Southern Uzbekistan in the Second Millennium B. C.

One of the great successes of archeological investigations in southern Uzbekistan in the years of Soviet power has been the clear documentation of this area’s extensive occupation and utilization in the Stone Age, the Kushan epoch, and later periods. However, the history of the entire period from the Stone Age to the appearance of early class societies in later times represented a major gap in the history of ancient Bactria, a lacuna that caused major difficulties in the study of the sources and genesis of archaic and classical cultures in general. The opinion was advanced that ancient Bactria was a mirage, that there were no earlier periods for the local development of the highly advanced urban culture of Bactria. ¹ This view associated the later flowering with the activities of another civilization, specifically, the Persian conquest of the Achaemenian empire.