KABUL, Afghanistan – More than 22,000 Afghanistan museum treasures, long thought to have been lost in the war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent cultural purge by the Taliban, have been located in bank vaults and other safe places where they were hidden by Kabul Museum officials.

The priceless Bactrian gold collection, precious ivories, bronze statues and other artifacts of 5,000 years of history on the Orient’s Silk Road – virtually all of the museum’s most precious items – were preserved despite the devastation engulfing the country, archaeologists said Wednesday.

The discovery of the Bactrian gold was announced this summer, but a just-completed inventory revealed that virtually all the museum’s most precious items are intact, said Oxford University archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert.

In the midst of the resistance against the Soviets, a team of curators in the early 1980s boxed up the most valuable pieces in the museum’s collection, stashing them in various vaults around Kabul, the Afghan capital. The curators used small safes, tin boxes, steel containers and anything else they could find at hand.

They then went “dead quiet,” said British archaeologist Carla Grissman, keeping their knowledge to themselves even as rumors floated widely about the destruction and looting of the museum’s contents.

They kept their secrets for a quarter of a century.

“These are the real heroes of this story,” said Hiebert, leader of the team that has been inventorying the newly rediscovered artifacts.

Because the once-missing artifacts come from so many different places along the Silk Road, he added, the find “has a significance well beyond Afghanistan and Central Asia. It’s of world importance.”

Because it straddles the Silk Road that camel caravans used to transport textiles from China to Europe and pottery, artworks and other materials in the opposite direction, Kabul was a prosperous city throughout much of civilization’s early history.

As a result, the museum held objects from a string of civilizations that conquered or traveled through the region, including the Bactrians, Kushans, Greeks and Buddhists.

Among the greatest treasures hidden away was the Bactrian gold, a collection of 20,457 golden objects excavated in northern Afghanistan in 1978 by Russian archaeologist Viktor Sariandi.

The collection included appliques from cloaks, figurines, clasps decorated with cupids riding dolphins, pendants depicting scenes of war, a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and an elaborate crown.