Treasures of the Great Silk Road

by Edgar Knobloch

  The excavations at Takht-i Sanghi (see also p.206) where the famous Oxus treasure was found, started in 1877 and continued sporadically until recently when they had to stop because the site was included in a military zone. It is a small hillock near the confluence of the Vakhsh and the Pandzh, which from here acquire the name of Amu Darya. A Zoroastrian fire temple was unearthed which was thought to be the biggest in ancient Bactria. Some 8,000 objects were brought to light which had mainly been used for sacrificial purposes. Hellenistic ivories, a number of gold vessels, carved bone reliefs, coins and jewels similar to those found in the fortress of Hissar in the west of the country and dated from the fourth to the third century BC, are now exhibited in the museum of Dushanbe.18

  Another interesting site in the south of the country was excavated in 2001, close to the regional centre of Kulab. A pottery workshop from the Achaemenid period was found here as well as two tombs and traces of walls and paving, indicating that this was the site of a large settlement the size and importance of which has still to be ascertained.

  * * *

  NOTES TO CHAPTER IX

  Full details of abbreviations and publications are in the Bibliography

  1 Gibb, Ibn Battuta, pp.174–75.

  2 Le Strange, Clavijo, pp.201–2.

  3 Belenitsky, Civilisation, p.74.

  4 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.242.

  5 The sites of the palace and of Kara Tepe lie within a military area and are not accessible.

  6 Leriche, P., ‘Decouverte d’une capitale d’empire Kushan’, Archéologia, 417/04.

  7 Belenitsky, Civilisation, pp.116–37.

  8 Frumkin, CAR XIII, p.245.

  9 Rempel, Ornament, p.72; see also above, pp.97, 110, 113.

  10 Barthold, Turkestan, p.81.

  11 Frumkin, CAR XII, p.176.

  12 Belenitsky, Civilisation, pp.140–42.

  13 Frumkin, CAR XII, p.173.

  14 Frumkin, CAR XII, p.171.

  15 Belenitsky, Civilisation, p.46.

  16 Belenitsky, Civilisation, p.100.

  17 Belenitsky, Civilisation, p.101.

  18 Francis, A., ‘Grandeur et misère de Tajikistan et d’Afghanistan’, Archéologia, 387/02.

  X

  THE SYR DARYA AND

  FERGHANA VALLEYS

  The course of the Syr Darya has always formed a frontier between the settled civilised territories to the south and the steppeland of the nomads to the north. Moreover, the upper reaches, the Ferghana valley and the valleys of the two confluents, Kara Darya and Naryn, represented at times a sort of enclave, the furthest outpost of civilisation sandwiched between the inhospitable mountains of the Alai, Transalai and Pamirs to the south, the Tien Shan to the north, the bare plains and deserts to the east, and connected with the west only by a narrow gorge, the Ferghana Gate.

  Barthold, in his Geographical Survey of Medieval Transoxania, gives several names of towns and settlements in the eastern parts of this region, next to the Turkish territories. This hilly, barren country, now part of the republic of Kyrgyzstan, was not conquered by the Arabs until the tenth century. In fact, it was always a border area, as it is now, between the eastern and the western parts of Turkestan. Near the town of Uzgen (Uzkend) was the passage ‘into the country of the Turks’, and an important road connecting Kashgar and Kucha with Kokand and Tashkent passed through here. Barthold mentions Osh and Uzkend as the two principal towns on the Turkish frontier.

  Taking the road west from Uzkend, we come to the town of Andizhan, on the confluence of the Naryn and the Kara Darya. This was the most important centre of eastern Ferghana, but was completely rebuilt after a catastrophic earthquake in 1902 destroyed all its interesting buildings.

  The medieval capital of the province was Aksikath, a city on the right bank of the Syr Darya below Andizhan, on the road to Khodzhend. There is a description of it in Makdisi and Ibn Haukal, according to which it must have been a large and lively place, but nothing of it has survived. Five miles north of the site of Aksikath is the village of Kasan, with ruins of an old town of the same name. Here, at the turn of the eighth century, was the capital of the princes of Ferghana. Nearby is the site of Mug-Kurgan, a fortress and probably a temple of fireworshippers. All around are scores of black tombstones typical of pre-Islamic civilisation. A few miles east, in the barren country, is a place called Ispid-Bulan, sometimes referred to as Safid-Bulend, with a twelfth-century mausoleum, Shah Fasil. An Arab commander, Muhammad ben Jarir, died here in battle against the infidels with some 2,700 of his followers. The mausoleum is a conical building of unusual design, with a steep cupola set on an octagonal base. The outer walls are completely without decoration, while the inside displays what some experts consider the richest decor in the whole Turan. Every inch of the walls are covered with fine ornaments and there is an amazing variety of motifs. Some of them do not appear anywhere else in Central Asia. This lonely and almost inaccessible monument, which almost miraculously escaped destruction by the Mongols, has therefore a definite place in the history of art in this area.

  Fig. 25 Syr Darya and Zarafshan

  How deep the barbarisation of the country must have gone may be seen on a group of three mausoleums in Kasan itself, built in the early fourteenth century, when Transoxania began to recover from the Mongol devastation. The mausoleum of Fakhreddin Tuman (1340–41) is inferior to Shah Fasil in every respect. It is badly built, crudely decorated, and the script used here is rather primitive: ‘Barbarously arranged,’ says Cohn-Wiener.1 Elsewhere in the town is another mausoleum, of Sultan Malik Serbakhsh, heavily damaged, with a mighty conical cupola and some remains of a terracotta frieze around the entrance. Inside, the transition to the cupola is not achieved by means of a squinch, but by a steep triangle of masonry in each corner of the socle. This technique appears in Turkey, but nowhere else in Central Asia.

  The towns of Namangan and Kokand are not mentioned in Barthold’s survey, apparently because they were of more recent origin. In Namangan, which is a district capital north of the Syr Darya, the mausoleum of Khojamny Kabri is a good specimen of seventeenth to eighteenth-century architecture. The same applies to the architectural monuments of nineteenth-century Kokand, the mausoleums Madar-i Khan and Dahman Shahkhan (the latter stands inside the old cemetery), as well as to the palace of Khudoyar Khan, built in 1871. It should be mentioned that a member of the Sheybanid dynasty succeeded in 1710 in establishing an independent khanate in Ferghana with Kokand as capital. In 1758 the khan had to recognise the suzerainty of China when a Chinese army appeared on his border. In the early 1800s the Khan of Kokand annexed Tashkent and later also the city of Turkestan, wrested from the Emir of Bukhara. A further expansion brought Kokand some territorial gains in Semirechiye until, in 1876, the whole khanate was annexed by Russia.

  The palace of Kokand is probably the last truly monumental building in Central Asia. The impressive façade, recently restored, displays bright colours and good ornaments in the local, Ferghana, style. An expert might even say that too many colours have been used and the eye gets tired. The architecture of the building is not very sophisticated, and inside perhaps only the painted wooden ceiling of the main reception hall is worth mentioning. Also in Kokand, best-quality ornamental tiles can be found on the gate of the Kamal Kazi madrasa (1913).

  In the southern part of Ferghana, a number of rivers flowing from glaciers of the 16,000ft Alai range were once tributaries of the Syr Darya, but now none of them reaches it, their water all being taken by the irrigation canals. The administrative centre founded by the Russians after the annexation of Kokand is the town of Fergana,2 originally a garrison town called Skobelevo. The nearby village of Margellan has a long history and was mentioned by the Arabs in the ninth and tenth centuries. However, the only outstanding buildings in present-day Margellan are three mosques dating from the early twentieth century with interesting iwans decorated with incised alabaster stucco.

  Seven miles west of Osh, in the south-east of Ferghana, a large medieval site
is now being excavated near the village of Kuva. In pre-Mongol times Kuva (or Quba) was the capital of an isolated district, and was reckoned to be the second city in Ferghana after Aksikath. In quantity of water and number of gardens it even exceeded it. It stood on a stream of the same name, which at that time still reached the Syr Darya. In Babur’s time (late fifteenth century) it was only a village. In 1957 a Buddhist temple was discovered and excavated there. The walls had been destroyed by fire, but numerous fragments of clay sculpture were found in a fairly good state of preservation. The most interesting items were a large figure of Buddha or bodhisattva, and a large number of heads and fragments of torsos of gods and goddesses, demons and other figures, typical of Mahayana Buddhist art. Some of the figures still retained traces of the original paint. The temple was decorated with wall paintings, of which only a few small fragments had survived.3 This site is, from a cultural point of view, closely related to AkBeshim in Semirechiye, west of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan (see p.157). Here, too, a Buddhist temple was discovered, the walls of which were very well preserved, standing intact up to 10ft high, and the architecture of the building could be established almost in every detail. A considerable part of the area was occupied by a large courtyard (105ft by 60ft), surrounded by massive walls. Along the longer side was a continuous line of cloisters in iwan form, apparently supported on wooden pillars. The temple on the west side of the courtyard stood on a stylobate and consisted of a rectangular hall 60ft by 33ft; a wide entrance passage was in the east wall and three other openings in the west wall. All the temple buildings were decorated with paintings and stucco reliefs, and there were statues standing on pedestals, some of them of gilded bronze.

  Another Buddhist temple found at Ak-Beshim was smaller in size and square in plan. The shrine was cruciform and there were two ambulatories running around it. The pottery sculpture found here was in a better state of preservation than in the first temple, and here too were traces of painting on the walls. Inside the town of Ak-Beshim a small Christian church of a Nestorian community was discovered. It was built on a cruciform plan 17ft by 16ft, conforming with the early Syrian architectural canons. Traces of polychrome frescoes on the walls were unfortunately too small to distinguish their subjects.4

  In the Ferghana Gate, which separates the valley from the Hunger Steppe, lies the medieval town of Khodzhend. This was in Alexander’s time his easternmost outpost, called Alexandreia Eskhate. In the tenth century it was an independent administrative unit, ranking among the large towns of Transoxania, with a citadel, inner and outer suburbs, a cathedral mosque and a palace. The town was famed for its vineyards and gardens. The population was so large that the produce of the neighbouring fields did not suffice for its needs, and corn had to be imported from Ferghana and Ushrusana.5 During the Mongol invasion, Khodzhend was one of the places that put up the strongest and most determined resistance.

  Almost the whole area between Khodzhend and Samarkand (about 200 miles) formed part of the province of Ushrusana or, previously, a Soghdian principality of the same name. It has been discussed in detail in Chapter 7.

  On the right bank of the Syr Darya, as we approach Tashkent, near the mouth of the River Angara, lie the ruins of the pre-Mongol town of Banakath, and next to it the post-Mongol ruins of Shahrukhiya, which in fact was Banakath rebuilt by Timur. The capital of this province, Shash, was a place called Binkath, not far from the River Chirchik, of which the Arab geographers give the following description:

  The town of Binkath was surrounded by two lines of walls, of which the outer line had seven gates and the interior line ten gates. The shahristan had three and the citadel two gates. The palace and the prison were in the citadel, the cathedral mosque outside but close to it. In the town and its neighbourhood were many gardens and vineyards.6

  The name Shash or Chach may be found in ancient Chinese chronicles, and the town of Binkath is probably none other than the present Tashkent. When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russians were pushing south their ‘open frontier’ in the Kazakh steppe, towards Tashkent and the Syr Darya, Tashkent was, like other contemporary towns in Central Asia, a walled city surrounded by a moat. The walls were crenellated, 16 miles in circumference and in places up to 15ft high. There were twelve gates and two passages. Outside, luxuriant orchards and walled gardens stretched for several miles in each direction, so that the traveller approaching the city saw only a vast belt of trees in which no building was visible. The population, some 60,000 to 80,000, consisted mainly of sedentary Uzbeks, but there were also a number of Tajiks and some Tartars, Kazakhs and Indians. There were numerous worships of various kinds, but the great passion of the inhabitants was commerce. Trade with Russia, which had been developing since the seventeenth century, had assumed a dominant position, and Tashkent merchants were regular visitors to the fairs at Orenbug, Troitsk and Nizhniy Novgorod.7

  Tashkent, although the biggest and by far the most important city of Central Asia, has in fact very little to offer from the artistic and archaeological point of view, especially after the earthquake in 1966. The only relatively old buildings were the sixteenth-century madrasas of Barak Khan and Kukeltash and the fifteenth-century mausoleum of Qaffal Shashi, all in the Old Town. Rempel8 mentions also the mausoleum of a Suyunij Khan, built in 1531–32, with some interesting interior decorations. The mausoleum of Yunus Khan, who died in 1486, built at the end of the fifteenth century, had no special architectural or ornamental features, and it was used, when the author visited it, as an architect’s office. The new large museum houses an excellent collection of antiquities from the whole area.

  A huge archaeological site is offered by the unexplored ruins of Otrar, an important town on the Syr Darya not far from Tashkent. It was in Otrar that a caravan of Muslim merchants friendly to the Mongols was put to death by the local governor, thus giving Chingiz-Khan the reason for his devastating raid on the Khorezmian Empire. The city of Otrar was never rebuilt after the Mongol destruction and it was near its ruins that Timur died in 1405, just after he had launched his campaign against China. The site, known as Otrar-Tyube, covers some 49 acres, and has walls dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with some later reconstructions. Excavations on a large scale have begun recently.

  Down the river, below Otrar, the steppe on both banks was the territory of the Turkish Ghuzz, or Oghuz. Their capital, situated two days’ journey from the estuary, was Yangikent (New Town), which corresponds to the site of Dzhankent-Kala. Nearby began the Khorezmian, or Khivan, territory with the border fortress of Dzhan-Kala. A caravan route connected this district with central Khorezm, roughly following the eastern shore of the Aral Sea.

  On the Zhany Darya, which was the ancient riverbed of the Syr Darya, is the site of Chirik Rabat, a fortified Scythian settlement of the seventh to second century BC. Babish Mulla, 25 miles north-east, was a fortress of the fourth to second century, with a necropolis where many gold and silver objects were found. These two, and some other sites in the same area, are believed to have been inhabited by the Apasiaks (Water Saka, or Massagetae).

  The site of Uigarak, in the delta of the Syr Darya, comprises some 80 kurgans, several of which were excavated in 1961–65.

  As for the prehistoric cultures, many sites have been found on the left bank of the Syr Darya, on the western boundaries of Ferghana, belonging to the so-called Kayrak Kum culture. This is a Bronze Age culture related to the Hissar culture south of the mountains. In some cases the settlements occupied a very large area, up to 25 acres, but most of them ranged between 0.25 and 7.5 acres. The houses sometimes reached a length of 65ft with a width of 55ft. Farming and stock rearing were the main occupations, but hunting and fishing also played a part in the economy. Domestic animals included cattle, sheep and horses. A large number of querns found here shows that grain was grown as well. Bronze-working techniques were highly developed and a considerable part of the population was obviously engaged in mining, exploiting the nearby deposits of copper ore. Remarkably fine cast
ing moulds and bronze articles of a very high standard were found in this area. Their pottery was often moulded round a cloth bag filled with sand, traces of which were found on the inner surface of the vessels.9 Also from the Bronze Age is the large settlement named after the village of Chust. The pottery found here includes some magnificent tableware covered with a red slip and decorated, after glazing, with a pattern in black.

  The settlement of Dalverzin was already surrounded by a strong defensive wall, partly constructed of adobe bricks. The houses were built at ground level, but their layout has not been fully established.10

  In eastern Ferghana, the large site of Shurabashat dates from the Achaemenid period, while Kala-i Bolo on the border of Tajikistan is the site of a Soghdian kushk, similar to Ak-Tepe, mentioned earlier. Frumkin11 dates this site mainly from the eleventh to twelfth century, with only some wooden sculptures belonging to the pre-Arab, seventh to eighth century period.

  As for the ancient period, it is worth quoting Rempel,12 who says that in the Tashkent oasis, in Ferghana, and also in the lowlands of the Syr Darya, which remained virtually unaffected by Hellenism, older art forms were preserved much longer, as may be judged by the pottery. These forms are linked partly with cultures of the Anau type (see p.135), partly with the culture of the steppe nomads. On the Syr Darya there emerged, in the course of time, the so-called ‘culture of marshland villages’ with its original ornament – geometrical, floral and animal – which is linked to the ancient culture of the ‘steppe bronze’, and to that of the early nomads, and which developed its own independent motifs, related to the culture of the peasant population of Khorezm and Soghd.