ALTERNATE INDO IRANIAN CIVILIZATION

The previous thread that I did on Indus valley civilization surviving did get postive response but my knowledge of it was quite limited and my knowledge of Indo iranian too was limited. After reading many articles and books I have enough knowledge on both of the civilization ( not that I claim to be an expert on these matter ) that I can do a realistic alternate timeline that doesn't like alien space bat .Now I'll try to narrate this thread like a story with explanation in between much like how ancient Indian myths were narrated


The story begins Here in this unforgiving landscape, “Black Sand” (as the desert’s name means in the Turkmen language) sprawls across more than 200,000 square miles called the kara- kum desert a salt-flat scoured by sandstorms, sun-hammered by day, near-freezing at night. It’s one of the most sparsely populated environments on earth, with an average of just one person per 2.5 square miles But it was not always this way. Nearly 6,000 years ago, this plain was a fertile river basin, fed by currents rushing down from the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. Wheat and barley grew here, along with date-palms and fruit trees. Herds of sheep and goats grazed on grass along the mountain slopes.
In other words, this riverplain once resembled the valley of Mesopotamia — not only in its ecology, but also in culture,further south into the sandy wastes, we discover a network of mud-brick cities where they dealt with goods and jewelry which was a blend the style of the Sumerians with the aesthetics of the Indus Valley civilization further east . The city was located in modern day gonur tepe
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Around a vast central citadel surrounded by mud-brick walls and towers, there was an even greater wall with square bastions, surrounded in turn by a third oval wall enclosing an entire city of temples, marketplaces and houses. Wheeled carts once rolled along the city’s paved roads.

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The capitol citidel

Canals from the Murgab River flowed through its heart, providing clean water to an intricate system of wells and irrigation canals. Clearly, this was no slapdash settlement grown to unmanageable size — it was a planned city, just as beautifully arranged as the urban centers of Sumer and the Indus Valley.

And if we go into many of the houses and temples, we find delicately worked jewelry of gold and silver, set with carnelian and lapis lazuli — the latter of which appears in Sumerian jewelry, but had to be mined near Gonur Tepe, in the mountains of Afghanistan. This suggests that the culture was oplulent and had achieved a high degree of urbanization.

The art displays workmanship every bit as fine as that of master Egyptian and Sumerian craftsmen, and features a repertoire of motifs any Sumerologist would recognize: men with mustache-less beards and high-waisted skirts; women in plaited dresses and mantles; heroes clutching snakes and battling mythic monsters. And there was several Sumerian cylinder-seals (stamps used as “signatures” on locks and documents) among the ruins, proving that these people — whoever they were — had some kind of trade link with the Sumerians.

We also find metal discs in some of the houses resemble the wheels of chariots used by it's inhabitants. So this must be some grand Outpost of Sumerians? The answer is no for if we look around we even find severalof the distinctive clay seals used by Indus Valley traders — who constructed their own planned cities at sites like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro —bearing inscriptions in the still-untranslated scrpit in OTL
An Indus valley seal

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If we look around more we find clay bullae (similar to those used by Sumerian merchants to record economic transactions) carved with mysterious symbols unlike those of any known writing system.

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Though it sounds too wild to believe, this city seemed to demonstrate the existence of a previously unheard-of civilization — one that boasted a system of cities with planned urban architecture, sprawling across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; along with a continent-spanning trade network, and a unique system of proto-writing. All in the 2500s BCE.




We now know that the Sumerians aren’t as unique as we always thought. Experts have long puzzled over Sumerian trade records’ mentions of mysterious eastern lands like Magan and Meluhha. The consensus is that these names referred to Oman and the Indus Valley, respectively — but who can be certain?

If we conduct Chemical analyses of Sumerian artifacts have revealed that much of their gold and silver was mined in Asia — and scholars have long recognized that bright blue lapis lazuli can’t be mined in Mesopotamia, and can only have arrived via some eastern trade route.

But the really intriguing question is one of precedence. Who invented the world’s first planned cities: the Sumerians, or the people of Gonur Tepe? What about the wheel, or writing, or irrigation, or a myriad of other famous Sumerian inventions, which the Oxus Civilization (as the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex is now known) seem to have had at around the same time?


Central Asian cultures tend to get skipped over as “nomadic tribes” or “steppe peoples.” Gazing out on tent-camps and barren plains, a traveler might naturally assume that any cities ever raised here must have been mere temporary flukes — experiments in urban living that quickly imploded, leaving the nomads to return to their “natural state.”

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Ruins at gonur tepe

In the case of the Oxus Civilization, its people flourished for nearly six hundred years, from the 2400s to the 1700s BCE — when the climate abruptly grew drier throughout the Middle East. Relentless droughts drained the Murgab River, cutting off the city’s lifeblood (just as, far to the west, the Sumerian fishing-marshes were rapidly drying up).But unlike in Mesopotamia, no new empire swept in to occupy and exploit the cities around Gonur Tepe

The question is who are the inhabitants of this civilization which was until now lost to history
Narasimhan et al. 2018 analyzed BMAC skeletons from the Bronze Age sites of bustan ,gonur tepe and Sapalli Tepe Themale specimens belonged to haplogroup E1b1a (1/18), E1b1b(1/18), G(2/18), J (2/18), j1 (1/18), J2(4/18), L(2/18), R (1/18), R1b (1/18), R2(2/18), and T(1/18).

From this we can say that Bactria margina or Oxus river valley civilization was a complex and ethnically diverse civilization
The Bactria Margian civilization began in the foothills around Ashgabat in 2300 B.C.—about three centuries after the pyramids were finished and at the time power in Mesopotamia was shifting from Sumner to Babylon and China had yet to develop writing—and spread to much of modern Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan around 2200 B.C. and then disappeared a 5 centurieslater.

Bactria Margiana was a resourceful agricultural society that thrived around oases in the harsh Kara-kum Desert. It; 1) established large urban centers; 2) built mud-brick fortifications, large buildings and monumental arches; 3) established extensive irrigation systems to grow wheat and barley; 4) raised goats and sheep; 5) produced fine ceramics, bronze goods, alabaster and bone carvings and jewelry made with gold and semiprecious stones; 6) buried luxury goods with the dead; and 7) may have developed writing or proto-writing.

Urban settlements that served as centres of commerce and craftsmanship were present in Central Asia in the early Bronze Age, circa 3000 BC. The influence of ancient civilisations in the region was complemented by the constant interaction between sedentary and nomadic cultures. In the beginning of the second millennium BC the Indo-Iranian tribes penetrated Central Asia. The onslaught of these steppe herdsmen was a lengthy process and it was not until five centuries later that they succeeded in assimilating the local peoples, adopting the latter’s achievements and giving up to a considerable extent their pastoral way of life. As a result, a number of mixed-type cultures emerged, which combined highly developed arable farming with cattle-breeding and extensive use of the horse for military purposes and transportation. The Aryans had laid the foundation for the formation of the indo iranian ethnos and culture in the region.

Soghd and Bactria dominated in the region, while a number of lesser principalities such as Khuttal (contemporary Kulob) retained independence and ruling dynasties of their own; however, despite the ethnic homogeneity of the population and close cultural and economic bonds, these territories merged into a centralised state with a complex government machine after some peroid of time under the Indo Aryans however there remained local autonomies that recognised the supremacy of the new Indo iranian authority but this is a story for another day

Margiana (50 miles north of Merv, Turkmenistan) is the site of a Bronze Age civilization that thrived around the 2nd millennium B.C. and ranks with ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley as one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Its inhabitants built mud-wall fortresses and crafted bronze seals, ceramics, jewelry and ceremonial items and drank a potion made with opium, cannabis and ephedra plants. It is believethat Zoroaster may have lived here but this theory doesn't find much credence .
THE ORIGIN

The ancient Oxus culture may have arisen at sites like Anau, a settlement at the base of the Kopet-Dag mountains, which dates back to 6500 B.C. Later settlements like Gonur, roughly 4,000 years old, may have been founded by people from the Kopet-Dag cultures. By 3000 B.C., the people of the Kopet-Dag had organized into walled towns. They used carts drawn by domesticated animals, and their pottery resembles the kind later found in Gonur.

The Oxus civilization—at least in Margiana, the region in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—evolved from this Kopet-Dag culture
What prompted the settlers to abandon the Kopet-Dag and migrate into the area around Gonur? One possibility is drought. that the same drought that he claims destroyed the world's first empire—the Akkadians in Mesopotamia—around 2100 B.C. also drove the Kopet-Dag peoples from their homes. If the small streams that poured out of the mountains stopped flowing, life in the arid climate would have been impossible. That would have forced the people of Kopet-Dag to head toward Gonur and settle by the Murgab River, the only reliable source of water in the Kara-Kum. With its headwaters in distant Hindu Kush glaciers, the river would have continued flowing even in the hottest summers or longest droughts

Another possibility is that population growth forced people down from the mountain slopes and onto the plains, where the Murgab then flowed lazily into a delta, creating an oasis of dense brush teeming with game, fish, and birds. That could explain why so many Oxus sites are built on virgin soil, as if carefully planned in advance. The people came from the foothills of the Kopet-Dag with baggage, a knowledge of agriculture, irrigation systems, metal, ceramics, and jewelry making

Writting system

Several thumbnail-size stone inscrib with three or four red symbols that may be an ancient form of writing. The symbols are different from those used in the writing of Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus Valley. The object was a seal, with a measure of units of grain, and was used in the accounting of commodities as was the case with seals in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley

The symbols resemble an ancient form of Chinese writing that was used until about 200 B.C. A similar-sized seal found in Xinjiang, dated to the Han Period (206 B.C. to A.D. 9) has almost identical symbols. If there is a link between the newly-discovered symbols and the ancient Chinese writing it suggests that the Chinese writing was influenced by the writing of this ancient civilization.
 
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