At least it's away from the Taliban

who destroyed the ancient mountain side Buddahs with tanks, if you recall. ("...Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, where two giant Buddha statues once stood. The statues were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001. The statues, nearly 2,000 years old, were one of the world's greatest and least-studied cultural treasures. International experts are now in Afghanistan, studying the possibility of restoring the statues.")



"It was a mystery of legendary proportions. When a 2,000-year-old treasure trove went missing from Afghanistan's National Museum in the 1980s, the rumors abounded: Did the Soviets take it? Was it looted and sold on the black market? Were 22,000 pieces of gold, jewel-encrusted crowns and magnificent daggers melted down and traded for weapons?

As it turns out, none of these plausible scenarios ever happened. Instead, a mysterious group of Afghans had stowed the so-called Bactrian gold underground and guarded its secret for over two decades of war and chaos. This month, some of the artifacts are on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris."