History

The BMAC occupied a chain of river-delta oases stretching across what are now Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. Gonur Depe was the largest and most complex of its settlements — a true capital city, not merely a large village. It was contemporary with the Old Babylonian period in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, and the peak of the Indus Valley Civilisation at Mohenjo-daro, yet it was entirely unknown to scholarship until Sarianidi began surface surveys in the 1970s.

The city had a complex internal organisation: a fortified royal palace (approximately 150 × 140 metres) with multiple courtyard areas, a ceremonial precinct (which Sarianidi called the "temenos") including a fire altar and evidence of Zoroastrian-like ritual, and a residential town divided into neighbourhoods with streets, houses, and workshops. A vast necropolis surrounds the settlement. Royal burials yielded extraordinary objects: gold and silver vessels, jewellery of lapis lazuli, carnelian and turquoise sourced from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and distinctive "BMAC-style" compartmented copper-alloy seals representing an artistic tradition entirely independent of Mesopotamia or the Indus Valley.

One burial contained the remains of a camel — the earliest known domesticated camel burial in the archaeological record, suggesting that BMAC may have been involved in the early history of camel domestication that would eventually transform long-distance trade across Eurasia. Sarianidi argued controversially that the BMAC was the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Iranian peoples and therefore of both the Iranian Avestan religion and the Indian Vedic tradition — a hypothesis that remains debated but is increasingly supported by archaeogenetic and linguistic evidence.