The Stamp Seal Mysterycontinued

      “They’re usually very skeptical about this sort of thing,” Mair recalls. “They were saying, ‘This is fascinating.’”
      All three of the seal’s characters “fit well within the framework of the earliest known Chinese writing,” he wrote in a letter this past spring. “However, I do not view them as evidence of Chinese influence at Anau because the Chinese script is not known until 1,100 years after the 2300 B.C.E. date of the signet … Fred says that his signet was almost certainly a local product, because—aside from a site near Anau—there was no other source of jet for more than a thousand kilometers. Consequently, I believe that the signet inscription (and I’m absolutely convinced that it indeed represents genuine writing) is phenomenally important because it helps to document the transmission of writing eastward.”
      That letter was written to New York Times senior science editor John Noble Wilford on May 9. The following Sunday, the story of the stamp seal and the ancient civilization of Central Asia was on the front page of the Sunday Times. “In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Culture,” the headline proclaimed.
      “You can say we have discovered a new ancient civilization,” the story quoted Hiebert as saying. “We are rewriting all the history books about the ancient world because of the new political order in our own time,” he added, referring to the opening up of former Soviet Union territories to Western archaeologists.
      Not everyone in the academy shares Hiebert’s enthusiasm for going public with his discoveries. When he showed a photograph of the seal to Dr. Robert Dyson, emeritus director of the University Museum and emeritus professor of anthropology, Dyson’s response was: “Good job, Fred. Now go out and find a hundred more like it.”
      In fact, that’s what Hiebert hopes to do, though he’s not holding his breath until he finds a hundred of them. “One stamp seal doesn’t tell us anything,” he says, “but it gives us the impetus to look for more.” On his next visit to Anau, he will pursue a different excavation strategy in hopes of finding similar objects from the same period, instead of digging deeper in search of older objects.
      “This is going to be a long-term debate that will perhaps only be solved through further research and further digging,” he says. “And that’s exactly what we intend to do. For me, the critical issue is that for the first time in that time period, we’ve found a series of symbols next to each other in relationship to each other.”
      Hiebert made another brief trip to Turkmenistan this past June to discuss the stamp seal. By then, another, similar seal had surfaced. But it was a long way from Anau.

When Victor Mair flew to China six months ago, he met with Dr. Qiu Xigui, professor of Chinese languages at Beijing University. After he showed him a photo of the Anau stamp seal, he wrote another letter to Wilford describing Qiu’s reaction and his own ruminations on the subject.
      The first thing [Qiu] said was, “If we ignore the archaeological context, then I would say this inscription can’t be earlier than the Western Han (206 B.C.-9 A.D.).” This is almost exactly what I said when I first saw the inscription. That is why I pressed Fred Hiebert so hard about the dating, but Fred insisted that the stratigraphy, pottery, and everything else pegs the signet at 2300 B.C. I have to believe Fred because he is a competent (nay, gifted) archeologist, but I’m going to quiz him hard about the dating again when I get back to Penn …
      Prof. Qiu provided one other electrifying piece of information. He had a fairly clear memory of the discovery of a nearly identical seal in—of all places—Xingiang (Eastern Central Asia). That … would also fill in the long gap between Anau (Western Central Asia) and the heartland of China. … Prof. Qiu says that both of the Central Asia lignite seals look as though they were written by people who had contact with the Chinese writing system and may have tried to imitate it without getting the forms entirely right. Maybe. But if Fred’s dating is reliable, we have to go back to [another explanation]: namely, the flow of influence was operating in the opposite direction. I have also all this time been saying that the ultimate origins of Chinese writing lie not in Mesopotamia or Egypt, but that they should be intimately linked with the same complex of peoples who brought bronze metallurgy and the horse-drawn chariot during the second millennium B.C. The Anau seal brings us one step closer to figuring out how all of the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.

      Enter Raphael Pumpelly, stage left.

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Left: digging in “Unit 221,” where the stamp seal was found.