A SECOND OXUS BEAKER WITH BOND CAPTIVES, AND A POSSIBLE EVIDENCE OF ANOTHER 'WRITING' SYSTEM SO FAR UNRECORDED

We publish an embossed silver tumbler that, in the unmistakable style of a well-known but limited series of Battrian silver vases, re-proposes the characters and theme of an earlier tumbler in the same precious metal, probably coeval, already published. An armed procession leads a bound prisoner (accompanied by a boy or girl). Although unfortunately both tumblers come from the antiquarian market and lack precise contexts of discovery, they represent direct evidence (though certainly propagandistic) of a clash between a polity from the late 3rd millennium BCE and another from a region of the Iranian Plateau, to be found in the Halil Rud valley (Jiroft) or nearby areas (Jazmurian basin, or Western Baluchistan). The strong similarity between the themes and characters depicted on the two tumblers, which were produced and used in a Palatine setting, leaves open the possibility that they refer to a specific historical event (the defeat, capture, and probably execution of a chief of the aforementioned southeastern Iranian regions by an Oxus expedition). The image of a boy (or girl) with a rope around his or her neck is, in the iconographic context under consideration, unusual and particularly cruel. Finally, three different sequences or groups of minute signs engraved on the side of three of the characters depicted (the longest, of 10 signs, perhaps referring to the adult captive), and perhaps a fourth short 'inscription' visible on another silver jar from the royal necropolis of Gonur, open up the possibility- certainly not certainty-that the elites of Margiana and Bactrian, by the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, also had their own, independent writing system. That is, of course, if the 'inscriptions' documented in this work do not turn out to be pseudo-inscriptions in the future.