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Gold gems that chime like tiny constellations, drinking horns carved from ivory, the faces of rulers modeled in raw clay: a journey through Central Asia that follows not silk, but substance. The exhibition brings together masterpieces from protohistoric Margiana (3rd-2nd millennium BC) in southeastern Turkmenistan and from ancient Parthia, with a focus on the site of Nisa (2nd century BC-1st century AD) in the country’s heartland. It’s a rare occasion: gold-and-stone necklaces from Gonur Depe leave the national borders for the first time, alongside them, raw-clay heads - portraits of kings and warriors - and finely decorated Hellenistic ivory rhyta speak of a taste that fuses power, ritual, and exchange. Margiana, the core of the so-called Greater Khorasan Civilization, reveals a technologically and artistically advanced Bronze Age, grounded in a shared political, economic, and cultural fabric. The narrative then widens to the Parthian Kingdom/Empire (or Arsacids): from Nisa-Mithradatkert, a dynastic memorial, come works that evoke the glories of a vast dominion stretching from the Euphrates to Bactria, capable for centuries of withstanding Rome’s pressure on its Western frontier.