PESHAWAR, July 22: The management of the Peshawar museum has detected some 688 relics of Gandhara period in the godown of the museum, which remained unregistered since the British period, officials said here on Tuesday.

Director of the department of archaeology and museum, NWFP, Dr Ihsan Ali said: “Certainly, it came as a surprise for the staff when they detected a large number of unregistered precious pieces in godown of the museum.”

These unregistered pieces include life-size stone statues, sculptures, coins, swords and other ethnological objects of archaeological significance.

These archeological pieces were found when the management started work to design computerized catalogues of displayed and undisplayed objects in the museum. A large number of pieces have been stored as the management has no facilities to accommodate them in the museum galleries.

Sources in the archaeology department questioned why such a huge collection of antiques was not registered in the past, saying that no clue was found when and who dumped this collection in the museum stores without documenting it.

Prof Farid Khan, founder director of archaeology and museum of NWFP, when contacted, expressed ignorance about the presence of the unregistered pieces in the museum godown. He said that during his tenure a proper record of all the displayed and undisplayed objects was maintained.

“This is the only museum in the country which has very well- prepared and transparent catalogues. Not a single piece had disappeared from its galleries,” he claimed

Apart from this, officials said around 2,711 more registered pieces were lying safe in the museum godown. The archaeology department is planning to shift these additional objects from Peshawar to other museums of the province.

The museum management has undertaken a project to computerise catalogues of the entire objects in the museum. In the first phase, a catalogue of 8,500 coins of Islamic and pre- Islamic period available in the museum would be prepared.

In the second phase, a separate catalogue of other objects including 938 pieces of Gandhara period, 341 ethnological objects and 258 Islamic period  pieces would be included in  the catalogue. The project aims at facilitating researchers from the country and abroad, officials said.

The management has decorated total 1,537 rare collections of Gandhara, pre-Islamic, Islamic, Sikh and British period in the galleries of the Victoria Hall, which was converted in museum after partition.