How Did a Chimaera Get Lost in Margush? Indus-Related Seals from Bronze Age Oases Along the Amu Darya and Murghab Rivers

This paper presents a coherent collection of Indus-related stone seals and tablets from Bactria and Margiana, detailing their morphological and iconographic features and indicating comparisons with equivalent seals found in the greater Indus Valley of present-day Pakistan and northwestern India. Overall, these objects reveal a new aspect of the settlement pattern in the oases flourished along the Oxus River during the Middle Bronze Age, with specific reference to the seminal paper by Sandro Salvatori (2008), ‘The Margiana Settlement Pattern from the Middle Bronze Age to the Parthian-Sasanian Period: A Contribution to the Study of Complexity’. A few other miscellaneous hybrid-seals with features of both the Oxus and the Indus seal productions, including the representation in local style of a typical Harappan chimaera, will also be presented to further stress the duration and significance of the commercial and cultural links between these two macro-regions along the third and in the first half of the second millennium BC