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A CENTRAL ASIAN CIVILISATION AS ANCIENT AS SUMERIA CENTRAL ASIAN CIVILISATION SUMERIA ANCIENT The collapse of the Iron Curtain means that many ancient ruins are finally being examined by Western archaeologists. The lost city at Anau could spark a radical rethink of history. large, sophisticated civilisation equal to Sumeria and Mesopotamia, and thriv- ing at the same time at least 5,000 years ago, was lost in the harsh desert sands near the Iran and Afghanistan borders. But now details are beginning to emerge. At the beginning of May, I visited and interviewed archaeologist Fredrik Talmage Hiebert, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Assistant Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology. There he has some exquisite pottery shards, which the Russian government permitted him to bring back to the United States from his recent excavations in the Kara Kum desert of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the Iran and Afghanistan borders. No American archaeologist had been there since 1904 when New Hampshire archaeolo- gist and geologist Raphael Pumpelly discovered ancient ruins at Anau in southern Turkmenistan near Iran. But the Soviets did not develop the Anau site. In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists working west of Afghanistan reported vast ruins, all built with the same distinct pattern of a central building surrounded by a series of walls. Several hun- dred were found in Bactria and Margiana on the border that separates Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. But nothing was reported beyond a few Soviet journals that were never translated. Then in 1988, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dr Hiebert first received permis- sion to travel to Anau. He has discovered it is about 2,000 years older than the Bactria and Margiana sites further to the east, going back nearly 7,000 years to at least 4500 BC, or the Bronze Age. The oldest shards from there are of high craftsmanship, and this past summer Dr Hiebert found a black rock carved with red-coloured symbols that to date are unidentified but considered to be evidence of a literacy independent of Mesopotamia. The discovery is revolutionary to earlier academic thought that Sumeria was the first civilisa- tion with a written language. Since this interview, Dr Hiebert will have presented his findings at an international meeting on language and archaeology at Harvard on 12 May 2001. The text of my interview with Prof. Hiebert follows. Prof. Fredrik Talmage Hiebert, PhD: Our work joins Mesopotamia and Sumeria in being one of the world's civilisations in an area we hadn't previously expected to find civilisation. This is far to the north of the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, Iran and even north of the ancient cities of the Indus civilisation. This is in an area that was formerly part of the Soviet Union, so most Western scholars did not have access to this area. Then this last year, during my excavations of June and July 2000, we came across a wonderful discovery: an inscribed stamp seal dated to about 2300 BC that clearly has symbols on it. These symbols looked to us like writing. We looked around at all the dif- ferent systems in the area. Was it ancient Mesopotamian? Was it ancient Iranian or ancient Indus? We even asked our Chinese scholars if it was ancient Chinese. And it was none of these. So, we are proposing that this one single stamp seal is the first ever evidence we have of writing among the cities of Central Asia that were found by our Soviet, now Russian, col- leagues, and now where we are working as well. In other words, it's not just a linking area of the centres of civilisation. But it now contains characteristics of ancient civilisa- tions itself: cities, monumental architecture, a very elite society such as kings and courts, and now some form of literacy or writing system. This is very important because what it Interview with Prof. Fredrik T. Hiebert, PhD by Linda Moulton Howe © 2001 PO Box 300 Jamison, PA 18929-0300, USA Fax: +1 (215) 491 9842 Email: earthfiles@earthfiles.com Website: www.earthfiles.com Interview with PO Box 300 Jamison, PA 18929-0300, USA Fax: +1 (215) 491 9842 Email: earthfiles@earthfiles.com Website: www.earthfiles.com NEXUS +55 Prof. Fredrik T. Hiebert, PhD AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2001 www.nexusmagazine.com