Technological Civilization Is Awesome (cont’d): Lost-Found Trade Cities in Central Asia Edition
What I’m Reading: Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia by Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times, 23 October 2024.
Shared Article from New York Times
Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia
The discovery suggests that trade routes along the Silk Road were far more complex than previously understood.
Alexander Nazaryan @ nytimes.com
The site was uncovered using lidar mapping of the site during a UAV drone flyover; excavations have turned up a central citadel, artifacts and fortifictations.
The casual tip would lead Dr. [Michael] Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, to Tugunbulak, an enormous fortified city dating back to a medieval empire.[1] He and his team would spend nearly a decade trying to map out the site, as well as the one he’d originally come to Uzbekistan to explore, known as Tashbulak.
The results of their research, published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, describe the two sites as
the largest and most comprehensive urban plans of any medieval cityin Central Asia situated at high altitude (defined here as about 6,500 feet above sea level).. . .
The willingness of medieval merchants to detour up the mountains suggests a complexity of trade routes absent from popular conceptions of the Silk Road.
Stereotypically, we think that it’s like a highway,Dr. Maksudov said.No — it’s very highly networked.Initiated by the Chinese explorer Zhang Qian, who went in search of
heavenly horsesfor the Han dynasty, the Silk Road eventually connected people living thousands of miles apart, in ways both predictable and not.Because of their position between East and West Asia, the Central Asian cities of Samarkand and Bukhara served as important Silk Road hubs. Much later, they became cities in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Dr. Maksudov explained that the U.S.S.R. imposed a Marxist version of history on the region, celebrating large urban developments while downplaying the contributions of medieval nomadic peoples, like those who possibly settled Tashbulak and Tugunbulak.
Scholars used to think about nomadic and sedentary societies as separate and distinct,Dr. Frankopan said.These sites show clearly that reality was much more complicated, with mobile communities not only creating settlements but large ones, too.— Alexander Nazaryan, Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia
New York Times, 23 October 2024.
- [1][The reporter is probably referring to the Kara-Khanid (Qarakhanid) Khanate, a Turkic khanate that dominated the Central Asian steppe and Transoxiana from the 800s to the 1200s CE. —RG]↩
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