Victor Sarianidi was born in 1929 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He graduated from the State University of Central Asia, Faculty of History. While still at the University he began archaeological excavation in the territory of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In 1959 he moved to Moscow where he worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now the Russian Academy of Sciences). In 1975 he received his Doctorate in Historian Sciences. For over 50 years he has been excavating in Turkmenistan, where for the last 35 years he has concentrated on the excavation of the ancient country of Margiana (or Margush). There he discovered an unknown civilization dating back to the end of the third-beginning of the second millennium BC. In the depths of the Kara Kum desert he discovered the largest necropolis of this period in Anatolia. The Margiana culture proved to be so highly advanced that scholars increasingly hold the view that Bronze Age Central Asia was one of the main civilizations of ancient times, along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China. In the period from 1969 to 1979 he excavated in Afghanistan, where he unearthed one of the largest gold treasures ever to be discovered: six tombs of unknown Kushan kings that contained over 20,000 gold items. The treasure dates from the end of the 1st c. BC - 1st c. AD. V. Sarianidi is the author of over 20 books and many articles.