Nov 18, 2025 08:02 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 18, 2025 08:07 PM by C C.)
Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Iron City of the Silk Road in the Remote Highlands of Uzbekistan
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a...-180987637
EXCERPT: The sole inhabitants of the area are roving shepherds, only a couple of whom stay to brave the harsh winters, as well as a few farmers who come to cultivate fields in the summer. A thousand years ago, however, impressive walls interspersed with formidable towers enclosed some 300 acres, about twice the size of Pompeii.
Yet this site lies at around 7,000 feet above sea level, where a June snowstorm is not unusual and the snowpack can last for more than half the year. Even today, few humans live year-round at such an unforgiving altitude.
Climbing out of the trench, Maksudov picks up a football-size chunk of rock from a large pile. “Here, hold this,” he says, laughing when my face betrays surprise at its heft. “It weighs so much because of the iron pellets inside,” he explains, pointing to the stone’s crimson striations.
Miners, smelters and blacksmiths may have converged at this remote site as early as the sixth century A.D. to produce the weapons and tools indispensable for medieval Central Asia. They likely forged swords, arrow tips and horse tack essential to all the great steppe empires, including the Scythians, Huns and Mongols, and presumably made hoes and plows that helped transform marshy lowland oases into productive farmland.
These wares radiated out along a shifting network circulating goods, technologies and faiths from Manchuria to the Mediterranean, and from Sri Lanka to Siberia, a network that Ferdinand von Richthofen, a 19th-century German geographer, first described as the Silk Road.
The detection of a medieval industrial town at high altitude, the fruit of three years of research using high-tech drones and low-tech shovels, is generating excitement among Central Asia specialists all over the world. “To find a city-sized settlement in this highland landscape is entirely a surprise,” Søren Michael Sindbæk of Denmark’s Aarhus University told me when the discovery was reported last year.
The excavation’s leaders are convinced, even as they still are analyzing historical and archaeological data, that the mysterious urban area is the long-lost city of Marsmanda, an iron-producing metro-polis mentioned in tenth-century Arab sources, but which has never been located. It’s a reasonable claim, according to many of their colleagues.
More broadly, the discovery lends weight to fresh thinking about how the Silk Road emerged and evolved before sea routes diminished its traffic after the 15th century. The pastoralists who roamed the Central Asian uplands have long been cast as marginal outsiders or mounted predators, ready to swoop down on vulnerable lowland populations.
Tugunbulak’s sophistication, however, suggests instead that the region’s mountain residents were an essential part of the lucrative web that came to be called the Silk Road... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a...-180987637
EXCERPT: The sole inhabitants of the area are roving shepherds, only a couple of whom stay to brave the harsh winters, as well as a few farmers who come to cultivate fields in the summer. A thousand years ago, however, impressive walls interspersed with formidable towers enclosed some 300 acres, about twice the size of Pompeii.
Yet this site lies at around 7,000 feet above sea level, where a June snowstorm is not unusual and the snowpack can last for more than half the year. Even today, few humans live year-round at such an unforgiving altitude.
Climbing out of the trench, Maksudov picks up a football-size chunk of rock from a large pile. “Here, hold this,” he says, laughing when my face betrays surprise at its heft. “It weighs so much because of the iron pellets inside,” he explains, pointing to the stone’s crimson striations.
Miners, smelters and blacksmiths may have converged at this remote site as early as the sixth century A.D. to produce the weapons and tools indispensable for medieval Central Asia. They likely forged swords, arrow tips and horse tack essential to all the great steppe empires, including the Scythians, Huns and Mongols, and presumably made hoes and plows that helped transform marshy lowland oases into productive farmland.
These wares radiated out along a shifting network circulating goods, technologies and faiths from Manchuria to the Mediterranean, and from Sri Lanka to Siberia, a network that Ferdinand von Richthofen, a 19th-century German geographer, first described as the Silk Road.
The detection of a medieval industrial town at high altitude, the fruit of three years of research using high-tech drones and low-tech shovels, is generating excitement among Central Asia specialists all over the world. “To find a city-sized settlement in this highland landscape is entirely a surprise,” Søren Michael Sindbæk of Denmark’s Aarhus University told me when the discovery was reported last year.
The excavation’s leaders are convinced, even as they still are analyzing historical and archaeological data, that the mysterious urban area is the long-lost city of Marsmanda, an iron-producing metro-polis mentioned in tenth-century Arab sources, but which has never been located. It’s a reasonable claim, according to many of their colleagues.
More broadly, the discovery lends weight to fresh thinking about how the Silk Road emerged and evolved before sea routes diminished its traffic after the 15th century. The pastoralists who roamed the Central Asian uplands have long been cast as marginal outsiders or mounted predators, ready to swoop down on vulnerable lowland populations.
Tugunbulak’s sophistication, however, suggests instead that the region’s mountain residents were an essential part of the lucrative web that came to be called the Silk Road... (MORE - missing details)