<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/science/13LOST.html>
May 13, 2001
In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Asian Culture
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In an unexpected benefit of the cold war's end, Russian and American
archaeologists say they have discovered an ancient civilization that
thrived in Central Asia more than 4,000 years ago, before being lost in the
sweep of history.
The people of that area, the archaeologists say, built oasis settlements
with imposing mud-brick buildings and fortifications. They herded sheep
and goats and grew wheat and barley in irrigated fields. They had bronze
axes, fine ceramics, alabaster and bone carvings and jewelry of gold and
semiprecious stones. They left luxury goods in the graves of an elite class.
The accomplishments of those unknown people in what are now the republics
of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan began to
emerge over several decades of excavations by archaeologists of the Soviet
Union, who worked diligently but in academic silence behind closed borders.
The surprising scope of society suggested a stage of social and economic
development generally regarded as civilization. All that seemed lacking was
evidence of number or writing systems.
With the end of the cold war, American archaeologists have joined the
Russians in exploring the region, and now they are reporting that they have
found inscriptions showing that these people may have indeed had writing,
or at least were
experimenting with a form of proto-writing around 2300 B.C.
"We are rewriting all the history books about the ancient world because of
the new political order in our own time," Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert, a
University of Pennsylvania archaeologist involved in the excavation, said
in an interview last week.
In the most recent and provocative discovery, Dr. Hiebert uncovered a small
stone object engraved with four or five
red-colored symbols or letters that apparently bear no resemblance to any
other writing system of the time. Other scholars agreed that the symbols
seemed to be unlike contemporary scripts in Mesopotamia, Iran or the Indus
River valley.
Dr. Hiebert made the discovery last summer in ruins at Annau, a site near
the border with Iran and only eight miles from the Turkmenistan capital,
Ashgabat. He described the findings a week ago at a symposium at Penn and
yesterday at a conference on language and archaeology at Harvard.
"You can say we have discovered a new ancient civilization," Dr. Hiebert
said. At the same time, the pyramids of Egypt had been standing for three
centuries, power in the Tigris and Euphrates valley was shifting from Sumer
to Babylon and the Chinese had yet to develop writing.
Dr. Victor H. Mair, a specialist in ancient Asian languages and cultures at
Penn, who was not on the research team, said of the inscription, "I
definitely think that's writing."
Dr. Mair added that the discovery of ruins of an advanced culture in a
region "where there was thought to be just space and emptiness fills an
enormous gap" in terms of trade and cultural exchange across Asia in
antiquity. It suggested that people in Asia more than 4,000 years ago were
not as isolated as once supposed, he said, but probably had continent-wide
connections.
The dozens of settlement ruins of the newfound civilization stretch east
from Annau across the Kara-Kum desert into
Uzbekistan and perhaps the northern part of Afghanistan. It is an area 300
to 400 miles long and 50 miles wide. Since no one knows who the people were
or what they called themselves, archaeologists have given the culture the
prosaic name of the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex, or BMAC
(pronounced BEE-mack), after the ancient Greek names of two regions it
encompasses.
Long after the ruins were buried in sand, the area was traversed by the
legendary Silk Road, the caravan route linking China and the Mediterranean
lands from the second century B.C. to the 16th century A.D. The oases that
served as way stations for rest and resupply on the Silk Road also
supported the BMAC civilization, which presumably was trading far and wide
over some kind of ancestral Bronze Age Silk Road.
Dr. Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, a Harvard archaeologist, questioned whether the
symbols on the artifact represented true writing. But he said that Dr.
Hiebert's discovery "falls into place with other research showing that this
culture was working out some sort of communication system, though it never
reached the level of complexity in writing as its neighbors did."
Until the waning days of the Soviet Union, foreign scholars knew almost
nothing of the nature and extent of the BMAC culture. Reports of findings
were confined to Soviet journals.
In the post-cold-war openness, Russian archaeologists are eagerly sharing
their knowledge and inviting collaboration with Westerners. Dr. Hiebert
plans to return to Annau, possibly next month, for further excavations to
be financed in part by the National Geographic Society.
Dr. Victor Sarianidi of the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow found a
distinctive architectural pattern in many of the ruins. The buildings at
each site appeared to be erected in one burst of construction according to
the design of a single architect. The largest buildings were like huge
apartment complexes, each bigger than a football field and divided into
dozens and dozens of rooms. They were surrounded by multiple mud-brick
walls, some as much as 10 feet thick. Beyond lay traces of agricultural fields.
In the 1990's, Dr. Hiebert began digging slowly to deeper, and therefore
earlier, levels of occupation. He was rewarded last June while excavating
beneath a room in what appeared to be an administrative building at Annau.
That was where he found the carved symbols on a piece of shiny black jet
stone, a type of coal, less than one inch to a side.
Archaeologists believe that it was a stamp seal, commonly used in ancient
commerce to mark containers by their contents and ownership. The site also
contained many lumps of clay that were used to seal vessels or parcels.
Scientists analyzing charcoal found with the artifacts dated the material
at 2300 B.C., before the larger settlements were built. American
radiocarbon dates have established that the BMAC culture was present in
Central Asia from 2200 B.C. to 1800 or 1700 B.C. Russian research generally
underestimated the culture's antiquity by about 500 years.
Back at Penn, Dr. Hiebert showed the symbols to colleagues, and they were
stumped. They said the symbols were unlike the Mesopotamian cuneiform
script, generally regarded as the earliest writing system, or the
proto-Elamite writing on the Iranian plateau.
Dr. Gregory L. Possehl, a specialist in Indus archaeology at Penn, said the
artifact's shape was wrong for an Indus stamp seal and only one sign could
possibly be construed as related to Indus script.
"It looks as if it is some kind of writing," Dr. Possehl said last week.
"It is unique, as far as I can tell."
Dr. Mair assured Dr. Hiebert that the symbols were not Chinese, if the
artifact is as early as has been dated. Chinese writing is thought not to
have begun until hundreds of years later.
Whatever its origins, Dr. Mair said, the type of symbols and the small
number of strokes used to create each one "makes me think the writing
system is already fairly abstract, not pictographic."
Dr. Hiebert is not so sure. He cautioned that there was insufficient
evidence to determine if this was an evolved writing
system, or if these people had become aware of the existence of writing
elsewhere and were experimenting on a system of their own. He speculated
that the engraved stamp included a prefix symbol, a marker to designate the
category of the word to follow, that preceded four symbols for the word or
words. These could stand for the name of a commodity and its owner.
The only other example of possible writing by the BMAC people was reported
two years ago by Dr. I. S. Klochkov of the
Institute of Archaeology in St. Petersburg. He found a pot shard in the
ruins at Gonur with what appeared to be four letters of writing in an
unknown script and language. Other Russian research has turned up evidence
that people of the BMAC culture made notations in pottery and clay.
Scholars have many questions about the new ancient civilization, mainly
about where the people came from, what influence they had on their times
and what happened to them.
Dr. Hiebert thinks that the culture emerged near Annau, in the foothills
along the Iran-Turkmenistan frontier, where there is evidence of earlier
villages. Dr. Sarianidi contends that the culture's roots lie in Turkey.
Other scholars point to evidence showing that they might have migrated from
the north.
The BMAC culture's decline is equally mysterious. "Why that happens remains
unclear," said Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard. "The architectural
signatures, their fortified buildings, disappear after a few hundred years.
Most of the luxury materials disappear. There is a diminution of
complexity. Perhaps people revert to smaller settlements, or they leave and
are absorbed in other cultures."
But for a while, in a land and a time unsuspected by archaeologists until
recently, a civilization flourished and then vanished, leaving crumbling
walls of mud brick and some cryptic symbols on a tiny piece of stone.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
