The Second Afghan Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History has reported the discovery of a lost city in the Seistan Basin on the Afghan-Iraq border. Walter A. Fairservis, jr., leader of the exploring group, explains that the site seems to have been unoccupied for 5,000 years. The area yielded examples of pottery bearing designs never used today. Yet these markings are sophisticated and give evidence of an advanced stage of culture. The abandoned town unquestionably had been a settlement of considerable importance in its prime. It was a permanent, not a transient community. This was demonstrated by the durable character of the tombs which it had raised.
What race or nation of people was represented in the Seistan metropolis is not yet clear. Mr. Fairservis believes them to have been “of a Mediterranean type,” but that comment, of course, is not specific; it could mean any of perhaps 50 different stocks. Another question inevitably raised by the finding of the lost city is: Why was the place abandoned? Conceivably, drastic changes in weather were responsible. The long-forgotten town stands in a valley now almost incessantly swept by mountain winds rising to as much as 110 miles an hour. One side of the declivity is a desert of gravel, the opposite side a desert of sand. Mr. Fairservis has explained that the “hill breeze” had “done their excavating for them.
But what happened to bury the relics of the ancient Seistan city? The site was covered with pulverized stone before it was uncovered by the winds sweeping down from the crests of the mountains. Erosion, gradual elevation of the temperature of the valley, diminishing rainfall, continual drought—all these factors could add up to an environmental condition intolerable to people able to migrate to a friendlier location. That apparently is what occurred. The community simply moved away. Then shifting air currents covered the deserted town with sand, and so it lay for centuries—forgotten even by professional students of the past. What became of the migrants remains to be determined from systematic examination of the artifacts disclosed by the current “hill breeze.” That is where the science of ethnography—the science of human culture—comes in. Possibly Mr. Fairservis and his colleagues will be able to relate their finds with Egypt or Crete or Cyprus, or with prehistoric France or Britain or Ireland, or even with Mexico or Peru or the still farther Orient
The Evening Star, Washington, DC, June 19, 1951