Tillya tepe, Tillia tepe or Tillā tapa (Persian: طلاتپه, romanized: Ṭalā-tappe, literally "Golden Hill" or "Golden Mound") is an archaeological site in the northern Afghanistan province of Jowzjan near Sheberghan, excavated in 1978 by a Soviet-Afghan team led by the Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi.

An imitation gold coin of Parthian King Gotarzes I (95-90 BCE) was found in the left hand of the woman in tomb VI.

The fact that this coin is in gold, and not silver or bronze as is usually the case for Parthian coinage, suggest that this imitation was made for prestige purposes.

The obverse shows an almost naked man only wearing an Hellenistic chlamys and a petasus hat (an iconography similar to that of Hermes/ Mercury) rolling a wheel.

Several of the artifacts are highly consistent with a Scythian origin, such as the royal crown or the polylobed decorated daggers discovered in the tombs.

These pieces have much in common with the famous Scythian gold artifacts recovered thousands of kilometers west on the banks of the Bosphorus and the Chersonese.

Hellenistic cultural and artistic influences can be found in many of the forms and human depictions (from amorini to rings with the depiction of Athena and her name inscribed in Greek), attributable to the existence of the Seleucid empire and Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in the same area until around 140 BCE, and the continued existence of the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the northwestern Indian sub-continent until the beginning of our era.

The hoard was thought to have been lost at some point in the 1990s, the National Museum of Afghanistan having been looted numerous times resulting in a loss of 70% of the 100,000 objects on display.

[11] In 2003, after the Taliban was deposed, the new government wanted to open the vault, but the keyholders (called "tawadars") could not be summoned because their names were purposefully unknown.

Also witnessing the re-opening were National Geographic Explorer and Archaeology Fellow Fredrik Hiebert and the archaeologist who originally found the hoard, Viktor Sarianidi.

Following an agreement between the Afghan government and France, the collection was evaluated and displayed internationally in an exhibition through the cooperation of several prominent museums and the National Geographic Society.