Mound of Golden Eggs

By day, Iranian Archaeologist Ezat Negahban and his crew dig spectacular ancient artifacts out of a low mound in the fertile Goha Valley, 186 miles northwest of Teheran. By night, they stand guard against raiding peasants, crooked local officials and stealthy professional thieves. The round-the-clock duty is wearing but necessary, for the location is one of the richest in archaeological history, and the entire valley around the mound has gone digger-daffy. Peasants are even uprooting their vines and fruit trees in a frantic search for ancient gold.

The treasure hunt was unwittingly begun by Professor Negahban when he organized a routine archaeological survey of the thousands of man-made mounds that dot the valleys leading to the Caspian Sea. Remnants of forgotten cities whose mud-brick buildings and ramparts have long since crumbled, all the mounds looked interesting. But one afternoon last fall Dr. Negahban walked out of a forest in the Goha Valley and spotted five of them piled close together. "I knew instinctively," he says, "that I had found my quarry."

Full-Dress Dig. Dr. Negahban's party made exploratory borings in a mound named Marlik aftera nearby olive grove. Out of the red earth came gold buttons, small bronze cows, red carnelian beads, and two cylindrical seals used to roll impressions on moist claydocuments. The University of Teheran granted Dr. Negahban funds for a full-dress dig, and the 400-ft.-long boat-shaped mound was systematically excavated.

After one week the diggers literally struck gold. They brought up a pouring vessel heavily inlaid with carved golden animals. One of the creatures has a human body, with a bird's wings and two animal heads. In its outstretched arms it holds two winged lions. On another part of the vessel a golden lion attacks a golden deer, Dr. Negahban suspects that these symbols are religious.

Stream of Treasure. Day after day, treasure poured from the mound, which is now known locally as "the mound that lays golden eggs." The biggest bowl, 8 in. high and 6 in. in diameter, shows a bird with animal legs and a mane. Other bowls are lively with prancing unicorns, bulls, rams, eagles, fish, a warrior in chain mail holding two leopards by their necks. The diggers turned up gold jewelry and gold household and toilet articles (ear cleaners, tweezers, needles), stone maceheads, terra-cotta figurines, a marble sword hilt inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. Said one ragged workman as he watched the stream of treasure: "How rich and careless we were to cast our gold into the earth like a seed. It grew nothing and left us poor."

Most of the treasures of Marlik Mound are already safe in the Iranian Archaeological Museum, but new finds always give Dr. Negahban something else to guard. By now he is surfeited with gold; he would rather dig up a clay tablet.

From the style and workmanship of the articles he has found, he has guessed that they date from about 1000 B.C., but he cannot be sure until he finds some written record connecting Marlik Mound with the known chronology of ancient Iran. Perhaps he will never be sure; at the beginning of the first millennium B.C., the whole Near East was in turmoil, with fierce barbarians making forays far into the Assyrian Empire. Little was written down during this dark age.

Still, there are four more mounds to be excavated, and Dr. Negahban hopes that these will tell him what ancient people lived in the Goha Valley and buried their treasure there. "I won't leave a scrap," he says. "I won't budge until all the mounds are finished."

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