasure room suddenly became much empty.

The only thing left is the big wooden box in the center of the room!

After untying the tarpaulin covering it, most of the wooden boxes that appeared in front of Liu Dong were listed together, with a length of 1.5 meters and a width and height of about 60 centimeters!

Of course, there are a few big ones, but only a few of them!

After a brief look, Liu Dong found that the periphery of these large wooden boxes was sealed with iron nails!

Judging from these sealed traces, many of these large wooden boxes have been piled up here for a period of time! Many iron nails have faintly appeared rust!

Only a few of them seem relatively new, as if they have just been stored in!

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 shock-proof cushion shaped like hay in the wooden box, what was originally just faintly revealing golden light appeared in front of Liu Dong!

This is a statue of Medicine Buddha made entirely of gold and about 70 centimeters high, but Liu Dong has never seen such an elaborate and wonderful Buddhist statue.

The scabbed-seated Buddha smiled, his lips slightly open, and spat out a golden lotus flower from his mouth, which extended from the corners of his mouth to the sides. The lotus petals are connected to the hair like a beard, and the design is extremely ingenious! The ornamentation on the body of the Buddha statue is also extremely exquisite, and there are more than a dozen gems inlaid around the body!

Judging from the aura emanating from the Buddha statue, this is a Buddhist statue left over from the period when the Kushan Kingdom occupied Afghanistan and dominated Central Asia and northwest India more than 1,600 years ago!

If you extrapolate from time. Equivalent to the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties of China!

The long history, coupled with exquisite workmanship and ingenious conception, as well as precious materials, constitute a national treasure of art!

Seeing that Liu Dong, who was happy to hunt his heart, held the golden Buddha statue in his hand and admired it carefully, he was a little reluctant to put it away and picked up another golden Buddha statue from the box again.

In contrast, this Buddha statue is slightly smaller, only about 40 centimeters high, but the casting is just as ingenious. The decoration around the Buddha's head is not the lotus flower that is common in Buddhist statues and ornaments, but the petals of sunflowers, which is probably the most peculiar of Buddhist sculptures!

However, both Buddha statues are from the Kushan Kingdom in the fourth century AD!

In addition to these two golden Buddha statues, there are no less than 70 large and small Buddhist statues made of gold in the entire box! The largest one is the 70-centimeter Medicine Buddha lotus statue that Liu Dong saw at the beginning, and the smallest one is only about 10 centimeters! But these Buddha statues are almost as exquisite. It embodies the Buddhist culture that once flourished in Afghanistan's history!

And what is almost identical is that they all came from the Kushan kingdom 1,500 years ago, when Mahayana Buddhism flourished only in Afghan history.

Wait until the people of Ida have destroyed the frost. With the rise of Zoroastrianism, and later the rule of Afghanistan by the Western Turkic and Tang dynasties, Buddhist culture has all but disappeared here.

After the Battle of Hengrus, the Arabs replaced the Tang Dynasty and established their rule here, and Islam completely replaced Buddhism here!

To this day, people can only rely on the many Buddhist sites more than 1,500 years ago. The pomp and circumstance of Buddhism during the Kushan period!

But even if it flourished for less than 500 years, Buddhism left a rich cultural treasure in Afghanistan today.

From the golden Buddha statues that Liu Dong saw in front of him, I can see the clues!

Moreover, these Buddha statues in the country of Mahayana Buddhism recorded in Tang Xuanzang's "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" are also very different from the domestic Buddhist statues in terms of casting technology and cultural connotation, which greatly enriches Liu Dong's collection!

Then, with excitement and anticipation, Liu Dong opened the second one until the 13th box. Almost all of them are Buddhist statues of different sizes, and the materials of these Buddhist statues include gold, silver, platinum, ivory, bronze, stone, wood and jade, and other materials that Liu Dong can think of, and the number of them is no less than 800!

With so many large and small Buddha statues combined, it can be called a history of Buddhist statues in Central Asia!

The only thing that makes Liu Dong feel a little pity is that many statues have been mutilated because of too long ago, and some even have only a lonely Buddha head left!

However, deep in Liu Dong's heart, the expectation of the remaining wooden box of Chinese objects exceeded these small regrets!

When he opened the 14th wooden box, it was no longer a Buddhist statue, but a sculpture with a clear Greco-Roman cultural style.

Historically, since Alexander's crusade allowed Greek culture to influence the entire Central Asia, at least a thousand years, the influence of Greek culture has been deeply engraved on this desolate land!

The later Seleucid and Bactrian dynasties made this influence even more profound!

At this moment, Liu Dong saw these full-body and half-length marble and bronze statues with a clear Hellenistic cultural style are the best proof of this history.

Of course, as the key point of the intersection of Eastern and Western civilizations, the Silk Road must pass through, Afghanistan left behind from China is obviously a lot of cultural relics, in these boxes Liu Dong found, with obvious Oriental culture of porcelain, gold, bronze! And the most typical is blue and white porcelain!

Although there is no fine product like the 'figure pattern jar', Liu Dong still found a lot of blue and white porcelain from the official kiln of the Yuan Dynasty!

It's just that there are not many cultural relics with obvious Greco-Roman culture and Chinese culture, and the two together do not exceed 10 boxes, and the number of pieces does not exceed 600!

In addition to about 9 boxes of gold and silver jewelry, ancient coins, and gemstone jewelry, nearly half of the boxes contain precious works of art left over from various dynastic periods in Afghan history under the influence of Islamic culture!

Including the icon of Allah Allah in Islam, as well as the four angels Jebr'ilai, Mika'ilai, Azra'ilai and Israfilai, plus various sculptures of the six messengers mentioned in the Qur'an, including Adam, Noah, Ibrahim, Musa, 'Isa and Muhammad!

Of course, there are also Qurans of various periods from the Abbasid dynasty to the Shir dynasty, the Safarid dynasty, the Samanid dynasty, etc., after the Arab Empire took control of Afghanistan at the beginning of the eighth century!

In addition to the gold and silver jewelry, there are nearly 2,900 pieces of cultural relics such as statues, murals, porcelain, stone tools, and jade in 67 wooden boxes!

Spanning the age from the 5,000 years of obscurantist stone tools, bone tools, to modern Islamic relics!

Among the nearly 3,000 antiques, there are three in Liu Dong's opinion: one of them is a stained glass bottle with a height of more than 1 meter from the Roman era in the third century BC!

Glass is also colored glass, in ancient China's Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, glaze was equivalent to a gemstone, and there were very few large pieces! Similarly, in the West, where the level of productivity was more backward, the time and energy spent on making a glazed ware was also extremely expensive! Liu Dong had seen such a huge glazed ware from BC for the first time!

A precious object like this is undoubtedly a treasure in any museum in that country!

Two of the three precious ones are not so much one as a set!

A golden spear about 250 centimeters long, plus a golden round shield with a diameter of 80 centimeters!

Both the golden spear and the golden shield have a distinctly Hellenistic style, for example, the spear is engraved with an olive pattern, and the surface of the round shield is engraved with the image of Ares, the god of war among the twelve main Greek gods!

If that were all there was to it, Liu Dong wouldn't have regarded these two weapons as the most precious treasures, even if they were all made of gold!

But if these two weapons are related to Alexander the Great, the 'Emperor of the Ages' in Western history, it will be different, especially the weapon is a highly symbolic thing!

When Liu Dong obtained these two weapons, he carefully compared the Greek text on them, and the meaning of the words on the golden spear was: "Alachosia will always submit to the king who rules all the territories under the sun, the great Emperor Alexander!"

Arajosia is not a human name, but the name of a province under the ancient Persian Empire, which included parts of present-day southeastern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan and northwestern India. The Helmand River flows through Arachosia and provides the most fertile land in Southern Afghanistan, the largest of which is now Kandahar!

Of course, after Alexander's crusade destroyed the Persian Empire, Alachosia naturally submitted to Alexander's command and became a province of Alexander's empire!

Like the golden spear, the inscription on the golden shield reads: "Bactria honors the king of Macedonia, and the emperor of Alexander's empire as his eternal master!"

Bactria and Arachosia both mean the same thing, and were both provinces under the Persian Empire before Alexander's conquest, but Bactria is located in the northeastern region of Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush!

………………………………………………………… (To be continued......)

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