antiquities - Anahita Gallery

Anahita Gallery, Inc.
Fine art, photography & textiles from Central Asia.

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antiquities

This page features antiquities, primarily from the Central Asian Bronze Age period from the mid-third to the mid-second millennium B.C. They were purchased in Afghanistan during the time when we were residents there in the early 1970s. In part, we were drawn to these mysterious objects because they appeared to prefigure the forms and designs of later steppe art. Strangely, there was also congruence between their reticulated, highly abstracted renderings of scorpions and birds of prey in bronze, and the designs of recent textile arts of unrelated Central Asian peoples of the 18th and 19th centuries. When we left Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, we were able to export them through the kind assistance of a Kabul Museum archaeologist, who felt – correctly, as it turned out – that our Bronze Age materials would be safer in the U.S. than in Afghanistan. At the time, almost nothing was known about these materials, as the first archaeological excavations in which they were discovered, those of Raphael Pumpelly in the early 20th century (in what later became Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) had been cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution. Russian archaeologist Victor Sarianidi was the most important of the Soviet scholars who revived this field after a lengthy hiatus, and his and other works on the period were published beginning in the 1970s. Sarianidi was in Afghanistan at the same time that we were; his famous discovery of the Tilla Tepe gold hoard actually occurred accidentally, while he was excavating an earlier Bronze Age site. Later, the vast majority of the Bronze Age objects in our collection were used to illustrate scholarly works published in the Soviet Union, Russia, Turkmenistan, and the United States, most extensively by Sarianidi in "Myths of Ancient Bactria and Margiana on Its Seals and Amulets".

click on an image to view an enlargement

ANT_0066 Bronze Seal with two camels 4th-5th C 2.8" across $3200

ANT_0067 Bronze Nomadic Toggles c 500 BC largest: 1.1" long $400 each

ANT_0068 6 Scythian Gold Pieces c 500 BC largest: .4" $600, lot

ANT_0069 Bronze Nomadic Toggles c 500 BC largest: 1.7" long $300 each

ANT_0070 Bactrian Cult Object, Lead c 2000 BC 4.2" x 10.25" $10,000

ANT_0071 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD 1.25" across $250

ANT_0073 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD .8" across $300

ANT_0074 Silver Seal, Rare 5th cent. AD .8 $1000

ANT_0075 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD 1.1 across $350

ANT_0076 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD 1.5 across $600

ANT_0077 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD 1" across $275

ANT_0078 Copper Seal 5th cent. AD 1.4" across $450

ISL_0049 Ceramic Ossuary 1500 BC 12 x 13 in $4000
ANT_0052 Hunnish Cauldron 5th C 11.7 x 13.75 in price on request	ANT_0052 Hunnish Cauldron 5th C 11.7 x 13.75 in price on request
ANT_0052 Hunnish Cauldron 5th C 11.7 x 13.75 in price on request	ANT_0055 Small Alabaster Bowl 2000 BCE 1.8 x 3.5 in $450
ANT_0056 Lead Circular Votive Object 2000 BCE .75 x 11.8 in $5000	ANT_0057 Stone Macehead 2000 BCE 1.5 x 2.8 in $300

ANT_0061 Stone Ritual Object 2000 BCE 3.7 x 32 in $3500	ANT_0064 Strand Hunnish Beads, high-tin bronze 5th-6th C length 12 in $1100
ANT_0064 Strand Hunnish Beads, high-tin bronze 5th-6th C length 12 in $1100	ANT_0065 Alabaster Goblet 2000 BCE 4.5 x 9 in $950
ANT_0001 Bronze Age alabaster lamp 2000 BC 1.7 x 3 in $400	ANT_0002 Bronze Age alabaster lamp 2000 BC 1.5 x 3.3 in $400
ANT_0003 Bronze Age alabaster lamp 2000 BC 1.2 x 4.25 in $400	ANT_0004 Bronze Age alabaster lamp 2000 BC 3.25 x 4.25 1000
ANT_0005 Sogdian ceramic horsehead 5th C AD 2.6 x 3.5 in 350