An Oasis Civilization Rediscovered

FOR SOME 3,500 YEARS, the sand dunes of Turkmenistan’s Murghab Delta plains, a stretch of Central Asia’s Karakum Desert, concealed the ruins of a sprawling 70-acre city belonging to a long-forgotten civilization, its name lost to history. First rediscovered by Soviet archaeologists in the 1970s, the city was dubbed Gonur Depe, or “Gray Hill,” which is what the local Turkmen called the site. The sandy mound concealed high mudbrick walls, carefully gridded streets that divided residential districts from those where merchants may have plied their trades, and areas where religious ceremonies likely took place. Soon after the city’s discovery, excavations revealed that the people of Gonur Depe were immensely wealthy. Artisans crafted beads from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, carved ivory from India into mosaics depicting dragon-like creatures, and fashioned lavish depictions of goddesses from silver mined by nomads.

Archaeologists digging at Gonur Depe, now led by Russian Academy of Sciences anthropologist Nadezhda Dubova, have established that the city flourished from about 2250 to 1700 b.c., during the Bronze Age, and that the people who lived there belonged to what scholars now call the Oxus civilization. This widespread culture shared pottery styles, architectural forms, burial customs, and a unique artistic vision. Its members spread across a broad swath of southern Central Asia, including parts of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Gonur Depe is the largest of the 150 known Oxus settlements of varying sizes, clustered around the oases of the Murghab Delta. Its people obtained their rich array of goods through trade, despite the fact that the desert plains surrounding this oasis city were devoid of minerals or other commodities. “They didn’t really have any raw materials whatsoever to offer,” says Nikolaus Boroffka, an archaeologist