National Museum of Afghanistan

The museum that Afghans call the Kabul Museum began as a royal collection under King Amanullah in the early 1920s, formalised as a national museum and moved into its present building near the Darulaman Palace on the edge of Kabul in 1931. Its core collections were built through twentieth century excavation, much of it led by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, which worked sites from the Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum to the multicultural trading post of Begram, whose ivories, Roman glass and Chinese lacquer became some of the museum's most famous holdings. Gandharan Buddhist sculpture, recovered largely from the region around Hadda near Jalalabad, gave the museum an important collection of the Greco-Buddhist art that grew where Hellenistic and Indian traditions met along the old trade routes into Central Asia.

The museum's twentieth century growth was undone within a few violent decades. Rocket fire during the civil war of the 1990s destroyed much of the building and its contents, and after the Taliban took Kabul, an edict in 2001 against pre-Islamic and figural imagery led to the deliberate smashing of thousands of remaining Buddhist and Hindu sculptures, an act condemned internationally alongside that year's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. What the museum now shows is therefore not a single continuous collection but a reconstructed one, built from objects staff managed to hide, from pieces recovered after being smuggled abroad, and from conservation work supported by foreign governments and museums after 2001.

The Buddha's Alms Bowl is one of the pieces that survived both the war years and the smashing campaign, too large and too plain to be worth looting or destroying as devotional figural imagery, and it remained in the collection through the museum's worst decades. Two Chinese pilgrim monks, Faxian in the fifth century and Xuanzang in the seventh, described a venerated bowl of the Buddha kept in the Gandhara region centuries before it entered the modern museum's catalogue, though the object's chain of custody between the pilgrims' account and its cataloguing in Kabul cannot be independently traced, and the museum's identification of the surviving bowl with the one the pilgrims saw is traditional rather than documented.

The museum's recent history illustrates a wider Afghan repatriation problem: thousands of objects looted from the museum and from illegal excavations during the war years surfaced later in markets and private collections abroad, and years of negotiation have returned many of them, most famously the Bactrian gold hoard, discovered in 1978 and kept safely in a bank vault through the war rather than in the museum itself, unlike many other pieces. Since the Taliban's return to power in 2021, foreign governments and heritage bodies have voiced concern over who controls the museum and its remaining holdings, and public access has been reported as intermittent. The atlas records this as an open and unresolved question of governance rather than settling it.