Ancient Funerary Goods from Bactrian Tombs

Ancient Bactria Hemispheric Carved Stone Dish Incised Decoration

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From the accidental or unofficial discoveries of these ancient items eroded out or dug up from the tombs in Balkh, the ancient Bactria in Northern Afghanistan, these items were brought into the merchant stalls and sidewalk displays of the merchants in Kabul, Ghazni and Peshawar.  They finally were recognized as something very different and probably very old by the Westerners strolling through the bazaars of such mercantile cities.  They were bought in rather small quantities by many different visitors, but are now being gathered into larger private collections.  

The beads and vessels, the weapons and ritual objects of such a lost culture of the Central Asian Bronze Age, lasting from at least 2,500 B.C. to 1,600 B.C., are now becoming rather hard to acquire for the person who would simply like to have a few for his/her own interest and study.  We were introduced to these items in 1974 when we lived in Kabul for two years.  We have since acquired a small collection of beads, vessels and ritual objects.  The vessel in the photograph above reveals so much of the style of decoration used in Bactria.  

An ancient Bactrian beautiful steatite dish carved as a half circle with a slight concave curve on the 'straight' side. The olive green sets off the striations and conical engraving to good effect. The wavy line decoration lightens the geometric shapes into a more lyrical over all design. There is some wearing away where the sides join into a point. But the piece is in excellent condition for an object that has been weathered either in the earth or exposed to the elements for at least 3,500 years and very possibly as long as 5,000 years. 

The dish is decorated on every side and along the top edge. There are many faint marks on the inside and bottom of the dish, but I suspect that they are marks by the engraving tool.

The culture that produced this dish is located in what is now the country of Afghanistan in the North part, in the high desert of Central Asia, nestled into the lower part of the Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas. 

The civilization that began to develop in ancient Bactria some 5,000 years ago was replaced by later inhabitants that have also been replaced, or at least their culture has developed in a new direction. But in the third millennium B.C., some 5,000 years ago, the myths that informed the culture were expressed in designs on stone amulets, seals, and vessels of various kinds. The myths were acted out in monumental temples.

This dish was probably buried along with the owner as part of his grave goods, though it might have been simply left in a room of a temple that fell to ruin due to invasion or abandonment. 

The pyramidal design on this dish, naturally enough, came to represent the ancestral mountain to the people who settled that area more than a thousand years after ancient Bactria had fallen to ruin. Perhaps it expressed the same meaning in very ancient times, as well. Since Bactria did not record its history in writing, we have no way of knowing. One added commonality with the Mongols who came to that area beginning in the 900s is that they used similar wavy lines to represent water in the ornamentation of their possessions. However much the wavy lines are used in both cultures, we do know from Sarianidi's interpretation of the myths of Bactria, that the ancient Bactrians used wavy lines mainly to represent snakes. 

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1 inch = 2.5 cm

Measurements: width = 4.7 cm; length = 9.1 cm; thickness = 2.3 cm 

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Fossil Sea Shells High in the Hindu Kush Mountains

The capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, sits at about 6,000 feet altitude in the Hindu Kush Mountains, the foothills of the Himalayas which climb another 20,000 feet.  By the pushing of the Indian, formerly African, continental plate against the Eurasian continental plate, the floor of the ancient Tethys Sea is folded against itself and rises about 2 centimeters a year.  I will leave it to the reader to calculate how many years it took to get so high.  I doubt that it has always risen at the same rate, probably climbing quite a bit faster when what is now the Indian sub-continent first slammed into the Eurasian continental plate.

The floor of the Tethys Sea had beds of ancient ammonites, a sea creature with a circular shell with spiral sections inside.  To me, it is more beautiful when not broken into halves to expose the interior.  The fossilized shell is like ivory, when ground and polished by hand.  The ancient Bactrian people valued such shells and patiently ground them flat and smooth, by hand of course.  Then they pierced them to wear as amulets, probably attributing mysterious powers to the beads, because they appeared to be stones that had once been alive.

Here is a photo of one shell that had been ground, smoothed and pierced:

                                               

This ancient ammonite fossil shell was hand smoothed by Bactrian people in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan.  The spiral sections still show on the outside of this fossil, but they have been smoothed so that appear almost to be an incised design on old ivory.   The photo below shows the same bead where it is pierced for stringing as an amulet.

If you were to pick up the bead and peek into the bead hole, you would see that it is not the same diameter all the way through the amulet.  That is caused by the primitive hand drill made of stone or bone, wet with grit and forced partway through the bead by placing the bone or stone point in a loop on a small bowstring attached to a bow and moved quickly back and forth, causing the point to turn rapidly.  In other words, a primitive portable hand drill.  When the bead is pierced about half way through, the artisan begins the same process from the other side of the bead.  Because of the shape of the sharpened length of bone or stone, the joining of the two holes will be narrower than the outside edges.  

You can also see that the hole is countersunk, from the stone drill that was much wider around when the fine point reached the center of the bead, making the outside of the hole wider in diameter and sunken from the friction of the turning point picking up particles of the shell around the hole.  

Here is the other side of the amulet, now ready to string.  As you can see, the spiral structures are much more visible on this side, leaving the amulet much thicker and stronger than so many of the seal shells that were pierced through that thin place in the middle of the spirals.  The beads pierced through the center of the concentric circles tend to fall apart during the centuries.  This one held together very well.  I have many Bactrian pieces created from these fossil shells.  

One of the most beautiful uses of these ammonite fossils is illustrated in this photo:

These particular ammonite fossil beads were made in a later age, when there were grinders that could almost eradicate the spiral indentations, could shape the bead and make a smaller diameter bead hole.  But still it was a hundred years ago or more when  these shells were gathered from the Hindu Kush and hand worked into beads for the so named Afghan wedding necklaces, as in this one. 

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How I Began the Collection of Ethnic Ornaments

It began when my family moved to Turkey because my husband had been recruited by the U. S. Foreign Service (our Embassies and Aid Programs) as an auditor of the U. S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East. We lived four years in Ankara, and when we left we had a house full of everything from carpets to Anatolian Shepherd Dogs. But the dogs, the copper pots and pans and the wheat grinding sleds I will leave out of my discussion. I will stick to jewelry, textiles and home furnishing accessories such as artifacts for display.

Within a few months, our Ankara flat's hardwood parquet was covered with magnificent carpets. The dollar seemed to go farther in those days, 1969-73. I was still a fairly young householder and I wanted copper vases, ceramic plates, and more and more carpets. I had not had such beautiful handmade things available to me before that time in my life. My husband traveled to Iran, to Egypt and to Greece, bringing back everything from cut crystal imported to Cyprus from Czechoslovakia to marble statues surplused from the museum in Cairo. It took me a while to become interested in ethnic jewels. Those wool carpets were my collecting passion for those four years.

But then we took the overland route to Afghanistan, our next post. In our Land Rover with our youngest son lying on all the necessary supplies in the back, we drove for about a week through Eastern Turkey and Iran, and all along the desert road through Herat and Kandahar to Kabul. We settled into a lovely home made of mud brick with smoothed painted mud floors. They were easy to repair because after several earthquakes the mud mason shows up with a bucket of mud and fills in the crack and paints in over. Earthquakes are fairly common in Kabul, because it sits in the lower reaches of the Himalayas, in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Since that mountain range is still rising, the earth stretches and yawns fairly often.

Bactrian Amulets, Carved Alabaster Miniatures 4500 Years Old

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It was in Kabul that bodily ornamentation became interesting to me. Since pre-historic times, the people have mined gemstones and finished them into ornaments and utensils. I have in my collection many various household, cosmetic and jewelry pieces made of stone around 4500 years ago. By that time, the trade route through Afghanistan was a heavily traveled road. From that period to about the time of Alexander the Great's marriage to Roxanne in the Bactria Kingdom (not far from Kabul) was really the high period for civilization in that region. The glories of the past in Afghanistan provided our most interesting collectibles.

We could have stayed in Afghanistan for a long while, because it fed our interest in the development of art and technology through the ages.

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Afghanistan: a Producer of Jewelry from Pre-historic Times

When we received word that we were moving from the heavily traveled roads of Turkey to what to us sounded like the wilds of Afghanistan, I was up for the adventure, but imagined a culture begun by Alexander the Great and modified by the Arabic influence of the Moslem expansion from Mecca and Medina. Fortunately, we were able to travel overland through the major influence on Afghanistan, which is Iran. In our trip from Meshed in Eastern Iran across the border to Herat in Afghanistan, we could hardly tell we had crossed a border. In fact, Herat was more important and more cultured (in the modern sense of the word) than Meshed. We could not spend any time in Herat because we were trying to make it from Meshed to Kandahar where we could stay in the US AID guest house and see some familiar surroundings for a change, after a week of managing to communicate with Turkish and German! We did not have time to study Farsi before we left Ankara.

So we started across the desert in our trusty Land Rover. Practically no other traffic on the American built asphalt highway, only those dancing mirages to tease us in the lengthening distance. The only break in our boredom came from drinking warm beer -- actually hot beer -- because we had no air conditioner in our Rover. That is, until we were shocked to see a figure come out from under a culvert in a begging posture, which we had not anticipated. My husband was the driver for this trip, so he was trying desperately to steer around the figure that to our sun-dazzled eyes appeared menacing, not mendicant. It took us probably a quarter mile on down the road to decide exactly who or what we had met and avoided. Who knows what else was lurking under the culvert? We did not hang around to find out.

But now I will get back on topic -- maybe. Once we began to study the language, to prowl the bazaars and to study the prehistory of Afghanistan, we began to appreciate our posting to that country. Actually, we would have been happy to have spent the remainder of our term of service abroad in Kabul. No wonder we continued to learn and to form friendships with people such as Victor Sarianidi, a Russian archeologist who excavated so much of the Bactria Margiana civilization (ca. 2500 to 1600 B.C.) that extended from Turkmenistan through Iran and Afghanistan, on to the Western reaches of Mesopotamia.

Victor became our friend and I was able to assist in editing the English version of three of his books on the excavations: Myths of Ancient Bactria and Margiana on its Seals and Amulets, Moscow, 1998; and Necropolis of Gonur, Athens, 2007; Margiana and Protozoroastrism, Athens, 2---.

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Bactria, Afghanistan: the Old Persia on the Silk Road

The forerunners of pre-Islamic Persians were the migrant farmers of desert oases in the Kara Kum Desert and in the arid areas of Central Asia southerly toward the Indus Valley. Archeological remains trace the flowering of this culture from the third millennium B. C. to 300 B. C. when Alexander the Great married the Bactrian princess in Bactria, Afghanistan as he conquered Persia. These first Iranians were not nomads, but they were in movement, because the earth was in a warming period as their culture spread into the areas mentioned. The drying up of the oases in this large area of the earth caused the migration of the farmer settlers to pick up and move when necessary, thus the spread of the culture and the amalgamation with the indigent groups into which they moved.




As they moved they traded and this activity created a new economy that began to flourish along the route that we eventually called the Silk Road. As you see from this map, the Silk Road finally spread out to go many places, but by 2500 B. C., the road through Bactria was already heavily traveled from Europe to China. And it was Bactria in Afghanistan where the finest stone beads of that period were made. Lapis, turquoise, carnelian, banded agates, serpentine all were produced from mining the Himalayas. Artisans were no doubt attracted by the traffic of buyers through Balkh, which became a hub along the Silk Road.

The bead makers had materials ready to hand and a culture that produced craftsmen who had developed their bead making to a high art. For this post, I will add just this one photo of such beads:



These are amulets made from fossilized shells or alabaster, but they do not have the characteristic grain of alabaster, and they are too hard and dense to be gypsum, the other white material used for beads and seals. So I am assuming that they are fossilized shell, as I saw a lot of that in Afghanistan when I lived there.


More information on Bactria in the book Bactria, an ancient oasis civilization from the sands of Afghanistan, Giancarlo Ligabue and Sandro Salvatori, eds.