Most of Afghanistan is now a sterile desert, but once it must have been green and productive. From coastal Baluchistan to the Russian border, the whole country is dotted with the ruins of ancient cultures, which spread deep into Soviet Turkestan. Back in the U.S. last week, after a ten-month trip through that ancient land, Anthropologist Walter A. Fairservis Jr. of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History told about his second expedition in search of dead civilizations under the eaves of the Himalayas.
The first time he had gone to Dash-ti-Margo (Desert of Death) and discovered a dead city, forgotten by the modern world (TIME, Nov. 7, 1949). This time, accompanied by his bride of five days, Anthropologist Fairservis revisited the same mysterious area of southwest Afghanistan. Near the Bolan Pass, the expedition, came across its first big find: 36 sites which yielded pottery of a hitherto unknown type. On the bottom of many of the pieces were mysterious little signs, some 30 different ones, that look as if they might be the beginnings of an alphabet. Some of the sites, Fairservis believes, go back as far as 5000 B.C. Near Kandahar the party discovered pottery goddesses with the outsized breasts that many primitive peoples worshiped as symbols of fertility.
The strangest place the Fairservis expedition visited was a narrow valley near the Iranian border. Surrounded by deserts and now a barren wasteland itself, the valley must have been a lake bed in some remote period. Later it must have been thickly inhabited. A great wind that rages through the valley has blown the soil away, uncovering town sites, cemeteries and heaps of pottery fragments which now lie exposed on the desert. There the expedition found tools of copper, but there was no evidence that any people had lived in the valley since prehistoric times.
When the finds are properly studied, Fairservis hopes they will throw light on one of the darkest mysteries of man's past: What common ancestor, if any, begot the flourishing civilizations of Mesopotamia, India and China? When written history began, these centers were developing independently, completely cut off from one another by virtually impassable barriers.
Fairservis' theory is that the Afghanistan region was well-watered and fertile at the dawn of history. Civilization spread from the West along the Arabian Sea, through Afghanistan and Baluchistan into northern India. He suspects that it also spread northward into Central Asia, and may have reached China through Soviet Turkestan.