Festival at the Margiana Digs

Dr. Victor Sarianidi, his guest and his team of workers at the Gonur Depe excavations are in the picture below.  They are sitting on carpets spread on the Kara Kum Desert floor.  The brush piles protect them a bit from the sand and wind.  They are waiting for the nearby clay oven to bake the bread and for the steaming pot of meat stew for the festival.

Victor is the white-haired, white-bearded man; my husband, his guest, is seated to the right of Victor; to the right of my husband sits a Russian assistant; the Turkmen males, the woman cook and the child are seated on each side of the the three non-Turkmen males.

My husband, the adventurer and ardent explorer into the ancient Bactrian culture, visited the site seven times and came to know most of the people who worked with Victor Sarianidi, the leader of the Russian excavation team. Victor was also our teacher on the subject of Bactria.

I fondly recall his stories of what he had discovered about the religious practices, the burial customs and the myths portrayed on the seals and amulets of Bactria and Margiana.  One evening, as he sat in our easy chair, I perched myself on the raised hearth in our living room while he told his entrancing stories of lambs or horses given a burial beside the master who had died.  He explained that small dishes, the amulets or beads that the deceased had worn during life, and sometimes an animal would also be placed in the tomb shaped like a room in which to spend the after life.

Victor had found in the religious practices and the funeral customs the precursors of the Zoroastrian religion of later Persia and India.  As he "read" the images engraved on stones and cast in metal in ancient Bactria and Margiana, Victor saw their strong relationship to the legends written out much later in the Zoroastrian literature, the Avesta for the Persians and the Rig Veda for the Zoroastrians in India.

Since I had a background in linguistics and had done a bit of amateur archeology before I met Victor, I began to study seriously the history of the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex.  We had long before built up our collection of artifacts bought from Afghan merchants and from other collectors.  I am still studying the pieces and trying to interpret the images through Victor's eyes.

Victor died several months ago, but one of his last acts was to send us the last book he published.  I am therefore able to continue learning from him.