The vast majority of the Bactrian Margiana seals contain motifs, styles, and even material that are entirely foreign to the repertoire of seals from … - C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (ed.). Archaeological thought in America. 357 pages, 35 illustrations. 1989. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0-521-35452-8 hardback £35 & $39.50

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The vast majority of the Bactrian Margiana seals contain motifs, styles, and even material that are entirely foreign to the repertoire of seals from Syro-Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and the Indus (Baghestani 1997). They are of a thoroughly distinctive type and are to be seen as indigenous to the Central Asian Bronze Age world and not as derivative from any other region. They have been found in the Indus civilization, on the Iranian Plateau, at Susa, and in the Gulf. Amiet (1984) and Potts (1994) have documented the wide distribution of Bactrian Margiana–complex materials, and it is in this context that the specific parallels to the Syro-Anatolian region are to be appreciated. The wide scatter of a limited number of artifacts does not privilege any area as a homeland for the complex. The very limited number of parallels between the Bactrian Margiana complex and Syro-Anatolia signifies the unsurprising fact that, at the end of the 3d and the beginning of the 2d millennium, interregional contacts in the Near East brought people from the Indus to Mesopotamia and from Egypt to the Aegean into contact.