Some Central Asian history from 4000-3000BC

Jar from Tepe Sialk

This post will look at the years 4000-3000BC for the region of Central Asia. Central Asia is a little tricky to describe and for the purposes of this post it will include the Pontic Steppes (referred to in previous European posts), the boreal lands north of Siberia and all the steppe lands from the black soil of the Ukraine, the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau, to the northern steppes on the borders of China. I will also include the history of the Iranian Plateau here. It is not Central Asian, but it does link the northern steppes with the regions of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. I have not spoken in great detail about Iran before and it is certainly worth including so I shall include it here.

The same caveats that I have mentioned before must be mentioned again. I am not a professional historian, merely someone who finds history interesting. So, everything presented here should be questioned heavily.

This period predates most writing, so much of what we learn will come from archaeology, with some additional input from linguistics, genetics, biology and geology. Dendrochronology is of less use here than in Europe, but we have the great fortune to be close enough to written history to be able to use folklore and legend here in a way that we have not been able to do in the posts about prehistoric Europe.

Goblet and cup of the Susa I type

To speak of the history of the regions of the centre of the Eurasian landmass, we must speak of what this world looked like in the year 4000BC. On the Iranian Plateau and north into the steppes west of the Urals, agriculture had been adopted and farming villages had developed into towns. Urbanisation was beginning in what is now Iran, spurred on by similar developments in the neighbouring Indus and Mesopotamian river valleys. The greatest of these cities, or proto-cities, was probably Susa, which was in the phase known as Susa I, where the two nearby settlements had merged to form a single walled settlement, with geometric style pottery abundantly placed in the graves of the inhabitants.

Further to the north was the city/proto-city of Tepe Sialk, which was at this time in the cultural period known as Tepe Sialk III. Somewhat surprisingly the climate of Iran seems to have been wildly different to what we think of today. What is now the vast desert of Dasht-e-Kavir, the Great Salt Desert, seems to have been a huge inland lake that could be sailed on as if a sea, and the monsoons of the Indian Ocean seem to have stretched up into the Iranian Plateau to water this paradise.

Lapis lazuli

Nearby Godin Tepe was established on an extremely early trading route where the beautiful blue stone of lapis lazuli was imported from Badakhshan (in what is now Afghanistan) to Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians prized lapis lazuli highly and its brilliant hues illuminate many of their artworks. It might be compared to how our culture values diamonds, with the exception that lapis lazuli was perhaps rarer. To the ancient world, the only source of lapis lazuli were the mines of Badakhshan and any occurrence of lapis lazuli in archaeology is a sign of interconnections with this trading network.

To the east of Susa was the small settlements of Tall-i-Bakun and Rahmatabad Tepe, which, like the other settlements in what is now Iran, seems to have been involved in trade with the surrounding world and the burgeoning proto-urban centres of southern Mesopotamia. Doubtless the Iranian Plateau holds many such centres that are as yet under-studied. These are the ones that we will mention for now to give an idea of a landscape that was moving towards urbanisation and civilisation but, like its neighbours, was not quite there yet.

In the Pontic Steppes, north of the Black Sea, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European languages had begun to split up. The speakers of Proto-Anatolian, the parent language of Hittite, and the oldest branch of Indo-European, had probably already split at this point. As of this point however, the Indo-European speakers were probably just minor pastoralist tribes roaming on the grasslands with no inkling of the future of the languages they spoke or the mythologies they believed.

Further to the east through the vast steppes of Central Asia, through the deserts of the Gobi, we know less of the peoples who lived on this land. It is probable that the taiga was nearly uninhabited.

Around the year 3900 Susa seems to have come more heavily under the influence of nearby Mesopotamia and this period is usually referred to as Susa II. Many of the trappings of the Uruk period culture of Mesopotamia would be evident in Susa over the following centuries. While there were always substantial differences between Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau, in some ways it makes sense to think of them, or at least the periphery regions like Susa, as a single cultural area.

Figurines from the Kura-Araxes culture

Around this time as well the Kura-Araxes culture began to form. This was a mountain culture that flourished in the highlands of what is now Azerbaijan and Armenia. This culture seems to have had dealings with the steppe dwellers to the north but also trade links with the agricultural centres to the south. The culture also seems to spread quite rapidly throughout the mountain regions, and there is a strong possibility that the Kura-Araxes culture was spread through violence. It’s not clear what language these peoples spoke but it is a possibility that they spoke some version of Hurro-Urartian, or Proto-Kartvelian, as the speakers of these languages later inhabited these lands. But this is merely a hypothesis.

Around the century of 3700 the Botai culture began in what is now northern Kazakhstan. These people built small houses of wood and earth and had enclosures of fence poles. But their actual settlements were quite small. We shall speak more of this culture later.

Cromlech of the Maykop culture

Around this time, the Maykop Culture (also referred to as the Maikop Culture) began to flourish in the Kuban River basin, a territory that roughly corresponds to the area just north and west of modern Georgia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Here the burial practices were rather similar to the later Indo-European burial practices, with the prominent members of society being buried in holes that were later covered with large mounds. The grave goods of the Maykop culture were quite elaborate, including many beautifully carved items that are honestly some of the most beautiful pieces of art anywhere in the world from this time. The Maykop culture would exist between the later Yamna culture to the north and the Kura-Araxes culture in the Armenian Highlands to the south and may have served as a cultural bridge between the two.

Around the year 3500 it seems likely that the wheels were in use among the Maykop culture and other cultures in the area. The Mesopotamians also had developed the wheel, as had the Balkans cultures in Europe. Perhaps these inventions were independent or perhaps there was a common source. At this stage we don't know for sure. Some have assumed that this means that horses were domesticated around this time, but we know that the Sumerians at least did not have domesticated horses. It is likely that the first wheeled vehicles were pulled by oxen (donkeys were probably only domesticated some centuries after the wheel had already been invented).

Around this time, the Tocharian languages, a branch of Indo-European probably broke off from the main language family. The speakers of these languages were probably moving eastwards, towards the towards and around the lands of the Botai culture. Eventually they would settle in the Tarim Basin in what is now present-day China. Their languages have gone extinct but are known through (much, much later) manuscripts. Their existence is a reminder that much language data has simply been lost to us. Had the manuscripts of the Tocharians not come down to us we might never have known that their language had ever even existed.

The settlements of the Bakun culture, such as its type site of Tall-i-Bakun (near the later Persian capital of Persepolis) seem to have fallen into decline and disuse around this time, as cultures overlapped, grew, struggled and merged over the centuries in a ceaseless whirl that we can only glimpse at by examining their pottery sherds.

Circa 3400 the Botai culture, in what is now Kazakhstan seem to have given us the first real evidence of the domestication of the horse. Horses could be used for meat, for their hides and for their milk (depending on whether the people of this culture were lactose tolerant). Cultures that had mastered the use of the wheel for human or oxen driven transport could also turn their captive horses to pulling carts. It is unlikely however that the earliest domesticated horses were ever ridden. The horses would have been quite small and may have been unable to bear the weight of riders. So, it would be a mistake to picture the Botai culture as a society of nomadic cavalry warriors. But it did lay the foundations for further developments.

Przewalski’s Horse on the Mongolian steppe

Now, it’s not exactly clear when and where the horse was first domesticated, but it would seem that the horses domesticated by the Botai culture were actually a rare breed of horse known as Przewalski’s Horse, or the Dzungarian horse. After the disappearance of the Botai culture these horses became feral and became effectively a wild species. So, we’re still not sure exactly where modern horses were domesticated, but it cannot have been too long after the Botai culture had domesticated the Przewalksi’s horses.

We should not picture the Botai as cavalry warriors. but we do know that they took great pride in the appearance of their horses and that they apparently bred horses for their colours. The pattern that they seem to have selected for was a white coat with small black spots on it. So, we can picture the Botai as effectively trying to domesticate their horses to look like Dalmatian dogs, which is an interesting mental image.

Around the year 3300 the Yamna culture began to thrive on the Pontic Steppes, north of the Maykop culture in the Caucasus. This is usually seen as the homeland for the Indo-European speakers and the place where they were able to either domesticate, or obtain domesticated, horses. These horses would allow the tribes to become highly mobile, as their hardy creatures would provide them with milk, hides and food while also pulling along goods and supplies behind them on carts. As these horses became more useful, the people of the Yamna culture would have tried to refrain from killing them (at least immediately), turning them into almost sacred creatures, but also relying more on oxen for their meat. These two animals, the horse and the cow, would become extremely important for the Indo-Europeans.

Pot from Yamna culture

It’s not totally clear that the Yamna were Indo-European speakers, but there are a number of clues that strongly suggest it, such as the fact that their land is near the centre of the Indo-European speaking lands, and thus would be a plausible homeland for them. There are certain genetic arguments as well, but as I am even less of a geneticist than a historian, I will simply say that there are some genetic reasons to believe that the Yamna are probably the original Indo-European speakers. However, it is important to remember that peoples are not languages and languages are not cultures, so identifying the Yamna as the "homeland" of speakers of Proto-Indo-European must be done with caution.

If these were the Indo-European speakers then we can speak a little about their religion. They worshipped a sky god who was king of the gods, whose name meant “Sky Father”. They also worshipped the sun or the moon, but not as their most important gods, as sometimes the gender of the he-god or she-god of the sun would differ from culture to culture. There were hero twins associated with horses, some myths of dragons and a world tree, a vague idea of a dark underworld where humans went after they died and other myths and legends. We can guess at a lot more, based on the mythologies of the later peoples who followed after but I feel that we cannot know much more than I have stated for certain. And that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

We can hear and read reconstructions of what some linguists believe this language to have sounded like. Here is a Youtube video of someone reading a fable in Proto-Indo-European. The fable was written by a linguist called August Schleicher in 1868 and is not ancient. But the constituent words are ancient and it is a fascinating window into a reconstructed ancient world. The translation is below:



The Sheep and the Horses 
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Around the same period as the Yamna Culture was beginning to thrive, the Afanasevo Culture (or Afanasievo Culture) began to flourish in southern Siberia, farther to the east than the Botai Culture. These may have been the first farmers in the region, bringing with them oxen and shortly afterwards, horses. Possibly these are to be associated with the Proto-Tocharian speakers whose language has been previously mentioned as separating off from the main Proto-Indo-European language group some centuries earlier. If this is the case then this would be a sign of rapid expansion by the speakers of the Indo-European languages.

Settlement at Shengavit, near Yerevan

Around the year 3200 the settlement of Shengavit was founded near present-day Yerevan by the Kura-Araxes culture. This was a small urban settlement, surrounded by a wall. It is possibly the most important settlement of the Kura-Araxes culture and contains a number of graves. Some believe that horses were found at this site, but these are probably from later burials that were sank into the ground through the archaeological strata, thus possibly appearing earlier than they in fact are. The fact that the walls were so large would suggest that they were for more than demarcation or keeping in livestock. It would suggest that the Kura-Araxes culture was a warlike one and that the builders of the proto-city believed that they would possibly face some form of attack.

Proto-Elamite writing

Around the year 3100 the Botai culture seems to come to an end, although it is not clear why this is the case. Far to the south, the city or proto-city of Susa enters the Susa III period, which is also the beginning of the Proto-Elamite Period. Most importantly, the Proto-Elamite script came into use in Susa around this time. This is a largely untranslated script but we can know that it was influenced by the cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamians, as it used a number of their number symbols. The exact language is unknown but is likely to have been the Elamite, or Proto-Elamite, language, which is not well known in any case. There is a possibility of an earlier script originating from Jiroft, but this is marred by the possibility of forgery and its archaeological context is not clear.

It has been believed that the Maikop Kurgan, a large ceremonial burial centre, in the Kuban River Basin, and the type site for the Maykop culture, was built around this time. The grave goods here are spectacular. There is also the more sinister addition of two women skeletons, who may have been sacrificed at the funeral of the dead ruler. If this date is correct then it may mean that this was the most elaborate burial from that time that has been discovered. The Hermitage Museum in Russia preserves some of their golden statues and clothing decorations. The man who was buried here must have been a chieftain or a king of great wealth. I will quote from the book “The Horse, the Wheel and Language” where the author, David W. Anthony, describes the contents of the kurgan.

Golden bull figurine from Maykop Kurgan
Exhibited in the Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

With him were eight red-burnished, globular pottery vessels, the type collection for Early Maikop; a polished stone cup with a sheet-gold cover; two arsenical bronze, sheet-metal cauldrons; two small cups of sheet gold; and fourteen sheet-silver cups, two of which were decorated with impressed scenes of animal processions including a Caucasian spotted panther, a southern lion, bulls, a horse, birds, and a shaggy animal (bear? goat?) mounting a tree. 
His tunic had sixty-eight golden lions and nineteen golden bulls applied to its surface. … Around his neck and shoulders were 60 beads of turquoise, 1,272 beads of carnelian, and 122 golden beads. Under his skull was a diadem with five golden rosettes of five petals each on a band of gold pierced at the ends. … The turquoise almost certainly came from north-eastern Iran near Nishapur or from the Amu Darya near the trade settlement of Sarazm in modern Tajikistan, two regions famous in antiquity for their turquoise. The red carnelian came from western Pakistan and the lapis lazuli from eastern Afghanistan. 
Description of the Maykop Kurgan from "The Horse, the Wheel and Language"

The author correctly points out that these items almost certainly came from the south, in that the lion was a Mesopotamian symbol of power and that the lands of the Maykop culture lay beyond the original range and habitat of the Asiatic lion. So, this ruler dressed himself in beads acquired through trade and bedecked himself with the symbols of royal power from another culture. We will almost certainly never know who they were, but the resplendence of the burial is worth remembering. It should be noted however that this date is far from certain for the Maikop kurgan and it may date from a later period, perhaps as late as 2300BC. This would still be impressive, but would certainly give a different context to the kurgan.

Around the end of the fourth millennium, around 3000BC, some believe that the Maykop culture drew to a close. This is obviously debateable. Clearly if the Maikop kurgan is from 2300BC then the culture continues for far longer, but all of the dates given here are by their nature speculative.

To the north of this region the language group Proto-Finno-Ugric may have branched off from Uralic. There is no real agreement as to exactly where these people lived (and languages do not correspond exactly with ethnic groups, and certainly not with genetics). But it is important to remember that all of the language groups that would come to be spread across Eurasia were in existence and spreading and splitting and changing, as language groups always have and always will.

Mountains in the Tibetan Plateau

In the Tibetan region there seems to have been an influx of migrants to the Tibetan Plateau around this time. These people seem to have come from what is now the northern Chinese Plains. However they also may have brought with them a unique adaptation for the mountains. There is a gene, which may be inherited from the Denisovans; that helps control red blood cell production and allows humans to function better at high altitudes without developing oxygen sickness. This gene allowed the inhabitants of the plateau to function and thrive where others would have surely perished. The original inhabitants of the mountains may possibly have had this gene, EPAS1, as well (remember that I am not a geneticist), but certainly the newcomers thrived with its help.

Finally, in Anatolia, the city of Arslantepe was burned around this time. This city was probably a trading colony, or possibly even an actual colony, of the Uruk culture from Mesopotamia. Later on the site would be rebuilt and would once again feature in the story of mankind but for now it was thoroughly destroyed. The culprits would appear to be the warriors of the Kura-Araxes culture, whose pottery now begins to appear in Anatolia and then to spread down into the Levant. The direct Mesopotamian influence on the region would fade around this time.

Before bringing the blog to a close I think it would be useful to discuss some historical issues that sometimes come up from looking at this period of history. Firstly, the question as to what is the oldest civilisation. A lot of countries currently lay claim to having the original civilisation, or the origins of civilisation, within their borders. A lot of these claims are quite legitimate. Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, India and others have quite legitimate claims in this regard. Even European countries like Malta, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova or Ukraine could make similar claims: The difficulty lies in deciding what makes a civilisation.

Iraq is home to ancient cities and is probably the origin of writing. Syria, Iran and India all have urban centres that unquestionably are earlier than the southern Mesopotamian cities (although Mesopotamia also has towns from this era). Many cultures have symbols that could potentially be interpreted as proto-writing. The Egyptian kingdom founded by Narmer/Menes is the world’s first unquestioned state. The site of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is the oldest known temple or sacred site in the world and Turkey/Iran is the probable home of agriculture in Eurasia.

The splendour of the burials in the Varna Necropolis of Bulgaria would give Bulgaria a good claim to the crown of civilisation, while the Cucuteni-Trypilia culture in present day Romania/Moldova/Ukraine had probably the largest urban settlements in the world in the year 3200BC, although they were abandoned shortly thereafter. Malta, with its ancient temples of the Stone Age, long before the Pharaohs ruled, could claim that this was civilisation and that it was the first. And surely the great megalithic constructions of Western Europe, with giant works like Knowth or Avebury could be considered the works of a civilisation?

So we can see that the question has many possible answers and that, while there are definite wrong answers (anyone who claims that civilisation started in Antarctica or the Azores would be wrong), there is no single right answer. What we should do instead is to question what we mean by civilisation, break it down into its constituent parts, and figure out where the constituent parts started. Questions like “Where was the wheel first used?” have an answer, even if we may not know it for certain right now. Questions like “Where did civilisation start?” do not really have a well-defined answer.

Later artwork of the Jiroft culture, c2500BC

It should be noted that I have not discussed the Jiroft culture in south-eastern Iran in this blog. This is because it has only recently been discovered and there is much work to be done on it. Unfortunately I was unable to find much solid information on this culture, as it was apparently discovered by a looter, who was afterwards caught, which spurred excavation of the site. However, there are few major papers on this that I could find, and those that I could find seemed to require confirmation. It has been speculated that Jiroft is as important a civilisation as the Indus Valley or Mesopotamia, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and at this moment, that is lacking. Hopefully more information will be available soon.

While discussing the Maykop culture I mentioned the book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language, which is an interesting book but, while I would recommend reading it, I would give some notes of caution about it. Firstly, I am wary of the idea that the steppe tribes such as the Botai actually rode their horses. Horses that we know today have been shaped by the selective breeding from domestication and their physical shapes have changed. Because no wild horses exist today, we do not know what the original horses looked like, but it is a plausible guess that they were unable to support a fully grown man on their backs. Evidence of bit-wear on teeth is not good evidence here. Horses may have had bits to help them in drawing sleighs, ploughs or later wagons.

Proto-Elamite Pottery found near Susa
exhibited in the Louvre

We know that when horses came to the Middle East around 1600BC that the people of the Middle East used them for chariots and that cavalry was only introduced much later. Similarly, we know that later steppe cultures used chariots, suggesting that cultures like the Botai could not ride their horses (or at least could not ride them into battle). The author suggests that rather than developing into cavalry the steppe tribes used the horses to raid in a more disorganised fashion. But it is still interesting that the cultures of the Middle East never developed this behaviour. The domestication of the horse was probably more as a source of meat/milk/skins/draught animal and only later as a weapon of war. On this point I could of course be proved wrong. 

So this sums up some of the crucial developments in the history of the world that occurred between 4000-3000BC in the vast stretches of Central Asia. For the next blog we will be looking at the same region but for the millennium that follows it.

Related Blog Posts:
Some Central Asian history from 4000-3000BC
Some Central Asian history from 3000-2000BC
Some Central Asian history from 2000-1500BC
Some Central Asian history from 1500-1000BC
Some Central Asian history from 1000-750BC
Some Central Asian history from 750-500BC