4000-2400 BC - Early Afghanistan
By 4000 BC, incipient urban centers with distinct cultures flourished at regular intervals, like stepping stones, across the Central Asian landmass. Unlike Bronze Age civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt or the Indus Valley, early Central Asian cultures had no dominant rivers to focus people, resources, and communications along a corridor from mountain to ocean. Nevertheless a vast and diversified tapestry of peoples and independent polities did arise in these isolated lands — a discontinuous urbanization where scarcity and climatic extremes were the norm.
Archaeological evidence reveals that civilization during the fourth and third millennium BC left no vacuum in the vastness that linked Mesopotamia with India and China. Archaeologists studying the jewelery and other artifacts unearthed from the Royal Tombs (circa 2400 BC) discovered that More than twenty thousand beads and other objects made of lapis lazuli retrieved from the Royal Tombs all had the same mineral compostition; hence all all originated from the same mine. Extensive cross-checking discloed that virtually every piece of lapis lazuli used in the ancient Near East — many tons of material — all came from the same mountain range, the Sar-i Sang, deep in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan.
To carry so much lapis from Afghanistan all the way to Mesopotamia, as well as to Egypt (where the blue stone was considered the height of fashion), must have required sophisticated logistics and a series of trading posts and oasis settlements along an established route on which other precious goods (such as gold, copper, precious stones, woods, exotic animals) could also be shipped. The lapis lazuli that arrived from the Sar-i Sang mines in Afghanistan to the great cities at Ur about 2400 BC travelled along routes or exchange that had already been active for thousands of years.
In the long march toward civilization, Mundigak (near modern-day Kandahar) provides evidence of a true city, perhaps a provincial capital of the Indus valley civilization, and evidence of the type of structures and objects that true cities produce: religious structures and carved or painted works of art. At Mundigak, archaeologists have discovered a large 3rd millennium BC pillared terrace structure with a doorway outlined in red, which probably had a religious purpose. At Deh Morasi Gundai, archaeologists found evidence of a shrine complex containing various ritual items such as goat horns, a goblet, a copper seal, hollow copper tubing, a small alabaster cup, and a carved and hand-molded pottery figurine of a mother goddess or fertility figure similar to figurines that were also found at Mundigak.
Deh Morasi Gundai was eventually abandoned about 1500 BC, perhaps because of the westward shift of the river on which it was built. Mundigak continued another 500 years. Two successive invasions by a nomadic tribe from the north forced the inhabitants to abandon the city after more than 2,000 years of continuous occupation.
After 2400 BC, throughout Central Asia the growth of urban societies was severely challenged. Within a span of some three hundred years, none of the major centers that developed during the first half of the 3rd millennium were still occupied. The precise reasons for this "urban collapse" remain a mystery. Yet toward the end of 3rd millennium, across northern Afghanistan and southern Turkemenistan and Uzbekistan, a series of events fueled the rise of cities and settlements that was to have a major impact.
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