A two-thousand-year-old Afghan treasure has come to light after a quarter century of rumors, legends, and speculation. Ibex figurines and jeweled scabbards and golden beasts--nearly twenty-one thousand pieces in all--have been found again.

Precisely where the treasure is, Afghan officials aren't saying in the interests of security.

The gold hoard from the ancient kingdom of Bactria has survived the years of chaos since it was discovered: the Soviet invasion, the warring among the mujahaddin, and the rise of the Taliban. Stories circulated that the golden objects had been carried off to Moscow, or sold on the black market, or melted down. In one account, just before the American forces arrived in 2001, the Taliban ran out of time trying to blow the central bank's vault. No one could say for sure what had happened.

Then in August of 2003, the government of Afghanistan announced that the Bactrian gold had been found and invited archaeologist Fred Hiebert to verify the fact. "I went over there to try and find out whether there was any truth to this rumor that the Bactrian gold was safe," says Hiebert, a specialist in ancient trade in Central Asia. "We were invited to inventory what collections they had, systematically, and do a verification."

Hiebert held the original field notes from the excavation by Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi in the 1970s. With support from the NEH and the National Geographic Society, he and museum specialist Carla Grissmann were in Afghan-istan last summer to conduct an inventory. The treasure, they determined, was intact.

The artifacts were uncovered in 1978 in the Mound of Gold, or Tillya Tepe, in a northern Afghan province that lies between the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Amu Darya River. The site was rumored to contain a golden man buried in a coffin of gold. Instead, Sarianidi's team found a four-thousand-year-old temple, and within its walls, the tombs of five women and one man. The archaeologists speculated that some time during the first century C.E., a tribe of Bactrian nomads had hidden the graves within the ruins of the abandoned temple.

Each person was interred with a dazzling array of jewelry, beads, buckles, coins, mirrors, and gold plaques that had trimmed their clothing--which, as was the nomadic tradition, the nobles had worn or carried with them in life. Four of the six nomads were buried with their heads facing north. Coins were placed in the mouths of two of the women: the toll for Charon to ferry them across the river Styx.

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Rachel Galvin is a freelance writer in Princeton, New Jersey.

Fred Hiebert is archaeology fellow at the National Geographic Society, which received an NEH Chairman's Emergency Grant of $30,000 to document the Bactrian gold.

More see:

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-11/goldenhoard.html

Bactrian Coins in Shanghai Museum

正面为亚历山大像，背面为持权杖的宙斯，两行希腊文意为亚历山大大帝

商晚期马首刀 in Shanghai Museum

战国齐墓出土疑似Griffin in Qingzhou Museum

Also be found in The Golden Hoard