"The discoveries made by Soviet archaeologists in Margiana and Bactria uncovered settlements and constructions of such complexity that they leave us little doubt about the special importance of these regions in the cultural geography of Central Asia and eastern Iran until the threshold of the 1st millennium BCE... one can conjecture, in the pre-Achaemenid period, the existence of an extensive geopolitical entity: research conducted on the ground would suggest attributing it either to Bactria alone or to a larger geopolitical entity that also included Margiana and Sogdiana, a parallel technique, even prior to the rise of the Achaemenids, but in which neither the Persians nor the Medes seem to have been much involved."