Geniza from the National Library

An exhibition with the support of the Hermitage Museum Foundation Israel. The sudden appearance in the first years of the twenty-first century of the Afghan Geniza, hundreds of manuscript fragments from medieval Bamiyan, was a remarkable occurrence. These pages of thick, soft, browning paper, covered in diverse texts in multiple languages, offered a window into lives and cultures far distant from our own, cultures that had flourished but later been almost totally destroyed.