The treasure from Tillya Tepe has gone missing once before. During the 1990s the National Museum of Afghanistan was looted several times with the loss of numerous items that had been on display. However in 2003 the Bactrian Treasure from Tillya Tepe was found to have been safely hidden away in a secret vault under the Central Bank of Afghanistan in Kabul. Apparently in 1989 the last Communist president of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah, had ordered the hoard moved from the museum to a secret underground bank vault, with the doors to the vault being locked with five separate keys which were then entrusted to five individuals. In 2003 after the Taliban was deposed, the new government wanted to open the vault but the keyholders could not be summoned because their names had deliberately not been recorded. President Hamid Karzai had to issue a decree authorizing the attorney general to try and break into the vault, although eventually the five key-holders came forward and the vault was unlocked. Since then the collection has been catalogued and following an agreement between the Afghan government and France, many of the items went on an international exhibition tour (2007-2009) being displayed at the Musée Guimet in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But as you say the current whereabouts of the collection are uncertain.

This is the first time I have heard of this.

The Collection contains some spectacular pieces:

Triceratops wrote:

This is the first time I have heard of this.

Neither had I. That said - that golden ram looks awfully like a piece Mrs V keeps beside a diamond star and badge with crown and harp on it. These are displayed on a sideboard located underneath a painting of some judges on horseback. They're all in her amber room.

Does Mrs V by any chance also have in her Amber Room a copy of Aristotle's 2nd book of Poetics, that's the one about Comedy, as I seem to have lost my copy? And while you're rummaging around for that, perhaps you might keep an eye out for any of the Gnostic 'Nag Hammadi' scrolls you come across, also Livy's history of Rome, 'Ab Urbe Condita', and the music for Mozart's Trumpet Concerto. Hey, you might even find a copy of the play 'Love's Labour's Won', apparently attributed to some early 17th century hack with the initials WS.

But returning to the Juliaart's OP, in January 2021 according to this report by Tolo News the Afghan Parliament was already discussing the need to send the collection overseas on another exhibition tour, partly to protect it from theft and corruption but also because previous exhibitions had proved a major currency earner: over the past 13 years it had been displayed in 29 museums in 13 countries, which had generated $5million for Afghanistan. So the collection may already have been quietly moved outside of the country.