Gonur Depe

Gonur Depe is a vast Bronze Age site in the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan, about sixty kilometres north of Mary and ancient Merv. Four thousand years ago it stood in the delta of the Murghab river, and it was the chief centre of the culture that archaeologists call the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, or the Oxus civilisation, which flourished between roughly 2400 and 1600 BCE. When the river moved away, the settlement was abandoned and the desert closed over it.

Its excavation is bound up with one archaeologist, Viktor Sarianidi, who began work at Gonur in 1972 and continued almost every year until his death in 2013. His teams uncovered a walled complex with a palace, courtyards, workshops, pools and buildings he identified as temples, together with a huge cemetery of several thousand graves. Some royal tombs held wheeled carts, the skeletons of animals and fine objects of gold, silver, bronze and stone, with seals carved with animals and mythical scenes.

Sarianidi argued that buildings at Gonur held fire altars and that vessels found there were used to prepare a ritual drink, which he linked with the haoma of the Avesta and the soma of the Vedas. Others have questioned these interpretations, and they remain debated. What is not in doubt is that Gonur was one of the great urban centres of Bronze Age Central Asia, in the land later known as Margiana, the Margush of the inscriptions of Darius. Parts of the excavated walls have been rebuilt in mud brick to protect them, and visitors reach the site by desert track.