Ruins and artifacts of an important Bronze Age civilization are emerging from a windswept desert along Afghanistan`s northern border, where Soviet excavations have yielded spectacular finds for nearly two decades.
Only recently, however, have archeologists realized the significance of what they had been uncovering: that a sophisticated, entirely unsuspected civilization, known as Bactria, flourished in south-central Soviet Asia from about 2500 to 1500 B.C.
That conclusion emerged only slowly despite intriguing clues that began to appear in the late 1960s, when a Soviet expedition started uncovering towns and fortified buildings just beneath the desert surface. A little later, a separate line of evidence developed as art specialists began tracing a trail of unusual antiquities on the world market, until they, too, struck Bactria.
Now, some scholars are saying that Bronze Age Bactria should be added to the list of the four great original civilizations of the Old World: Egypt`s Nile Valley, ancient Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River of China.
The accumulated evidence ”puts the Central Asian Bronze Age on the same footing as other Old World civilizations,” said Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, head of Harvard`s Peabody Museum, in a recent interview.
The remains of Bactrian civilization, reflected in massive buildings with intricate layouts and skillful ceramic and metalwork, represent ”a very distinctive expression of Bronze Age culture, a complex urban society as developed as any of the others,” he said. Lamberg-Karlovsky has been studying Bactria through a cooperative arrangement that he helped work out in the early 1980s with Viktor Sarianidi, director of the Soviet excavations. Lamberg-Karlovsky said the relationship has led to joint excavations in Bactria since 1985 and is opening a new opportunity for archeologists to do research in one another`s countries.
Apparently illiterate
Other scholars believe Bactria, which apparently did not develop writing and seems not to have formed an integrated state under powerful rulers, is less important than the four other early civilizations. Yet migrations from Bactria during its mysterious decline may have had far-reaching influence on Iran and India.
”Altogether, this is a major, major discovery,” said Philip Kohl, professor of anthropology at Wellesley College.
Bactria-from Bakhtri, the Persian name for the area-and an adjoining region, Margiana, occupy an area roughly the size of New England in a fertile desert watered by rivers flowing from the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Afghanistan. It extends north into Soviet Turkmenistan and east to the Iranian Plateau.
Until recently, the area was thought to have been virtually uninhabited during the Bronze Age, the period from about 3000 to 1200 B.C.
Despite the recent research, the Bactrian people remain mysterious, and the spectacular archeological finds in the area have gained little attention in the West. The reason may be that the dramatic importance of Bactria only became clear with ”the slow emergence of the archeological context over the last decade,” Lamberg-Karlovsky said. ”It hasn`t been the discovery of a single thing, like King Tut`s tomb.”
Now, however, Bactria is finally attracting attention.
Bactrian arts and crafts are on exhibit at New York`s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Italy a new book has been published, ”Bactria, An Ancient Oasis Civilization From the Sands of Afghanistan.” The book, edited by Giancarlo Ligabue and Sandro Salvatori, contains essays about the civilization and scores of spectacular photos of artifacts. It has been translated into English but is not yet available in the U.S.
Some of what is now exciting archeologists about Bactria had been apparent ”for a good number of years, but what was not known was the scale of the architecture,” Lamberg-Karlovsky said. He noted that the foundations of one fortress-like Bactrian building covered an area equal to three football fields. ”It must have been really impressive,” he said.
Farmers and nomads
Like the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus and Yellow River valleys, Bactrian society was based on highly productive agriculture. But instead of a river valley, the cradle of Bactrian civilization was a network of oases created through the irrigation of the desert at places where rivers, such as the Amu Darya and the Murga and their tributaries, disappear into the plain.
The Bactrians were mainly sedentary farmers, but they also had a nomadic tradition. Their beast of burden was the Bactrian (two-humped) camel, which seems to have been domesticated during this period; the Bactrians may also have domesticated the horse.
Because it occupied a trade route crossroads linking Egypt and Mesopotamia to China, Bactria was in a pivotal position, receiving artistic and technological influences from these areas and spreading its own. In fact, Bactria established a commercial nexus through which trade linked the cultures of the Near East, the Far East and India, an achievement that is now being seen as a key element in the entire panorama of Middle Eastern history.
Although Bactrian architecture, crafts and art borrowed themes from Mesopotamia as well as other nearby cultures, Bactria had a style all its own, experts say. That style is expressed in the intricate geometrical patterns formed by the layout of buildings in a complex at the Dashly Oasis. The rooms and corridors are based on circles and squares, a pattern mirrored in some of the metal seals fabricated by Bactrian artists.
The affluence of Bactria, as well as the division between rich and poor, is evident in a wide range of everyday artifacts, from plain utensils to mirrors and ornate cosmetic containers with applicators tipped with miniature sculptures, including goats and other animals, wrestling humans, or geometric motifs.
The ceramics and jewelry show that Bactria had technical abilities as great as any in the world at that time, art historians say. The artists used precious stones, such as lapis lazuli from mountain mines, gold gathered from pebbly creeks, and materials such as silver, carnelian and turquoise to create objects of extraordinarily high quality. Many are now in collections in the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre in Paris and expensive galleries.
Some of the most unusual Bactrian work includes seated female figures, made of chlorite and limestone, with stylized hairdos, impassive faces and wide, pleated gowns. Their significance or purpose remains unknown.
The credit for discovering the ruins of Bactria goes largely to Sarianidi, director of the Moscow Institute of Archaeology.
Leading a Soviet-Afghan archeological expedition, he surveyed and dug in southern Bactria between 1969 and 1979, uncovering an array of towns and foundations of monumental buildings until the invasion of Afghanistan made further excavation impossible. Work did continue north of the border, in Turkmenistan.
Artifacts traced
Equally important, however, was a flood of unusual artifacts that appeared on the international antiquities market in the 1960s and 1970s, first in the bazaars of Kabul, Afghanistan, and then elsewhere. Collectors and museums quickly snapped them up, even though their origin was unknown.
”When I first saw this material, I literally couldn`t cope with it,”
said Prudence Harper, curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan, which has about 150 Bactrian objects. ”I`ve been working in this field for 25 years, and I was coming face-to-face with very sophisticated works of art from a Central Asian culture about which I really knew nothing.”
What was clear, Harper said, was that it had taken a high degree of technology to produce them.
Because the artifacts had been looted from thousands of Bactrian tombs by local peasants, researchers could not determine where they originated, making archeological interpretation difficult or impossible.
Ultimately, however, the works were traced to Bactria, and though their precise context has been lost through the looting, they are being used in efforts to determine patterns of settlement, trade, immigration, religious mythology, and so forth.
The most intriguing unanswered questions involve the fate and ultimate influence of Bactria, which declined precipitously after about 1900 or 1800 B.C.
”It`s going to have very important implications for the later history of Iran and India,” said Kohl, the Wellesley anthropologist. He speculates that tribes from Bactria may have migrated in a two-pronged movement.
One stream, moving southeast, would have carried Bactrians and their cultural influence into Baluchistan, Pakistan and finally into the Indus Valley of the Indian subcontinent; perhaps they used horses to conquer a declining civilization there.
No pyramids
The second stream, moving southwest, may have taken Bactrian tribes to the Iranian plateau to become forerunners of the Iranian peoples. Sarianidi goes so far as to see in Bactrian architecture and art the themes of Zoroastrianism, the ancient pre-Islamic religion of Iran, but Western scholars are dubious.
As for the ultimate place of Bactria in pre-history, the verdict is not in. Kohl takes a cautious view.
”It clearly qualifies as a civilization, and you have some wonderful, fabulous metal objects,” he said. ”But there aren`t royal pyramids as in Egypt, or the royal tombs of Ur (in Mesopotamia), or any concentration of wealth signifying kingship. And it appears to be illiterate.
”But Bactria`s historical significance may be just as great or greater if you look at its later influence.”
