A generation ago the Oxus Civilization did not exist in the archaeological consciousness. Its eponymous river, today the Amu-darya, flowing west from the high Pamirs on the Afghan-Chinese border to lose itself eventually in the waste where once lay the Aral Sea, was a heavily policed frontier, the Iron Curtain of Asia. On the north bank were the Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, on the south Afghanistan. The Oxus basin was not a propitious place to do archaeology.
Things have changed, in many respects due to the innovative spirit of Russian archaeologists, notably the late Vadim Masson (1929–2010) and Viktor Sarianidi (1929–2013), who saw in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a chance to do fieldwork and a potential source of logistical support. Both had already been working in the Soviet republics north of the Oxus, and in Afghanistan they were joined by the late Sandro Salvatori (1948–2020), and by Maurizo Tosi (1944–2017), excavator of the crucial Bronze Age site of Shahr-i Sokhta on the Afghan border in Iranian Sistan.
The French, who had for decades held a monopoly on Afghan archaeology, maintained their interest, and the senior editor of this book, Bertille Lyonnet, is at the Collège de France; her colleague Nadezhda Dubova is based in Moscow. A third of the three dozen contributors are French, and a further quarter Russian; Germany and Italy each supply four, India and the USA two. Single scholars are based in Uzbekistan, Iran and Switzerland. There are no UK-based authors, despite the decades of work by the British Institute in Tehran, the short-lived British Institute in Kabul and the various projects that have worked in Pakistan—areas surrounding and affecting the world of the Oxus Culture.
That world embraced today's southernmost Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan, and west Tadjikistan, northern Afghanistan and the north-eastern fringe of Iran. The ‘Oxus Civilization’ (formerly and more exactly called the ‘Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex’ (BMAC)) was dubbed thus by Henri-Paul Francfort (Reference Francfort, Fussman, Kellens, Francfort and Tremlay2005), who saw it complementing the equally newly minted ‘Helmand Civilization’ south of the Hindu Kush in the third and second millennia BC. The Helmand, the only perennial river between the Tigris and the Indus, had long been seen as the potential locus of a prehistoric complex society, although surveys (by this reviewer inter alia: Hammond Reference Hammond1970) had not yielded major sites of pre-Islamic date. Anchored in excavations at Mundigak and Qala Said near Kandahar and at Shahr-i Sokhta, the ‘Helmand Civilization’ was elusive.
In the Oxus basin, flanked by those of the Murghab, Balkh and Zerafshan Rivers, there were by contrast sites a-plenty, especially on the great alluvial fans left by seasonal meltwaters from the western fringes of the Himalaya. Probably the best known, and most intensively excavated, is Gonur-depe, north of Merv in eastern Turkmenistan, where Sarianidi worked for many years. A usefully illustrated article featuring Gonur-depe was published in January 2021 (Gannon Reference Gannon2021); this counters the paucity of anything but line drawings and small monochrome photographs in the book under review. Gonur-depe features repeatedly in the 30 chapters, 963 pages, 290 illustrations and 44 tables, as well as the useful 44 pages of radiocarbon dates, which helpfully include those from the steppes to the north and the Indus basin south of the BMAC zone. In Bactria, important work at Sapallitepe and Dzharkutan in southernmost Uzbekistan is extensively reported. Shortugaï, near the left bank of the Oxus and the Greek city of Aï Khanoum in eastern Afghanistan, was dug by the French and proved to have strong southward links with the Indus Civilization in Pakistan. Steppe pastoralist sites such as Sintashta and the Andronovo Culture in general were also in close and quasi-symbiotic relations with the farmers of the Oxus Civilization, driven in part by domestication of the horse and the Bactrian camel. The Zerafshan drainage, running west out of the mountains along a major fault-line, exposes mineral sources valued by both economies, and its importance is underlined by the great downstream cities of the historic period such as Samarkand and Bokhara. The absence of the Oxus Culture from Mesopotamian records despite the temptation to equate ‘Marhaši’ with Margiana, given the presence of an Akkadian seal at Gonur-depe, is frustrating but no more. Also frustrating, beyond measure, is that so much of the art is from looted sites, with the loss of context and the ever-present risk of forgery.
Each chapter has its own bibliography, with much less redundancy than one might expect, and overall a splendid guide to the often obscure Russian-language literature.
Ljubov’ B. Kircho (Chapter 4) gives a data-dense summary of the Neolithic cultural developments, from Hissar in Iran south-east to Mehrgarh in Baluchistan and north-east to Sarazm in Tajikistan, that preceded the BMAC: the long-known sites along the Kopet Dagh—Anau, Altyn and Geoksjur—are embedded in the results of recent projects. An overall BMAC chronology of 2250–1700 BC, perhaps to 1500 BC, is now agreed, and the splendid introductory chapter by the editors encapsulates all of the main achievements and problems of recent decades’ research. They are also summed up by Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento: “The Bronze Age cultures of Central Asia have long been viewed as marginal extensions of the more famous civilizations that surrounded them, particularly those of Mesopotamia and of the Iranian Plateau […] this was in fact, not the case”. Although lacking a writing system, they are “the apogee of a proto-urban culture with sites often fortified and organized among dispersed oases […] an original complex civilization” (p. 405).
