National Museum of Afghanistan (institutional record)

The National Museum of Afghanistan's own custodial record is the institution's account of an object it holds, covering its acquisition and its documented survival through decades of war, including the Taliban's 2001 destruction campaign against pre-Islamic and Buddhist material and the museum's own celebrated recovery of items smuggled out and later returned. Its strength is direct custodial standing, the institution physically holding the object is best placed to state its accession history and present condition, and the museum's post-war reconstitution is itself a well documented act of cultural preservation worth citing on its own terms. Its limit is that a holding institution's record establishes provenance and custody rather than settling an object's deeper archaeological or art historical meaning, so a claim about what the object signified in its original Gandharan or Buddhist-era context needs a scholarly source engaging that question, with this record cited for where the object is and how it survived rather than what it meant.