The Oxus Treasure

Some time around 1877, people living on the north bank of the Oxus, the river now called the Amu Darya, began finding gold. The place was near an old fortified mound called Takht-i Kuwad, in what was then the Emirate of Bukhara and is now southern Tajikistan. Accounts disagree on almost every detail: whether the gold lay in the river sands exposed in the dry season, came from the ruins, or tumbled out of a collapsing bank. Diggers kept searching for years, and stories circulated of gold idols and a gold tiger that were never seen by any scholar.

What happened next is better documented. In May 1880 three merchants from Bukhara who had bought much of the gold were captured by tribesmen on the road from Kabul to Peshawar. A British political officer, Captain F. C. Burton, rode out, found the robbers quarrelling over the loot in a cave, and negotiated the return of a large part of it. In gratitude the merchants let him buy one of the finest pieces, a gold armlet, which he sold to the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, in 1884. The merchants sold the rest in Rawalpindi. Some had already been cut up as bullion.

Dealers in northern India passed pieces to the archaeologist Alexander Cunningham and to the collector Augustus Wollaston Franks. Dealers also made copies and tried to pass them off; Franks bought some fakes at little more than the gold price before obtaining the originals. Franks bought Cunningham's share and left the collection to the British Museum on his death in 1897. An incomplete second chariot and a rider, presented to the Viceroy of India by the British envoy in Kabul, followed later: the rider in 1931 and the chariot group in 1953.

About 180 pieces of metalwork survive, with perhaps 200 coins, though early reports spoke of 1,500 coins and of objects that never reached a museum. The quality varies enormously. The pair of armlets ending in winged griffins, once inlaid with coloured stones, is court work of the highest order, matching the armlets carried as tribute on the reliefs at Persepolis. A small gold chariot drawn by four horses carries a driver and a seated passenger. Fifty-one thin gold plaques incised with worshippers, some crudely, look like offerings left at a shrine. That has led most scholars to see the treasure as the accumulated gifts of a temple, deposited over a long period.

The way it came to light has left lasting questions. In 1905 the British Museum's own cataloguer, O. M. Dalton, warned that the treasure had passed through hands that could not be trusted. In 2003 the archaeologist Oscar Muscarella challenged the idea that the objects formed a single find and doubted some plaques; the curator John Curtis replied that contemporary evidence firmly places the find on the north bank of the Oxus between 1877 and 1880 and that most if not all of the pieces are genuine. Close parallels from excavated Achaemenid sites, such as jewellery from Susa, support the authenticity of the main groups.

There is also the question of where it belongs. The treasure left Central Asia through local sale and the colonial-era art market, never through excavation. In 2007 the President of Tajikistan called for its return. No formal claim followed, and in 2013 the British Museum presented gold replicas of key pieces to Tajikistan's new National Museum.