Dear Colleagues,

Below I copy, with his permission, a private message from David Anthony
that offers a detailed description of the horse and vehicle remains at
Gonur Tepe.

I should also mention that David has just turned over the manuscript of
his magnum opus to Princeton University Press. It will be entitled
__The Horse, the Wheel, and Language__ (they're still bickering over the
subtitle). I've been looking forward to this book for at least
half-a-dozen years, and I'm sure that it will be of signal importance.

Best wishes,

Victor

========

The Gonur Tepe horse burial probably dates about 2100-2000 calBC, the
earliest phase of the Bactria-Margiana civilization, and it was a foal,
not a mature horse, that had been decapitated (with the body, not the
head deposited in the grave, the opposite of an Indo-Iranian sacrifice).
The same grave contained the contorted bodies of I think I remember 10
humans, who apparently were killed and toppled over while they stood on
the floor of the grave. There was also a whole dog, and a whole camel.
One of the humans fell on top of of a small 4-wheeled wagon with solid
wooden wheels and bronze rim-guards or proto-tires that looked like
U-shaped clamps, nailed into the sides of the wheels. The vehicle is not
a chariot, but a solid-wooden wheeled wagon, and a very small one. The
grave is a brick-built chamber in the middle of a cemetery of
brick-built grave chambers, and was thought to have accompanied or been
a sacrifice attending one or more of the interments in a nearby elite
brick chamber with multiple interments deposited sequentially at
different times. One of those interments had a staff with a metal
horse-head pommel on the end. But these ritual and symbolic appearances
constitute the only evidence for horses at Gonur--there are no horse
bones outside of this one grave, and horses were not eaten. The local
wild equids, onagers, were occasionally hunted and eaten, but not
horses. I think the horses at Gonur came from the north, from the
steppes, and were introduced at just this time, about 2100-2000 BC. They
probably were a valuable trade commodity. The grave near Sarazm in the
Zeravshan valley at Zardcha Khalifa contained BMAC objects and northern
cheekpieces for chariotry, and northern steppe pottery appeared at
Gonur. I think the horse at Gonur represents not local domestication (
there were no wild horses to domesticate anywhere in Central Asia!) but
the beginning of a horse trade conducted by visiting steppe people who
soon turned into raiders, mercenaries, and finally conquerors.