Description:
Paul Stonehill on Gonur Depe in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, which he calls the capital of a vanished Bronze Age civilization known as Turkmen Egypt, the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex.
He says Viktor Sarianidi found the settlement in 1972 in the ancient delta of the Murghab River, near the Afghan border. Excavations from 1974 revealed a palace, temples, fine pottery, bronze, silver, gold, stone, and ivory, later shown at three museums in Germany in 2018 and 2019 and kept in Ashgabat and Mary. He dates the city to about 2300–1500 BCE, with a possible great fire around 1700 BCE, after which it was abandoned.
He describes the royal necropolis found in 2004, mosaics of griffins and bird-headed figures, more than 350 seals, vessels molded with snakes and frogs, and lapis lazuli beads no wider than a millimeter.
He describes the royal necropolis found in 2004, mosaics of griffins and bird-headed figures, more than 350 seals, vessels molded with snakes and frogs, and lapis lazuli beads no wider than a millimeter.
Russian teams returned in 2024 and 2026, after a two-year break, to dig the small settlements around the city. Stonehill rejects the idea that the roughly 5,000 bodies were formal burials inside the living quarters.
He says the abandoned dishes, people, and animals look like a disaster, and that something, possibly a war fought with powerful weapons, destroyed a center Sarianidi linked to the Indus Valley and Mohenjo-daro.