The IsMEO Italian Archaeological Mission in Afghanistan was active between 1957 and 1978. Its work focussed on excavations in Ghazni and uncovered two major sites, the Ghaznavid Royal Palace and an aristocratic dwelling named “the House of the Lustrewares”. By agreement with the Afghan government, the Mission was permitted to take a third of the excavated finds to Italy, where they were housed in the specially established Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale in Rome. The museum collection was then supplemented by donations from members of the Mission of objects which they had acquired personally while in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the work of the Mission was not limited to archaeology, it also surveyed several museum collections producing photographic records and notes of about 115 metal items in the Kabul National Museum, most of them acquired locally but also including the Maimana Hoard from NW Afghanistan which had been brought to the museum for conservation, and nine metal items in the Mazar-I Sharif Museum. In Ghazni, the Rawza Museum of Islamic Art housed the material newly excavated by the Italian Mission as well as other local acquisitions which were fully documented with photographs and notes in 1976. The work of the Mission was abruptly halted in 1978 due to the unstable situation which has continued in Afghanistan to this day. Since then, occasional brief visits by the Mission have reported Museums closed, damaged by war and neglect, and with most of the collections assumed lost.

This catalogue sets out to publish as much information as possible on the ninth- to thirteenth-century metalwork recorded by the Italian Mission, from old notes, photographs and drawings from the excavations, and from the surveys of museum collections, supplemented by the Afghan metalwork in the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale in Rome catalogued by the author. The catalogue is organized by function and shape of the object, followed by a comment section summarizing features of any groups, and then small black-and-white images (when available) of the objects. A chapter summarizing some general characteristics of the metalwork included draws it all together. Finally, there is a chapter on the metalwork excavated in Ghazni. The catalogue salvages the time and effort expended by a team of scholars over a long period and makes their work accessible for future generations, as well as providing a record of material, much of which is now missing. The academic world is indebted to Valentina Laviola for undertaking this painstaking and selfless work and IsMEO and the University of Naples are to be congratulated on sponsoring its publication.

The great value of the catalogue is that it provides a generously illustrated record of material excavated/found/acquired in a particular region and in sufficient numbers that specific object types can be confidently assumed to have been locally produced. Similar objects have swamped auction houses and dealer shops in London and elsewhere for the last 50 years. Unfortunately, enthusiastic archaeologists may have pointed the way to buried treasure for the desperate inhabitants of an impoverished, war-torn country and effectively established a checklist of the most desirable (valuable) artefacts. Some of the objects in this catalogue may have arrived unrecognized and devoid of provenance as part of this lucrative trade. The catalogue enables these orphaned objects to be seen in some sort of context.

Clearly Ghazni was a centre for cast metalwork in a variety of shapes, much of it sculptural with projecting knobs and bosses, others imitating pierced, repoussé or engraved sheet metal in gold and silver that rarely survive. Much of the sheet metalwork is hammered into a mould to create light, thin-walled shapes of standard types but with a great variety of moulds to create the repoussé motifs that decorate it. The Mission did not survey Herat, the centre of the luxury sheet metal industry, but some of the high-spouted ewers for which it was famous are in the catalogue, some of them probably contemporary imports. In contrast to the rich variety and sheer number of objects acquired locally, the contents of the chapter on Excavated Metalwork (to be read with Annex D “Excavated metalwork by area of provenance”) is a disappointment. The finds are inconsequential and include many items of jewellery which are otherwise excluded from the catalogue (as are coins), and with only a general indication of findspot without any associated evidence for dating. Perhaps these details are missing from the surviving documentation, but without them, the objects in this section are no more informative than other objects acquired locally.

This large volume includes more than 400 objects and runs to 549 pages. Understandably, it was necessary to limit the material by date to the ninth to thirteenth centuries, but this allows traditional assumptions about chronology to blur the result. Are the kohl flasks on plate 136 as early as suggested? Very similar kohl flasks appear regularly on the market and are attributed to nineteenth-century India. Are the stirrups on plate 159 Ghaznavid? They resemble nothing else in the catalogue in manufacture or design and are strikingly similar to stirrups attributed to the nineteenth-century Deccan. Is bowl no. 155 really from eleventh–thirteenth century Afghanistan? It is the sole example of this shape in the catalogue but it is a bowl type common in western Iran and Syria in the fourteenth century. It is perhaps churlish to ask for more, but a second volume (or even a photographic database) to include the rest of the material would be very welcome.