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Archeologists long assumed that the cradle of civilization was
southern Mesopotamia where 5,000 years old Sumerian texts and
objects were found. But the origin of the Sumerian
civilization is to a large extent unknown. We are now in the
position to demonstrate that the Sumerian script owes its
origin to the Central Asiatic pictographic seals.
A Science
Magazine article entitled
Middle Asia Takes Center Stage
(1)
claims the following:
Long dismissed
as a backwater, the vast area between Mesopotamia and the
Indus Valley is now revealing a tapestry of wealthy urban
centers that shaped humanity’s first concerted attempt at city
life.
The article
claims that instead of retelling the traditional story that
civilization sprouted in Mesopotamia, archeologists began to
assemble a far more complex picture in which dozens of urban
centers thrived between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley,
adopting each others architecture and ideas. This was possible
because all these urban centers could communicate in a common
language which can be defined as the Proto-language.
Below we see a
map of the region defined as Middle Asia. The common culture
of this region starts from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan in the north and includes Afghanistan, Iran and
Pakistan ending in southern Mesopotamia. The arrows indicate
the expansion route along rivers and sea coasts adopted by the
early settlers some 6,000 years B.P.
In an
article entitled: Neglected
Civilisation Grabs Limelight, Andrew Lawler says
(2):
Four thousand years ago along the
banks of the ancient Oxus River, which now separates
Afghanistan from Uzbekistan, there were people who lived in
vast compounds protected by high wall, produced their own
bronzes, and stone seals, and traded their wares as far as the
Persian Gulf and Palestine. Although these people would have
been key players in Bronze Age Central Asia, their
civilization remains an enigma because of 20th
century politics.
The vast
territories in which this Central Asian civilization
flourished have been defined as the Bactrian-Margiana
Archeological Complex (BMAC) by Fredrik Hiebert and Victor
Sarianidi who lead excavations in the region. “We are
redefining the boundary of Central Asia” says Hiebert and
claims that a single culture thrived in these regions. The
original name of Bactria is
Belh and the original name of Margiana is
Merv. Both cities are
ancient cultural centers of Turkic as well as Persian people.
The correct definition of this vast region should be
Belh-Merv Archeological Complex,
but as A. Lawler says; politics was and is still influencing
Archeology. Below we see the extent of the region defined as
BMAC.
One of the
important cultural sites discovered in BMAC is
Altyn Depe,
which means “golden hill”
in Turkish (see map at the top of the page). When
archeologists excavated this site they found a mud brick
altar, built 3,200 years ago as a temple for worship of fire
(3). The fire altar and several
golden artifacts found in this site give strong support to the
claim that the sun-worshiping people came to these regions
from the north. The golden ibex found in Altyn Depe (below) is
more than a simple piece of ornament, but is rather an
important clue for the Central Asiatic origins of this culture
(see Chapter 3, The Hidden
Meaning of Pertoglyphs).
The Uighur
people of the ancient times followed the shallow river banks
and pushed forward into the southern regions of BMAC in order
to build new settlements. One such important cultural center
is the city of Jiroft located in the south of present Iran. In
the picture below we see a pot excavated in Jiroft on which a
horned man with the feet of a bull is carved. We will find
this same symbolism in different parts of the world, forming a
strong support for a common Asiatic origin.
Below we see
an inscribed brick from Jiroft. This script is totally unknown
to the scholars and is waiting decipherment. The inscriptions
on three mud bricks found until now could well be the Asiatic
seal-based writing system predating the Sumerian cuneiforms as
well as Linear Elamite, another script from Susa (see map
above and also Chapter 13,
Evolution of Writing Systems).
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