ABSTRACT
The middle and upper reaches of the Amu Darya (Oxus River) in the late first millennium BCE and early first millennium CE was a melting pot of new and local groups mixing in an area that, in time, lay between the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (ca. 250–125 BCE) and the Kushan Empire (60–375 CE), which ruled the region before and afterwards. Such a context offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate issues of cultural identity by new and local populations during a period of political adjustment. In several cemeteries of non-elites along the Amu Darya that were excavated by Mandel’shtam, relatively richer burials of females sometimes contain earrings of gold or gilt bronze decorated with a pair of dolphins. This chapter examines whether these pastoralist women choose to wear these earrings based on this imagery or because of associations with the objects themselves and the ways in which these earrings connected them to settlements along the Amu Darya that inherited Greco-Bactrian traditions.
