Kazakh US exhibition banishes country's Borat image

Given the subtitle Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the film is a sometimes funny and often discomforting send-up of American social values.

But many audiences remember more vividly its portrayal of Kazakhstan as a backward nation populated by peasants with little in the way of culture, BBC informed.

So indelible is that image that at a sporting event in Kuwait earlier this year, the film's theme music was accidentally played during the award ceremony instead of the real national anthem of Kazakhstan.

But now that stereotype is being blown apart by an exhibition in Washington DC of ancient treasures that reveal the true "glorious nation of Kazakhstan".

Many of the artefacts comprising Nomads and Networks, on show at the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Asian Art galleries, have only recently been discovered and have never before been displayed outside the country.

"Such exhibitions are very important in terms of establishing a national identity and to show Kazakhstan to other people," says Dr Bauyrzhan Baitanayev, Director of the Margulan Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences in Kazakhstan.

"It's very clear to me that not a lot of people know what Kazakhstan is. In New York, people kept asking me about Pakistan and I had to explain, no, it's another country."

The exhibition aims to dispel the myth that the nomadic horsemen who traversed the Eurasian steppes during the era of the Persian Empire were culturally inferior to other communities that had settled.

The Persians called the nomads Saka and regarded them as fearless warriors. One of the earliest written references comes from the Greek historian Herodotus.

Intricately carved stone rock engravings reveal a communications system that helped the Saka navigate the landscape while ancient burial mounds known as kurgans have yielded exquisite horse decorations in bronze, gold and horn that show a high calibre of craftsmanship.

"We have a popular image of nomads that is no longer accurate," says exhibition curator Alex Nagel. "New research has made clear that nomadic culture was much more complex."

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