hian fragments, Central Asian and Sāsānian Persian influences prevail over Hellenistic ones.Tashtyk tribeOn the Yenisey River the Bronze Age Tagar culture was replaced by the Tashtyk culture, dating from the 1st to the 4th century AD. The physical appearance of the Tashtyk people has been preserved by a seriesof masks (mask), some of them modelled, others cast from the dead. They were painted with the features rendered in blue, red, and green against a yellow ground. Spirals disposed on the foreheads, temples, and cheeks of many of these masks probably represent tattoos. In many cases pearl necklaces worn by the women are also included. Although the animal motifs of the Tashtyks remained strongly Scytho-Altaic in style, the community was so much influenced by China that even its architecture was affected. Just south of Abakan, a large house made of beaten clay in the Chinese style has been discovered. Its roof had been covered with Chinese tiles, some of which carry inscriptions of the Han dynasty.The Parthian empire came into being in Khorāsān during the reign of Seleucus I, 358–281 BC, following the absorption by the Parthians of Parni (Dahae) tribesmen. The caravans traversing their territory brought them wealth and ideas from abroad. The figural art of the Hellenistic world made an especially strong impression on them. The finest Parthian objects come from Old Nisa, a town situated on the edge of the Karakoram Range, some 11 miles (18 kilometres) south of Ashkhabad in Tajikistan, close to the later town of New Nisa. Old Nisa was founded around 171 BC by Mithradates I to serve as a royal Parthian residence and necropolis, as well as the kingdom's capital. It contained several fine temples and an impressive palace built around a vast central hall, the roof of which was upheld by wooden supports set in stone bases—a practice followed in the town's larger houses. Life-size clay statues of men and women stood between these supports. The royal treasuries contained many valuables, including silver and silver gilt statuettes of local Parthian deities and of Greek gods, bronze and iron weapons, burnished and painted pottery, glass, and cast bronze animals, such as griffins. The most significant of these treasures, however, is a series of ivory horn-shaped drinking vessels, or rhytons. Some are embellished with paste inlays and precious stones, others have a carved frieze or band encircling their open ends. One rhyton (State Hermitage Museum) has a frieze of a procession that includes a Greek god. Conceived in the purest Hellenistic style, the frieze contrasts sharply with the rhyton's horned, lion-griffin-shaped terminal ornamentation, which is admirably modelled in the round, in accordance with the Scytho-Altaic tradition.The kingdoms of western Turkistan and AfghanistanSkill in irrigation, with the resulting expansion in agriculture, encouraged urbanism and the growth of states, changes that coincided with the rise of nomadism. While the nomadic cattle and horse breeders took over the steppelands, the culturally distinct states of Sogdiana (part of Uzbekistan and much of Tajikistan), Fergana (the greater part of Uzbekistan), Chorasmia (the Tashkent region), and Bactria (mainly Afghanistan) were established. At times independent, at other times reduced to vassaldom, the first three states were centred on rivers—Sogdiana around the Zeravshan and Kashkadarya, Fergana on the lower Syr Darya, and Chorasmia on the Amu Darya's basin. (The earliest references to these states are to be found in the Avesta, the principal scriptural work of the Zoroastrian religion, and in the inscription cut by order of the Persian king Darius I [reigned 522–486 BC] on the face of the rock of Bīsitūn in the Kermanshah province of Iran.) Bactria extended from the Syr Darya to the Hindu Kush (southern Tajikistan and Afghanistan) and is rich in unexplored mounds. Excavations at Balkh show that its first inhabitants settled there when others were doing so at Afrasiab (Samarkand) and Merv.The political and economic changes that developed in the 4th centur