Oxus civilisation

The Oxus civilisation is the common name for what archaeologists formally call the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), a Middle Bronze Age civilisation of southern Central Asia. The Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi gave it that name in 1976, while excavating in northern Afghanistan (1969–1979), and from the late 1970s his digs revealed many monumental buildings behind strong walls and gates. Reports appeared mainly in Soviet journals, and the finds became widely known in the West only when Sarianidi’s work was translated in the 1990s, though some Soviet studies had been translated earlier. Some scholars, among them Biscione and Vahdati, find both names too narrow, since related sites reach across northeastern Iran, and propose “Greater Khorasan Civilization” instead.

The civilisation grew from a long local past. Farmers with origins in West Asia settled the northern foothills of the Kopet Dag in the Jeitun era (7200–4600 BCE), herding goats and sheep and growing wheat and barley. Copper Age towns such as Namazga Depe, Kara Depe and Altyn Depe followed, and around 3000 BCE people from the Geoksiur oasis seem to have moved into the Murghab delta and the Zerafshan valley. In the Early Bronze Age (2800–2400 BCE) Altyn Depe developed a proto-urban society. Ancient DNA shows that the Bronze Age people descended largely from local Copper Age populations: about 60–65% of their ancestry relates to Neolithic farmers of the Iranian plateau, 20–25% to early Anatolian farmers and about 10% to West Siberian hunter-gatherers.

Its dates are debated. Sandro Salvatori dates its urban phase, the Integration Era, to c. 2400–1950 BCE, a view Massimo Vidale and Dennys Frenez share. Nadezhda Dubova and Bertille Lyonnet see a gap before it and date most sites in Margiana and Bactria, founded on virgin soil, to c. 2250–1700 BCE.

The people of the Oxus civilisation were settled farmers who irrigated wheat and barley; extensive irrigation systems have been found at the Geoksyur oasis. Their towns stood in three main regions: the Kopet Dag foothills, Margiana in the Murghab delta, and southern Bactria in northern Afghanistan. Namazga Depe covered about 52 hectares and may have held 17,000–20,000 people, and Altyn Depe about 25 hectares with 7,000–10,000.

Gonur Depe, in the Murghab delta of southern Turkmenistan, was the largest settlement, about 55 hectares, and Sarianidi regarded it as the “capital” of Margiana. Its almost oval fortified core, Gonur North, held the so-called Monumental Palace, temples and ritual places, the “Royal Necropolis” and water reservoirs; the palace measures 150 by 140 metres. Other strongholds include Kelleli 3, a four-hectare site with towers in a double wall and four equal gates, and Dashly 3 in Bactria, a fortified compound of 88 by 84 metres, while a local ruler’s house at Adji Kui measures 25 by 25 metres. Mallory compares these forts to the qila of later times: circular or rectangular, with up to three walls around homes, workshops and temples.

Not everyone lived inside the walls. At Adji Kui 1, pastoralists lived at the edge of the town as early as c. 2210–1960 BCE, beside the people of the “citadel”. Genetic studies find slight evidence that the communities were matrilocal, possibly because men were often away trading.

Oxus beliefs are known from figurines, buildings and burials, and their meaning is a matter of interpretation. The best-known figures are the “Bactrian princesses”: statuettes of limestone, chlorite and clay wearing large stylised dresses and headdresses that merge with the hair. They are read as fertility goddesses of an agrarian society, and as a ranking goddess of Central Asian mythology who keeps order by pacifying untamed forces.

Several large buildings are called temples, such as the 140 by 100 metre temple at Togolok, but it is not always clear why one walled structure is called a temple and another a palace. Gonur Depe had temples and ritual places within its walls, and a Royal Necropolis. In grave 3200 of that necropolis lay an almost complete skeleton of a foal on a four-wheeled wooden wagon with bronze-banded wheels, dated to about 2250–2200 BCE. Another burial held a stone statuette that seems to show a saddled horse, and in burial 3310 parts of a stallion’s body were found, which Sarianidi took to be the cult burial of a domestic horse.

Language may preserve something of this world. Michael Witzel and Alexander Lubotsky argue that the original language of the BMAC survives as a substratum in proto-Indo-Iranian, and Witzel notes that the borrowed words include terms of ritual and religion as well as of farming, town life, plants and animals.

Oxus craftspeople worked bronze, copper, silver and gold with great skill, and their many metal objects point to a sophisticated metalworking tradition. They also made ceramics and jewellery of semiprecious stones, and with its monumental architecture and bronze tools the complex shows many of the hallmarks of civilisation. Already in the Early Bronze Age, pottery at Altyn Depe was turned on the wheel and grapes were grown.

Transport changed here. Models of two-wheeled carts from about 3000 BCE found at Altyn Depe are the earliest evidence of wheeled transport in Central Asia; their harness shows they were first pulled by oxen or a bull. Camels were domesticated within the BMAC, and a model of a camel-drawn cart of about 2200 BCE was found at Altyn Depe. The wagon from grave 3200 at Gonur had wheels circled by bronze bands, and Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento considers that burial a century and a half earlier than similar burials of the Sintashta culture.

Whether the civilisation could write is debated. A single tiny stone seal found at Anau in Turkmenistan in 2000 carries five geometric markings similar to Chinese “small seal” characters, and led some to claim that the BMAC had developed writing. Its only match is a small jet seal of almost the same shape from Niyä in Xinjiang, now thought to date to 700 BCE.

The Oxus towns stood in a wide network. BMAC objects have been found in the Indus Valley Civilisation, on the Iranian Plateau and in the Persian Gulf, and Oxus sites hold foreign goods in turn: at Gonur Depe an Elamite-type cylinder seal and a Harappan seal stamped with an elephant and Indus script. Ties between Altyn Depe and the Indus Valley seem particularly strong, with two Harappan seals and ivory objects, and the Harappan settlement of Shortugai in northern Afghanistan probably served as a trading station. Tepe Hissar in Iran, a centre of metalworking and of lapis lazuli, belonged to the same interaction sphere.

The steppes to the north mattered more and more. Contact intensified around 2000 BCE. In the Amu Darya delta near the Aral Sea, people whose remains resemble those of the nomads of the Andronovo culture took up irrigation farming, a group known as the Tazabagyab culture. From about 1900 BCE Tazabagyab-Andronovo pottery appeared widely in the Bactrian and Margian countryside, inside BMAC strongholds and in herders’ camps outside the walls.

The civilisation’s link with the Indo-Iranians is much debated. Sarianidi saw it as Indo-Iranian, the result of a migration from southwestern Iran, while Lamberg-Karlovsky saw the BMAC objects at Susa, Shahdad and Tepe Yahya as intrusive. Mallory and Adams suggest that steppe peoples passed through “a membrane of Central Asian urbanism” on their way south, and Anthony sees a late hybrid culture in which proto-Indo-Aryan developed. Ancient DNA found no Yamnaya-related ancestry in the main BMAC samples, though some peripheral individuals carried steppe ancestry, in line with steppe herders moving south around 2100 BCE.

Around 1900 BCE the walled centres shrank sharply, and each oasis developed its own types of pottery and other objects. Many strongholds stayed in use, now with steppe-style coarse incised pottery beside the older BMAC wares. In the highlands of Tajikistan, kurgan cemeteries of the Vaksh and Bishkent types mixed late BMAC and Tazabagyab-Andronovo traditions, and at Sappali Tepe metal objects of 1700–1500 BCE derive from the Tazabagyab-Andronovo culture. Later sites in northern Bactria (c. 1950–1450 BCE) are mostly graveyards of the related Sapalli culture.

The people did not vanish. The Yaz culture that followed combined BMAC and steppe ancestry and is associated with early Indo-Iranians. Iron Age people of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan drew about 57% of their ancestry from Andronovo-related steppe herders and about 43% from the BMAC population, and modern Tajiks and Yaghnobis are found to be direct descendants of these Bronze and Iron Age Central Asians. The 2019 study by Narasimhan and colleagues found no essential BMAC contribution to later South Asians.

If Witzel and Lubotsky are right, the BMAC language lives on in loanwords in Indo-Iranian and in Vedic Sanskrit; Lubotsky proposes that Indo-Aryan speakers led the movement into south-central Asia and passed many of these words on to Iranian. Knowledge of the civilisation rests on Soviet and later international excavations at sites such as Gonur Depe, Altyn Depe and Togolok, and new excavations in northeastern Iran, at Tepe Chalow, Kalat-e Yavar and Shahrak-e Firouzeh, keep widening its map.