You were very lucky to see it before it was destroyed. The scaffolding really shows how big it is.

When I first saw your post, I assumed these were in Syria because the destruction in Palmyra made the news more recently.

I looked into your statue in Afghanistan. Here's what it looked like in 1832:

upload.wikimedia.org

It was originally covered in mud and straw with dyes like red. It must have been an amazing site. Here's what it looked like in 2018.

It's interesting that the statues had been trashed as far back as the early 1800's, and probably much farther back than that. I guess it makes sense to put them close together for a drawing, but they are actually so far apart that I never got them together in the same photo, even from miles away. I'll post more of what I've got later.

This is a story that just keeps getting more interesting. After the Taliban blew up the statues, they discovered a maze of 50 caves behind them which contain the world's oldest oil paintings!

Earliest Oil Paintings DiscoveredAsians, not Europeans, might have been the first to invent oil painting.www.livescience.com