In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Asian Culture

New York Times ^ | May 13, 2001 | John Noble Wilford

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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...

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...

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.

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• Turkmen capital is 8 thousand years old, archeologists say [06/11/2010]
• Ancient writing found in Turkmenistan [11/01/2004]