IN THE ALMOSI Gorge in the Hissar Mountains of western Tajikistan, a 20-foot-tall, pyramid-shaped boulder rests in a meadow about 10,000 feet above sea level. The meadow is not on any commonly traversed route across the mountains, and it’s likely that over the course of the last 2,000 years, very few people have made note of a series of signs carved into the boulder’s face. Consisting of simple hooked characters, trident shapes, and flowing S-shaped lines, the signs are part of inscriptions that would have been legible to people living under the Kushan Empire, a multiethnic state that rose to power in Central Asia in the first century A.D. But the people who wrote the inscriptions were working in a literary tradition that did not endure. The last person who could have read the inscriptions died some 1,500 years ago.
More than four decades ago, Sanginov Khaitali, then a young shepherd from the nearby village of Shol, was tending his flock in the gorge when he first noticed the inscriptions. While passing the boulder again in 2016, he observed that time, and perhaps the region’s frequent earthquakes, had taken a toll on the signs, and that there seemed to be many fewer marks on the rock than when he first took note of them. In the summer of 2022, he contacted Tajikistan’s National Academy of Sciences to alert scholars to his discovery. Archaeologist Bobomullo Bobomulloev organized an expedition to confirm Khaitali’s report and to make a record of the inscriptions—if they still existed.
After a six-hour trek up the gorge by foot, the team reached the meadow on a July afternoon. “Our expectations were justified,” says Bobomulloev.
