It just so happened that the honor of discovering an unknown Central Asian civilization belongs not to Russian scientists who studied this recently conquered region, but to the American Rafael Pampelli.
Usually they write that the first excavations near the Turkmen settlement of Anau were started in 1886 by the Russian general Komarov, who was fond of archeology. But it would be better if he did not do this: Komarov completely demolished the sandy hill with all its antiquities, without documenting a single find. He found no treasure. But the American Rafael Pumpelli found it. But not gold, silver and precious stones, but grains of wheat …
American enthusiast
Pampelli came from a family of Americans, whose ancestors set out to explore the New World in the 17th century. Raphael's father was a banker, and his mother was a poet.
After graduating from the academy, against the will of his father, he went to study in Europe. In Freiberg, Germany, he graduated from the Technological Mining University. Since then, his life has been associated with mining. He even discovered a shale mineral named after him - pumpelliite (pumpelliite). As a geologist, Pumpelli has traveled almost all over the United States. He wrote a lot on geology, put forward several hypotheses about changing the landscape of the Earth. But the older he got, the more he was interested not in how the planet changed, but in how man changed, how civilization was created and how these civilizations influenced descendants.
These questions were especially acute when he visited countries remote from Western civilization - Japan, China, Mongolia, India, Afghanistan. He was an excellent traveler: he was not afraid of either cold or heat, or lack of food, or interruptions in water. He found genuine pleasure in communicating with peoples who were considered wild, and did not perceive them as a threat.
Once he discovered for himself a hypothesis, advanced at that time, about the origin of the white people from the ancient Aryans. And he began to look for the homeland of the Aryans. Since he did not have enough historical and archaeological knowledge, he came to grips with these sciences. Unlike General Komarov, he thoroughly studied where to begin excavations, how to conduct them, how to document them.
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Once, during a long and difficult journey from Japan through Mongolia and Russia, he found himself in Central Asian Turkestan. There he heard stories about many ancient cities buried in the sands. Having studied the Central Asian lands as a geologist, he came to the idea that in immemorial antiquity, instead of a desert, there could be an internal sea on the shores of which the Aryans lived. Learning about Komarov's "excavations" and seeing the slopes of the Kopetdag, he decided in 1904 to excavate the second, not destroyed by the general, sandy hill near Anau.
Contrary to circumstances
The hill promised to be rich in results: Pumpelli found fragments of very ancient pottery there. And where there is ceramics - there is hope to unearth a city or a grave. With high hopes, Pumpelli went to St. Petersburg to seek permission to excavate. The Russian authorities issued a permit, but set three conditions: officially, the expedition will be under the supervision of the secretary of the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and East Asia, Vasily Bartold; no one will finance the research; all found artifacts will remain in Russia. There was nowhere to go. The researcher agreed.
Work began in early March. Archaeologists removed layer by layer, revealing burials, hearth remains, animal skeletons, ceramic vessels and bone fragments. The lower layer of Pampelli dates back to the VI millennium BC. But the most interesting were the layers of the IV-III millennia BC. While disassembling the pottery, Pumpelli discovered grains of wheat and barley adhering to the shards. Both those and others turned out to be not wild plants, but cultivated cereals. And the bones of animals found in the cultural layer turned out to be the remains of camels, bulls, horses and sheep, which ancient people used as agricultural livestock.
So Pampelli did not deviate from the truth, concluding that he was able to find the point of transition of ancient man from savagery to civilization. He gave the civilization he dug up the name "culture of Anau". With the light hand of Pumpelli, this name was fixed for a long time for all the settlements of this time in Turkestan.
The hill was literally sifted through a sieve so that even the smallest find would not be lost. However, the work was interrupted in the most unexpected way: hordes of locusts appeared. Insects flew, crawled on the ground, fell into excavations, crunched and chomped underfoot. It became unbearable to work. The Turkmens hired for the excavation fled in panic. The work had to be curtailed. Pumpelli hoped to return to Anau closer to autumn, but the first Russian revolution broke out. And then there was the First World War, the second Russian revolution, the October coup … He never returned to Anau.
Lost writing
The study of Turkestan began to be systematically conducted only under Soviet rule. Then it turned out that the Anau culture was preceded by the Jeytun culture. Geographically, it almost coincides with the distribution of Anau, but is three millennia distant from it.
It was they, not the people of Anau, who first began to cultivate wild barley and wild wheat, turning them into cultivated plants. They invented stone sickles and learned how to lay irrigation canals.
In the 7th millennium BC, this culture was diluted with the blood of migrants from the Middle East of Semitic-Hamitic origin. And from the west, the Finno-Ugric tribes of the Kelteminar hunter culture began to advance. In the V millennium BC, a new wave of migrants came from Iran - the Namazga-Tepe culture. They knew agriculture, raised pigs and cattle, were engaged in weaving, knew how to process copper, and built wheeled carts. But they did not harness horses, but camels. The horse was domesticated by other migrants - proto-Indo-Europeans who came to Asia from the East European Plain.
Probably, as a result of these mixtures, the Anau culture was formed in the IV-III millennia BC. Not quite Aryan, as Pumpelli thought, but very motley in ethnic terms.
Anausians carried out a colossal selection work and created a Turkestan miracle - white wheat (ak bugday). In 2005, on a hill near Ashgabat, grateful descendants built a museum dedicated to this wheat. There are grains found by Pampelli, and grain grinders found in other excavations, and stone sickles, and hand mills, and hoes, and churns, and clay figurines of the goddesses of fertility with braids that look like ears.
On the territory of Turkestan and all of Central Asia, by the middle of the II millennium BC, the Bactrian-Margian civilization developed. In fact - Indo-Iranian, in language - Aryan. Its existence was discovered and substantiated by archaeologist Viktor Sari-anidi, who worked on excavations in the settlements of Altyn-Tepe, Namazga-Tepe, Gonur-Tepe. He unearthed palaces and burial mounds over tombs, altars and Zoroastrian altars, studied many skeletons - both people and animals. On the territory of Afghanistan, he managed to find many interesting artifacts. These are carts sculpted from clay, figurines of gods, ceramics and pottery forges, copper and bronze knives and mirrors. And also gold items of incredible beauty - 20 thousand items, the so-called gold of Bactria, which today is considered the national treasure of Afghanistan.
But neither Pampelli nor Sarianidi found a single written document in the hills of Anau, in Namazga Tepe or in Bactria. Although in Margiana and Anau, drawing seals were found. According to generally accepted scientific opinion, only the society in which writing appeared is considered a civilization. Patterned printing falls short of writing. Although, if you think about it, what is printing for? To certify a document. And if there is a document, then there must certainly be a written language! And, probably, it existed not only in the palaces of Margiana II millennium BC, but also in Anau a couple of millennia before that.
Journal: Secrets of the 20th century. Mikhail Romashko