When he finally received permission to run his own excavations, Sarianidi worked in northern Afghanistan during the relatively peaceful decades of the 1960s and 1970s. His most famous discovery there came just before the Soviet invasion in 1979. His team uncovered an astounding hoard of gold jewelry in the graves of Bactrian nomads who lived around the first century A.D. But the region's mysterious Bronze Age sites, dating to the second and third millennia B.C., intrigued Sarianidi more. His excavations revealed thick-walled structures built with regular proportions and a distinctive style of art. Most scholars had thought that such sophisticated settlements had not taken root in the region until more than 1,000 years later.


Figurines with elongated bodies are common artifacts of the Oxus culture.


Small seals bearing this type of design, which originated in the Indus Valley of today's Pakistan, demonstrate the extent of the Oxus trading network.

Courtesy of Kenneth Garrett
Sarianidi had long suspected that similar sites might be found beneath a collection of strange mounds he had glimpsed during a 1950s trip in the Kara-Kum desert, a barren region in the middle of eastern Turkmenistan. Later, during a brief visit to a colleague's dig in that area in the mid-1970s, he commandeered a car and driver to investigate the site more closely. It was June, he recalled, and the heat was so overpowering he had to overcome an urge to turn back. Then, not far from the rough road, he spotted mounds rising up from the plain.


In treeless areas, such geographic features often indicate ancient settlements formed from mud-brick structures that later human occupation has compressed over time into artificial hills. The site covered so much land that Sarianidi assumed it dated from medieval times. So he was astonished to find pottery resembling what he had found in ancient Bactria.

When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan forced him and other archaeologists to relocate to other areas of interest, Sarianidi remembered this site, which locals call Gonur, and determined to return. In the early 1980s, he came back to Turkmenistan, working at Gonur and other sites.

What he has uncovered at Gonur is a central citadel—nearly 350 by 600 feet—surrounded by a high wall and towers, set within another vast wall with square bastions, which in turn is surrounded by an oval wall enclosing large water basins and many buildings. Canals from the Murgab River, which once flowed nearby, provided water for drinking and irrigation. The scale and organization of this construction was unmatched in Central Asia until the Persians' arrival in the sixth century B.C.

Sarianidi's team has also turned up intricate jewelry incorporating gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. The prowess of the Oxus metalworkers—who used tin alloys and delicate combinations of gold and silver—were on par with the skills of their more famous contemporaries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, Lamberg-Karlovsky says. Their creations display a rich repertoire of geometric designs, mythic monsters, and other creatures. Among them are striking humanoid statues with small heads and wide skirts, as well as horses, lions, snakes, and scorpions.

Wares in this distinctive style had long been found in regions as distant as Mesopotamia to the west, the shores of the Persian Gulf to the south, the Russian steppes to the north, and the great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, which once flourished to the east—on the banks of the Indus River of today's Pakistan. Archaeologists had puzzled over their origin. Sarianidi's excavations seem to solve the puzzle: These items originated in the region around Gonur.


An ivory mosaic panel that adorned a room at Gonur shows mythical creatures with the head of a bird and the body of a lion.

Courtesy of Kenneth Garrett

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a handful of Western researchers got word of Sarianidi's finds and began to investigate for themselves. Fredrik Hiebert, a young American graduate student, learned Russian, visited Gonur in 1988, and then a few years later returned with his Harvard adviser, Lamberg-Karlovksy. A team of Italians followed to dig at nearby sites and to examine Gonur's extensive cemetery. The Westerners brought an array of modern archaeological techniques, from radiocarbon dating to archaeobotany. U.S. labs determined that the early phase of the Gonur settlement dated to 2000 B.C.—five centuries earlier than Sarianidi had initially postulated—and that the people grew a wide variety of crops, including wheat, barley, lentils, grapes, and fleshy fruits.

The archaeological record shows that the site was inhabited for only a few centuries. The people of Gonur may simply have followed the shifting course of the Murgab River to found new towns located to the south and west. Their descendants may have built the fabled city of Merv to the south, for millennia a key stop along the Silk Road. Warfare among the Oxus people could have undermined the fragile system of oasis farming, or nomads from the steppes may have attacked the rich settlements. Sarianidi has found evidence that extensive fires destroyed some of Gonur's central buildings and that they were never rebuilt. Whatever the cause, within a short period Oxus settlements declined in number and size, and the Oxus pottery and jewelry styles vanished from the archaeological record. The large and square mud-brick architecture of the Gonur people may live on, however, in the clan compounds of Afghanistan and in the old caravansaries—rest stops for caravans—that dot the landscape from Syria to China.