A treasure hunt

摘要

The mound lies just beyond the oa-sis town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan, on the plain that slips south to the Hindu Kush and north to the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus. This was once Bactria, where the Hellenic world briefly touched and intertwined with the worlds of the Indus and the Siberian steppe. Greeks prospered here for a century or so after the death of Alexander the Great, in 323BC, and then were driven off. The mound is anonymous now, barely noticeable from the road. It stands three metres (ten feet) high, 100 metres in diameter, lopped square like a Celtic barrow, the whole of it overgrown with pale weeds. Locals named it Tillya Tepe, or Hill of Gold, long before the Soviet archaeologists came and revealed its treasures. That was in the winter of 1978-79, just before Afghanistan descended into 23 years of war, leaving 1.7m dead. In the last days before the beginning of that nightmare, a Soviet archaeological team led by a Greek-Russian, Victor Sariyannidis, unearthed 21,000 pieces of gold in six burial chambers within Tillya Tepe. The hoard had belonged to the rich Kushan nomads buried there around the time of Christ. It had lain undisturbed for two millennia. They were ecstatic at first, but, as the months passed and still they were picking the gold from the freezing clay, they became increasingly frightened. The value of their discovery was such that the Afghan army had to be called in to guard the site. KGB men from Moscow began to take an interest. Political officers arrived too, keen to use the dig as an advertisement for fraternal relations between the Soviet Union and the new communist regime in Kabul. The burial chambers were simple, and their flimsy ceilings soon collapsed. But the treasure was extraordinary, partly Siberian Altai, partly Greek. In one chamber a horse skull was found; in another, in the mouth of a young woman, was a silver coin, the toll due to Charon for her passage across the Styx into the underworld.