Dalverzin-Tepa

Dalverzin-Tepa lies in the Shurchi district of Surkhandarya region, sixty kilometres north of Termez, and it earns attention on several counts at once.

The best known is a hoard of gold weighing thirty-six kilograms in total: rings, necklaces and other ornaments that show how good the local jewellers were. No less important is the Buddhist sanctuary, reckoned the oldest Buddhist structure in Uzbekistan.

The site's flourishing falls in the Kushan period. The archaeologist L. I. Albaum confirmed this back in the 1930s, finding coins and pottery fragments of Kushan date, and the expedition of 1959–60 showed that in antiquity Dalverzin-Tepa was indeed a cultural centre. Irrigated agriculture was already practised here and an urban civilisation had formed, largely through Bactria's absorption into the Achaemenid empire. The city was a seat of local administration, of the nobility and of the military units that collected taxes and kept order in the district and on the frontier. Alexander's campaigns also pushed its development along. Its final decline came after the Arab conquest.

The site looks like this today. To the south is the upper town, the highest part, ringed by a ditch: pottery kilns, a small temple and a winery were found here. To the north are buildings laid out in a rectangle. Beyond the town stands a Buddhist temple where many figures of Buddhas, genies, devatas and bodhisattvas were found. A Muslim cemetery lies to the north-east and a temple of a Bactrian goddess to the north-west.