July 11 (Bloomberg) -- The towering Corinthian columns wouldn’t look out of place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman galleries.

They reside for now in “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” a dazzling exhibition at the New York museum that serves up the country’s Hellenistic past instead of its war-torn present.

Many of the objects on display disappeared in 1988, only to resurface 15 years later after the National Museum was bombed and repeatedly looted by the Taliban and others. Museum curators revealed that they had hidden the artifacts in a vault at the presidential palace in Kabul.

The common perception of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has been so closely linked to its fundamentalist culture that it’s hard to imagine the country when Islam didn’t even exist.

Yet the region once was an oasis of trade and cultural cross-pollination, as shown by the exhibition’s treasures -- local gold artifacts, Greek statuettes, Indian carvings and Chinese dragons -- taken from four archaeological sites.

In 1966, farmers in the northern village of Tepe Fullol dug up several gold bowls, dating from about 2,000 B.C. The artifacts reveal both a human presence in the area in the Bronze Age and trade ties to the more developed civilization of Mesopotamia.

The second site, Ai Khanum, was one of the largest Greek- style cities founded in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the area in the 3rd century B.C.

Buddhas Destroyed

That’s more than 700 years before two colossal Buddhas, one of Afghanistan’s biggest treasures, were carved into the side of a cliff in Bamiyan valley. Eight years ago the Taliban destroyed them.

The Ai Khanum artifacts include a 7-inch bronze statuette of Herakles dating from around 150 B.C. and a head of a pensive young man made with unfired clay in the early 2nd century B.C.

A stunning ceremonial plaque created around 300 B.C. depicts Greek goddesses Cybele and Nike on a lion-drawn chariot. The grainy dark-silver background highlights gilt robes, a road, sun and crescent.

The ancient city of Begram was a bustling hub of commerce along the Silk Road in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. In the years 1937-39, French archaeologists discovered a sealed warehouse overflowing with the period’s exotic goods from as far as China and Egypt.

Harvesting in Tunics

A radiant enameled glass from Egypt, painted about 1,000 years before Murano craftsmen set up near Venice, depicts date harvesting, with male and female laborers in vibrant yellow and blue tunics. Begram’s ivory plaques feature voluptuous, Indian- looking women, with tiny waists and round hips. In one elaborately carved piece, bejeweled matrons stand under gateways, hugging children.

The fourth site, Tillya Tepe, was discovered in 1978 by a team of Soviet and Afghan archaeologists, a year before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They found a nomadic family group of six tombs from the 1st century A.D. containing the remnants of a chieftain, five women and about 22,000 gold items.

Baltic Amber

The tombs contained ceremonial weapons and jewelry, buttons, belts and boot buckles -- some inlaid with turquoise from Iran, Afghan lapis lazuli, amethysts from India, pearls from the Arabian Sea and Baltic amber. It’s a visual ledger of international trade around the 1st century A.D.

One standout is a foldable gold crown, adorned with tree shapes and tiny disks. Another highlight is an elaborately carved sheath featuring a Chinese dragon, surrounded by a pattern of turquoise hearts.

This collection of Afghan treasures has been at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. One place it hasn’t been seen, for security reasons, is Afghanistan.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. Information: + 1-212-535-7710; http://www.metmuseum.org. The exhibition is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and a donation from Raymond and Beverly Sackler.

(Katya Kazakina writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 11, 2009 00:01 EDT