The items, some dating from the great civilisations before the Roman Empire, owe their survival to a scheme involving seven keys that would have befitted a central Asian fable.

At the heart of the exhibition, in the Guimet museum, is a collection of jewellery, dress and other artifacts of gold and precious stones from the first century AD that were found in 1978 by Soviet archeologists at Tillia-Tepe, in northern Afghanistan.

The “hoard of Bactrian gold”, never before seen in public, had been give up for lost until 2003, when President Karzai announced that it was part of a haul of 21,618 treasures that had been discovered in the presidential vault. French experts have cleaned and restored the 228 objects at the show, which was promoted by President Chirac and President Karzai.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in the late 1980s when civil war was raging, the whole collection had been secretly taken by unknown people from the badly damaged National Museum to the presidential strongrooms, run by the Central Bank.

When the Taleban took over in the early 1990s and set about destroying non-Islamic art, such as the cliffside Buddhas at Bamiyan, they and everyone else assumed that looters and vandals had long since spirited away the treasures.

The post-Soviet warlords and then the Taleban tried but failed to open the vaults, which were protected by a security system that required the insertion of seven different keys, held by seven people. The keys were never found. After the Taleban fell the latest technology was used to open the vaults.

The trove included the so-called Bagrame collection of Indian ivory statuettes, Hellenistic bronzes and Greco-Roman glass, which were found by French archaeologists in 1937 at the ancient city 40 miles (60km) north of Kabul. Several items appeared on art markets and rumours suggested that the trove was in Pakistan or Russia, or that Osama bin Laden had escaped with it.

The Paris show was suspended this year after the Afghan parliament refused to let the treasures leave the country. After the decision was reversed, insurers refused to cover their transport. They relented after the French armed forces undertook the shipment.

The Guimet museum was chosen because of its long involvement in Afghan archaeology, which was almost a French monopoly until the 1970s.

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