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Taliban thugs in Afghanistan are hunting for a priceless collection of gold artefacts dating back over 2,000 years. The treasure known as the Bactrian Treasure is one of the largest collections of gold in the world and represents the history and culture of the Ancient Silk Road. But during the Taliban’s takeover of the country following US and UK troop withdrawals at the end of August, it disappeared.

For centuries, Bactria - a region shared by modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan - was part of the Hellenistic world. Conquered by Alexander the Great, Bactria became the heart of a powerful Greek kingdom. And even after the Greco-Bactrian kingdom was overrun by nomads, its cities continued to thrive. This video explores their fates.The Lost Greek Cities of Central Asia | September 3, 2021 | toldinstone

Show availability of Iran for al Qaeda training, plotting. This week, prosecutors in New York introduced eight documents recovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan as evidence in the trial of a terrorism suspect. The U.S. government accuses Abid Naseer of taking part in al Qaeda’s scheme to attack targets in Europe and New York City. The files do not support the view, promoted by some in the Obama administration, that bin Laden was in “comfortable retirement,” “sidelined,” or “a lion in winter” in the months leading up to his death. Some of the key revelations in the newly-released...

Before long, the record of that ancient migration will begin to vanish. Our ancestors took tens of thousands of years to spread around the planet; people today move from Lubbock to Geneva or from Tamil Nadu to Texas in hours. In the process they wipe out genetic clues to the past. Think of our genes as the vestiges of an ancient library in which geneticists are trying to piece together and decipher the books; now think of that ruin being paved over for a new airport... When Wells arrived at Stanford in 1994, Cavalli-Sforza's lab was just plunging into studies...

The Hidden History of MenA research team braves Central Asia to capture a surprising genetic record of human migration and military conquest By Robert Kunzig DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 12 | December 2004 | Anthropology One day last fall, in the home freezer of Spencer Wells, there were these things: a large leg of lamb, a few quarts of milk, and underneath, DNA samples from 2,500 people in Central Asia. Wells is an anthropological geneticist and an energetic collector of DNA, especially Y chromosomes. He lived then in an old stone house outside Geneva, but he was raised in Lubbock,...

A previously unknown civilisation was using writing in Central Asia 4,000 years ago, hundreds of years before Chinese writing developed, archaeologists have discovered... The discovery suggests that Central Asia had a civilisation comparable with that of Mesopotamia and ancient Iran as far back as the Bronze Age, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert told the BBC... It is not known what the people of the civilisation called themselves, so researchers have dubbed the society the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex (B-Mac), after the ancient Greek names for the two regions it covers.

The Sand Dune Forgotten by Time Archaeologists working in the extreme desert terrain of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have moved a step closer to unraveling the mystery of a 40-century-old civilization. They unearthed 163 tombs containing mummies during their ongoing and long excavation at the mysterious Xiaohe tomb complex. And it's all thanks to the translation of a diary kept by a Swedish explorer more than 70 years ago. "We have found more than 30 coffins containing mummies," said Idelisi Abuduresule, head of the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute and the excavation team. The complex is believed to...

Archeologist says Central Asia was cradle of ancient Persian religion Fri Mar 18, 6:24 PM ET Science - AFP ATHENS (AFP) - The mysterious Margianan civilisation which flowered in the desert of what is now Turkmenistan some 4,000 years ago was the cradle of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, Greco-Russian archeologist Victor Sarigiannidis claimed here. He said the theory would provoke controversy amongst his fellow archeologists, but said his excavations around the site of Gonur Tepe have uncovered temples and evidence of sacrifices that would consistent with a Zoroastrian cult. The religion was founded by Zarathustra, a Persian prophet...

Archaeologist tells of digs in Central AsiaVictor Sariyiannidis has spent his life searching for traces of Greeks Findings from the royal Bactrian graves. A statuette of a goat, exquisitely fine work cast in gold, a gold ring engraved with a seated Athena and an inscription, and a gold clasp . These are just some of the 20,000 ancient pieces of jewelry Sariyiannidis unearthed at the site of Tilia Tepe in 1979 in what is now Afghanistan. By Effi Hadzioannidou - Kathimerini When Victor Sariyiannidis discovered the 20,000 pieces of gold jewelry in 1979 in Tilia Tepe in Afghanistan — an...

THE CURSE OF THE RED-HEADED MUMMY by Heather Pringle Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang, Victor Mair was known mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator of obscure Chinese texts, a fine sinologist with a few controversial ideas about the origins of Chinese culture, and a scathing critic prone to penning stern reviews of sloppy scholarship. Mair's pronouncements on the striking resemblance between some characters inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Chinese symbols were intensely debated by researchers. His magnum opus on the origins of Chinese writing, a work he had been toiling away at for...

Russian archaeologist says Merv was origin of Zoroastrianism TEHRAN, June 10 (MNA) – Russian archaeologist Victor Sarianidi believes that Merv, a province in southern Turkmenistan, was the cradle of Zoroastrianism, the Persian service of Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported here Saturday. According to Sarianidi, his archeological team has recently discovered some Zoroastrians’ temples in the region. Each has two fire temples -- one was presumably used for religious ceremonies and one for cooking, he added. The temples date back to some 3,000 years BC, estimated the archaeologist. Sarianidi had already named the legendary land of Margush as the origin...

Where others see only sand and scrub, Sarianidi has turned up the remnants of a wealthy town protected by high walls and battlements. This barren place, a site called Gonur, was once the heart of a vast archipelago of settlements that stretched across 1,000 square miles of Central Asian plains. Although unknown to most Western scholars, this ancient civilization dates back 4,000 years—to the time when the first great societies along the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers were flourishing. Thousands of people lived in towns like Gonur with carefully designed streets, drains, temples, and homes.

TURKMENISTAN: MAKING A BID FOR CRADLE-OF-CIVILIZATION STATUS 5/21/07 Even in mid-spring, a stark landscape greets visitors to the Gonur-depe historical site in eastern Turkmenistan. Standing amid sand and rock at the edge of the Karakum desert, it is hard to imagine that a rich civilization once thrived here, built around a lush oasis fed by the Murgab River. Yet Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi has uncovered just that since his expedition began in 1972. He says Gonur-depe was the capital – or imperial city, as he prefers to call it – of a complex, Bronze Age state – one that stretched...

2,000-year-old treasures tell wild storyNEELY TUCKER; The Washington Post Published: May 25th, 2008 01:00 AMThis sculpture likely depicts a supervisor of Greek athletics. It was unearthed in Afghanistan.Pendants showing the Dragon Master, a mythical nomadic man holding dragons by the leg, date back to the days of Christ.PHOTOS BY THIERRY OLLIVIER/MUSEE GUIMETA detailed ivory statuette of a woman probably adorned a piece of furniture in the 1st or 2nd century.An exhibit in Washington, D.C., reveals gold, intrigue and jewelry once buried in Afghanistan. The finds have survived looters and wars. WASHINGTON – You can go see Indiana Jones and the...

Cyrus the Great Cylinder, The First Charter of Human Rights By 546 BCE, Cyrus had defeated Croesus, the Lydian king of fabled wealth, and had secured control of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Armenia, and the Greek colonies along the Levant. Moving east, he took Parthia (land of the Arsacids, not to be confused with Parsa, which was to the southwest), Chorasmis, and Bactria. He besieged and captured Babylon in 539 and released the Jews who had been held captive there, thus earning his immortalization in the Book of Isaiah. When he died in 529, Cyrus's kingdom extended as...

THE mound lies just beyond the oasis town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, on the plain that slips south to the Hindu Kush and north to the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus. This was once Bactria, where the Hellenic world briefly touched and intertwined with the worlds of the Indus and the Siberian steppe. Greeks prospered here for a century or so after the death of Alexander the Great, in 323BC, and then were driven off. The mound is anonymous now, barely noticeable from the road. It stands three metres (ten feet) high, 100 metres in diameter, lopped...