Disputes about Takhti-Sangin

Despite the fact that excavations at the site of Takhti-Sangin began almost a hundred years ago, questions about the date of the founding of the city and foundation of the Oxus temple are still far from being resolved. The article provides arguments indicating that the parameters of the mud brick, column bases, and even the discovered fragments of Yaz III ceramics do not provide grounds to abandon B.A. Litvinsky’s assumption that the founding of Takhti-Sangin can be dated back to the early 3rd century BC. Thus, the square bricks of the 50–52×50–52×12–14 cm format used in the construction of the Oxus temple have no analogies among the Achaemenid monuments. The composite nature of the column bases does not at all indicate that the latter were manufactured in the Achaemenid era. Composite and monolithic bases existed in parallel in the 6th – 3rd centuries BC. Fragments of late Achaemenid ceramics from the wall seams of the temenos of the Oxus temple were already known to B.A. Litvinsky and I.R. Picikyan, but this did not affect their chronological conclusions. This is explained not only by the fact that any layers that could be dated to the Achaemenid period have not been discovered both at the time of Litvinsky’s work and later. In the last third of the 4th – first decades of the 3rd century BC, the population of the Central Asian satrapies continued to produce and use ceramics genetically related to the late Achaemenid period

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