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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

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

The fifth season of excavations at Akdepe settlement in Chandybil district of the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, has come to an end. Deputy Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan Professor Ovez Gundogdiev led the first national expedition. According to the Neitralny Turkmenistan newspaper, during the excavations the age of the settlement was defined. Until recently, Akdepe was dated to V-IV century BC, i.e. the Eneolithic age. However, the archeologists of the national expedition found pottery belonging to the Neolithic period (VI millennium BC), which corresponds to the Jeitun culture. "Our white-marble capital...

Vast stretches of Central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over... Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan -- and there are long moments when no town or road or field is visible from your window. Wandering bands and tribes roamed this immense area for 5,000 years, herding goat, sheep, cattle, and horses across immense steppes, through narrow valleys, and over high snowy passes. They left occasional tombs that survived the ages, and on rare occasions settled down and built towns or even cities. But for the most part, these peoples left behind few physical traces of their origins, beliefs, or ways...

Discoveries reveal a flourishing Dunhuang 1,000 years ago www.chinaview.cn 2004-03-21 15:20:33 LANZHOU, March 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Documents and other cultural objects unearthed from China's Mogao Grottoes, in northwest Gansu Province, provide evidence that Dunhuang was a flourishing international trade city over 1,000 years ago. Professor Zheng Binglin, also a research fellow with the Dunhuang Studies Institute of the Lanzhou University, made the conclusion based on his research on documents and other cultural objects of late Tang Dynasty (618-907) and Five Dynasties period (907-960). Dunhuang city, located in the western part of Gansu, is now a famous tourism city because it...

Chinese archaeologists have discovered an unidentified cluster of tombs on the Pamirs Plateau, unveiling a new mystery on the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road. Eights tombs, each two meters in diameter, were arranged on a 100-meter-long and 50-meter-wide terrace, with lines of black stones and lines of white stones stretching alongside like rays, according to the archaeology team with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that found the tombs in Xinjiang's Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, a border region neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, in October. "The tombs are peculiar. No similar ones had been detected before on the Pamirs Plateau,...

British researchers are heading to a remote part of western China to try and unravel one of archaeology's most puzzling mysteries. The researches are trying to find why the same sacred symbol has been found in apparently unconnected ancient sites around the world. Depictions of three hares joined by the ears can be seen in British medieval churches, 13th century Mongol metalwork and temples from China's Sui dynasty of the 6th and 7th Century, the Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday. Academics have long been baffled as to why the circular motif became prominent in Christian, Islamic and Buddhist cultures separated...

Public release date: 2-Aug-2007 Contact: Natasha Pinol npinol@aaas.org 202-326-7088 American Association for the Advancement of Science Beyond Mesopotamia: A radical new view of human civilization reported in ScienceMany urban centers crossed arc of Middle Asia 5,000 years ago A radically expanded view of the origin of civilization, extending far beyond Mesopotamia, is reported by journalist Andrew Lawler in the 3 August issue of Science. Mesopotamia is widely believed to be the cradle of civilization, but a growing body of evidence suggests that in addition to Mesopotamia, many civilized urban areas existed at the same time – about 5,000 years ago...

Archaeologists have unearthed relics that suggest prehistoric humans lived along the Silk Road long before it was created about 2,000 years ago as a pivotal Eurasian trade network. An excavation project that started in 2010 on ruins in northwest China's Gansu Province has yielded evidence that people who lived on the west bank of the Heihe River 4,100 to 3,600 years ago were able to grow crops and smelt copper, the researchers said. The site is believed to date back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC - AD 220). Over the past three years, archaeologists have discovered a variety of...

Tocharians The Tocharians were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BCE to the end of the 1st millennium CE. Their language is called Tocharian. Archaeology The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BCE until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century CE. "Tocharian donors", possibly the "Knights with...

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...

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...

BRONZE Age cities archaeologists say could be the precursor of Western civilisation is being uncovered in excavations on the Russian steppe. Twenty of the spiral-shaped settlements, believed to be the original home of the Aryan people, have been identified, and there are about 50 more suspected sites. They all lie buried in a region more than 640km long near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. The cities are thought to have been built 3500-4000 years ago, soon after the Great Pyramid in Egypt. They are about the same size as several of the city states of ancient Greece, which started to come...

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...