Animals played a hugely important role in the lives of the inhabitants of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. This mysterious civilisation was entirely unknown to scholarship until the mid-Twentieth Century AD, when the remains of Bactrian sites were first uncovered in Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan by Soviet archaeologists, led by the notable scholar Viktor Sarianidi. However, due to the complexities of the Cold War, this Soviet discovery – perhaps the most significant find of the Twentieth Century AD – was entirely hidden from Western scholarship, and this situation only changed when the USSR collapsed in the AD 1990s. The current prevailing theory is that the BMAC, as it is known, originated when the nomadic peoples of the Central Asian plateau combined with immigrants from what is now Iran. These nomadic peoples would have had a symbiotic relationship with the animals around them. Their lifestyle would have followed the movements and migrations of the herds across the grasslands of Central Asia, from river to river, going southwards as the harsh winters set in. Their existence was predicated on the domestication of horses and camels, who enabled them to keep up with the animals they hunted as they moved across the steppes.

Later, the BMAC settled down in cities. Some of these were quite large – the site of Altyn Depe in what is now Turkmenistan housed up to 20,000 people – and their existence was enabled by the adoption of farming. Alongside the production of barley, the BMAC culture were adept herders, and seem to have domesticated zebu (Bos taurus indicus) and water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) early. But while bovines were economically, culturally, and ritually among the most significant of the animals domesticated in the ancient world, the most numerous and arguably the most useful were sheep. Zooarchaeological evidence has indicated that sheep were dispersed into Central Asia by 6000 BC, and they quickly became essential. Wool and wool products were vital to the survival of humans in the region during the winter. As the most effective thermal insulator known at the time, cloaks of wool – in the BMAC, these were based on the kaunakes, a tufted woollen garment from Mesopotamia – were the most effective defence against the bitter cold. The species Ovis aries and Ovis vignei are known from BMAC archaeological sites, and these same species, with great curling horns, are known from BMAC art. The example presented here is exceptional. Carved from attractive and highly polished banded alabaster, a favourite material of the BMAC presumably for its lustre and for its remarkable property of being able to transmit light, the ram is delightfully naive. Four, almost conical, snub legs lead to a large and rectangular body. The rump is round and sizeable, while there is carefully studied attention to the musculature of the shoulders and pectorals. The face is long and triangular, with round cheeks, great curling horns, and two bulging round eyes. The overall effect is an attractive, endearing, even cute, ram, carved in a tactile way/

Rams feature frequently throughout ancient religion. Symbolic of male virility – the aggressive and athletic mating displays of the male ram played heavily on the ancient mind – as well as fertility, rebirth, and resurrection. In Egypt, one ram-god, Amun, was the ultimate creator of the Universe in one of the numerous Egyptian creation myths, while another, Khnum, fashioned human beings – especially future pharaohs – from clay on his potters’ wheel. The Egyptian example is instructive in another respect. The tetracephalic (four-headed) ram was a specific Egyptian iconographical motif of the New Kingdom Period (mid to late Second Millennium BC), associated with the four cardinal directions and the four seasons. Multi-headed rams were, then, apparent in other parts of the ancient world. Rams were also considered representative of Kingship in other ancient civilisations, and it is possible that our ram sculpture is meant to evoke something of the mercurial nature of charismatic leadership in the ancient world.