Word: shibarghan
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...long as anyone can remember, villagers called it Tillya Tepe-the Golden Mound. Even so, no one dreamed of the precious relics that might be unearthed in the strange, 12-ft.-high rise of ground located in a cotton field three miles north of the town of Shibarghan in northern Afghanistan. In 1977 a Soviet-Afghan archaeological team began serious excavations. By last fall they had uncovered the mud-brick columns and cross-shaped altar of an ancient temple dating back to at least 1000 B.C. Then they struck pay dirt-a glittering trove of gold that some Soviets said...
...Soviet archaeologists conjecture that the buried nobles of Shibarghan were members of a local ruling family in the midst of this dark period. One sign of kinship: two skeletons bore rings of identical design. Sarianidi's theory is that a family patriarch stumbled upon the long buried temple and appropriated it as a royal necropolis. For 200 years successive generations were apparently buried at the unmarked site, probably by night to outwit grave robbers...
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