Margiana in the epicenter of disputes
Several thousand years ago the waters of the Murghab River flowed, forming a vast delta on the territory of the Mary province of Turkmenistan, in the Karakum desert many kilometers north of the present oasis. Since ancient times, this land has attracted people with its fertility and abundance of water. In the Bronze Age (III-II millennium BC), the fertile land, now called the country of Margush, or, in ancient Greek, Margiana, was inhabited by sedentary and semi-nomadic tribes that created a unique culture of the ancient Oriental type.
The way this small country was called in ancient times is the subject of ongoing scientific discussion, but one thing has become obvious to all specialists in this field: it stands alongside such centers of world civilization as Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China. Great contribution to this has been made by the famous Russian archaeologist of Greek origin Victor Sarianidi (1929-2013), who in the early seventies discovered and for forty years unearthed ancient settlements of the old delta of Murghab. Since the fifties of the last century, archeologists with his active participation have uncovered dozens of monuments concentrated in several micro-oases along river channels and artificial canals.
Sarianidi's colleague, Italian professor Gabriele Rossi-Osmida, calls each such monument an ancient Roman term “Pomeriy” - the so-called piece of land that denotes the formal, sacral realm of a Roman city. In its line, there were special rules - for example, a ban on burial. Pomeriy was not a wall, but a legal and above all a religious border, the city's line was marked not by walls, but by white stones laid out by a chain. The commander in arms and his soldiers were allowed to enter the territory inside Pomeriy only in case of triumph, in order to make sacrifices to the gods. Obviously, this concept refers to a much later era, but the idea itself is, of course, deeply rooted and is unlikely to be limited to the Mediterranean world.
Such “Pomeriys” were located about 50 kilometers apart in the location of the settlements of the Murgab delta. This, in turn, gives grounds to assume that each “Pomeriy” was an administrative unit headed by a viceroy if there was then a centralized state, or a tribal leader, if each “Pomeriy” was an independent unit. But whatever the structure of the political system, the architectural type of Margian “Pomeriys” finds parallels in the later Iron Age and, according to Harvard University professor Karl Lamberg-Karlovski, even millennia later, in the guise and layout of the Turkmen fortresses of the 18th-19th centuries.
The largest of the identified settlements of the Murgab delta was Gonur Depe, rightfully recognized as the political and religious center of the ancient kingdom that existed here. Sarianidi called it “the city of kings and gods”, reasonably assuming that at the head of such extremely developed and structurally complex settlement was to be the king-priest, that is, the leader combining administrative-military and spiritual power.
Indeed, Gonur excavations have clearly expressed palace premises, located in close proximity to others, rather mysterious in terms of layout and arrangement, which can hardly be explained in any other way than suggested by Sarianidi. According to his version, this is nothing but temples of pagan cults that existed in the Ancient East during the Bronze Age. Both in size and in complexity of the internal structure, they are not inferior to the famous temples of Mesopotamia. The presence in them of a large number of foci of a very strange shape (with two chambers) led him to the idea that these were not simple ovens for domestic needs, but special braziers for preparing ritual food. They could only be used by fire worshipers, in whose beliefs fire was the sacred element and flames do not have to touch meat directly. Like everything worldly, it defiles a sacred fire. In fact, these ovens are arranged according to the principle of the oven: the food was baked in them only from the heat coming from below or from the side - from the chamber with fuel.
The cult of fire is very archaic. It originated at the dawn of mankind, in the era of the Upper Palaeolith (about 40-18 thousand years ago), but acquired the features of a religious system with a set of certain rituals and structures only about four thousand years ago, in the Bronze Age. In any case, Gonur and other ancient Margian settlements (pomes) show the presence of obvious signs of cult buildings. But what cults could they be dedicated to?
In addition to the temple of fire and the temple of sacrifices, Sarianidi them as the manifestations of the basic pagan beliefs of the Indo-Aryan pantheon: the temple of the Sun and the sanctuary of Mithras, temples of cult drinks (soma-khaoma), and two water temple complexes. Their detailed description with the justification of his conclusions are given in the popular science book “Margush. The Mystery and the Truth of a Great Culture”, published in Ashgabat in 2008.
But even earlier, in the late 80s, V.I. Sarianidi put forward a rather bold hypothesis that it was here, in the delta part of Murgab, in the era of bronze, in the bowels of total polytheism, where religious doctrine, which many centuries later made a revolution in the minds of people, has begun to take shape. It is about monotheism, the idea of a single god, the design of which later legends have attributed to the legendary prophet Zarathustra. In his name, all this religion was called Zoroastrianism (from the Greek form of the name Zarathustra - Zoroaster).
After centuries, the concept of a single supreme God formed the basis of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam); it is also represented in the philosophy of Hinduism, in Sikhism and other religions. Not only Sarianidi, but also many other scientists believe: there is every reason to believe that Avesta - a Zoroastrian collection of sacred texts - in its original form, in its most ancient parts was created precisely on the territory of Central Asia.
Nevertheless, in the science world there were many opponents of this hypothesis. First of all, the term, which Sarianidi introduced to the pagan cults that existed in Margiana, - protozoroastrianism - was criticized. Perhaps, it is not the most successful name from the point of view of the semantic structure of the word, but on the whole it gives a clear understanding of the essence of the phenomenon. It's not about the classical Zoroastrianism, but about those pagan beliefs that formed the basis of the world's first religion of Revelation, that is, the self-revelation of the one God through the message to people - through the Prophet.
Almost simultaneously, Sarianidi and his colleagues conducted searches in the north of Afghanistan - on the territory of the modern provinces of Faryab, Jauzjan and Balkh, whose lands about four thousand years ago were part of ancient Bactria. Archaeologists have discovered a striking similarity of architecture, as well as a variety of objects from ceramics, stone and bronze found in the Murgab delta and in the North Afghan provinces adjoining the Amu Darya. On this basis, V. I. Sarianidi put forward the idea that in the Bronze Age there was a culture that was fairly homogeneous in nature, which he called the Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC).
This term was adopted today by most experts as the most accurate definition of an oasis civilization, although closely related to the great river civilizations of the Indus, Tigris and Euphrates, but possessing a number of unique features. However, in the West, some of Sarianidi's colleagues are slow to recognize the abbreviation of BMAC and prefer to call the same culture the “Oks Civilization” (Oks is the ancient name of the Amu Darya river). Yet, not only the Murgab delta is a hundred kilometers from it but also this distance is an impassable desert where there are no traces of settlements of the Bronze Age. This circumstance alone makes the term “Oks Civilization” rather clumsy. But the question is not even about the title.
The ancient settlement of Gonur Depe is located about three hours drive from the city of Mary and is spread over 55 hectares. Today it is not only the most popular place of pilgrimage for tourists, but also an object of a long scientific dispute among scientists from around the world. One the most famous opponents of Sarianidi is and has been the American archaeologist, above-mentioned Professor Lamberg-Karlovski. His publications in The Review of Archaeology, devoted to excavations and books by Victor Sarianidi, showed an extremely biased review of BMAC's materials. He himself visited Gonur only once, more than a quarter of a century ago, when the entire palace and temple ensemble was not yet discovered, the richest necropolis was not found, but the scale of Gonur's monumental architecture became evident even then.
Viktor Ivanovich Sarianidi reacted quite sharply to Lamberg-Karlovski's speeches and did not hesitate to publish his reasoned response to them.
In 2010, Lamberg-Karlovski again visited Turkmenistan, but did not go to Gonur, obviously not wanting to personally meet with the famous colleague who was there in those days. He visited only the neighboring monument of Aji-Kui, located just 13 kilometers from Gonur, where Professor Rossi-Osmida worked. Even this much smaller settlement, which by that time had been thoroughly excavated by the efforts of the Turkmen-Italian expedition, produced a strong impression on Lamberg-Karlovsky. He put his former critical arrows fired at Sarianidi far away and in an article written for the collective monograph on Aji-kui published a year later in Italy, in fact recognized the independent significance of the unique ancient Marghush settlements. But he still repeated the claims to the method of Gonur's excavation.
“Of course”, V.Sarianidi said in this regard, “one can scrupulously describe in which room and in which layer a crock is found (only in Gonur's palace there were several thousand of them and they are waiting, of course, for their in-depth study), You can carefully measure the width and length of each excavated wall (and all this is in working diaries in the archive of the expedition), many other laboratory studies of our “archaeological kitchen” can and should be done, but all this is a matter for the future. I was striving to promptly introduce into the scientific circulation a new material that was not completely understood (at least for me) and give its general description”. Had Sarianidi been acting differently, according to the recommended method in the US, Gonur would not have been discovered so soon or maybe it would not have revealed to us its amazing treasures.
The scientist considered that specialists of different directions and profiles (and, first of all, linguists) should combine their efforts to understand at least a first approximation, but in all extent, what is this “BMAC phenomenon” and what role did it play in the ancient History of the Near and Middle East. This is a very difficult scientific task, but as a worthy reward we are faced with a much more complete picture of a culture that has long disappeared from the face of the earth, which we now have to call a dry abbreviation - BMAC.
