Bits and bridles in Siberian style and studded with gems, the better to show off the flight of the horses that wore them.Īll of this Bactrian gold, as it has come to be called, was painstakingly photographed and inventoried by the Soviet team and signed over to Afghanistan's National Museum in Kabul in 1979. Dragons with wings of turquoise mauling leopards down the length of a gold scabbard. A gold crown that could be taken apart and packed in a saddlebag. A man riding a dolphin upon a belt buckle. A representation of Aphrodite according to Bactrian tastes: stern and plump with small, thrust-out breasts. Pendants of agate, garnet, turquoise and cornelian. A griffin cut into milk-white chalcedony. A salver grooved in tangerine segments and inscribed in Greek. A model tree fashioned of gold and hung with fruit of pearls. The other treasures in the mound were no less glittering. The cloth itself had largely decayed-except for the weft, which had been of gold thread, indestructible even to the burrowing rodents that had tried to tug it away. Semi-spherical gold plaquettes stitched to the burial robes and kilts were taken by the bucketload from vertebrae and femurs. They had no higher ambition than to dazzle from afar as they dashed across the steppe. The Kushan nomads had a weakness for all that was flash or gaudy. Indeed, every bone seemed to have had the Midas touch: anything in contact had been turned to gold. Much of the treasure adorned what was left of the decomposed bodies. In one chamber a horse skull was found in another, in the mouth of a young woman, was a silver coin, the toll due to Charon for her passage across the Styx into the underworld. But the treasure was extraordinary, partly Siberian Altai, partly Greek. The burial chambers were simple, and their flimsy ceilings soon collapsed. Political officers arrived too, keen to use the dig as an advertisement for fraternal relations between the Soviet Union and the new communist regime in Kabul. KGB men from Moscow began to take an interest. The value of their discovery was such that the Afghan army had to be called in to guard the site. They were ecstatic at first, but, as the months passed and still they were picking the gold from the freezing clay, they became increasingly frightened. It had lain undisturbed for two millennia. The hoard had belonged to the rich Kushan nomads buried there around the time of Christ. In the last days before the beginning of that nightmare, a Soviet archaeological team led by a Greek-Russian, Victor Sariyannidis, unearthed 21,000 pieces of gold in six burial chambers within Tillya Tepe. That was in the winter of 1978-79, just before Afghanistan descended into 23 years of war, leaving 1.7m dead. Locals named it Tillya Tepe, or Hill of Gold, long before the Soviet archaeologists came and revealed its treasures. It stands three metres (ten feet) high, 100 metres in diameter, lopped square like a Celtic barrow, the whole of it overgrown with pale weeds. The mound is anonymous now, barely noticeable from the road. Greeks prospered here for a century or so after the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC, and then were driven off. This was once Bactria, where the Hellenic world briefly touched and intertwined with the worlds of the Indus and the Siberian steppe. THE mound lies just beyond the oasis town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, on the plain that slips south to the Hindu Kush and north to the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |