Desire for gold has driven people out of their homes and out of their minds. So Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi cannot have been surprised when a crowd gathered to gawk at a mound he was excavating in northern Afghanistan in 1978. Tillya Tepe, the Hill of Gold, dates to the first century ad, when the land was known as Bactria, and contained the graves of six nomads - a chieftain and five women - buried with more than 20,000 golden and bejewelled belongings, some of which are now on show at rnthe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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