Arkaim

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The article tells in detail about Arkaim and the Ural Country of cities. All our readers need to know this information by heart in order to operate with proven facts in a dispute with adherents of academic history.

There is only one amendment to the article: information that the people who built Arkaim and Sintashta were nomadic are conjectural and unverified. It raises doubts that yesterday's nomads suddenly built the most complex cities with sewerage systems - and stopped roaming. It seems that this assumption is a rudiment of the official history of yesterday, according to the principle: "if they lived in the steppe, then they were nomads." Firstly, at that time in the Southern Urals there could well have been a dense forest-steppe, and secondly, cattle breeding on an industrial scale is quite possible with a sedentary mode of management

Numerous cities grew up in the steppes of the Southern Urals about 4000 years ago. The most famous of them is Arkaim … Its ruins are located several hundred kilometers south of Yekaterinburg, not far from the Kazakh border.

Arkaim was discovered in 1987. The results of aerial photography carried out in this area before they were going to build a reservoir here and flood this area helped. In the photographs taken from the plane, mysterious spirals and circles were clearly visible. At first, a variety of explanations were put forward. Someone even talked about alien cosmodromes built in the South Ural steppes.

However, the excavations carried out under the leadership of the Russian archaeologist Gennady Borisovich Zdanovich brought an equally sensational result. In the Bronze Age, a complex urban culture arose in this wild steppe, far from the centers of civilization. The plans to build the reservoir were abandoned, and in 1991 Arkaim was taken under protection.

In just the last quarter of a century, in the steppes of the Southern Urals, on a small, by Russian standards, territory measuring 350 × 200 kilometers, 22 ancient settlements have been discovered, located at a distance of 40-50 kilometers from each other. According to Zdanovich, "a genuine cultural explosion" took place here in that distant era. While scientists do not know what kind of people founded these early cities (proto-cities).

Obviously, the tribes settled here that had previously roamed the steppe. They belonged to the so-called Andronov culture, which spread in the II millennium BC in the territory of the Urals, Kazakhstan and Western Siberia. Some scholars associate the inhabitants of Arkaim with the Indo-Iranians (Aryans) - that part of the ancient Indo-Europeans, which is most studied by historians thanks to the "Rig Veda" and "Avesta".

Arkaim's research is just beginning. It is known that the city was surrounded by two rings of earthen walls lined with bricks or stone slabs.

From a bird's eye view, it resembles a giant wheel lost in the steppe. External wall diameter - 180 meters; internal - half as much. The height of the walls reached 5.5 meters, and the width was 4-5 meters.

The outer wall was surrounded by a two-meter ditch. “For the attackers, such a fortified city was a serious obstacle the height of a modern three-story building, surrounded by water,” writes Gennady i Zdanovich in the pages of the Znanie is Sila magazine.

The main gate that led to Arkaim was located on the western side. Three additional entrances are oriented in three other directions of the world. The total area of the city exceeded 20 thousand square meters.

Along the walls, from the inside, there were one-story houses in which the townspeople lived. According to Zdanovich's estimate, from 1, 5 to 2, 5 thousand people lived in Arkaim. The houses built of adobe bricks were up to 20 meters long.

These are very large dwellings, the archaeologist notes. On one side of their narrow houses adjoined the wall, on the other they went out onto a spacious street that encircled their ranks. The dwellings were crowned with a sloping gable roof.

In the part of the house that was adjacent to the outer wall, there was a "common room" that could accommodate up to 50 people. Closer to the entrance, “family” rooms were set up, separated from each other by partitions. Through a hole in the roof it was possible to go upstairs. In this way, the houses in Arkaim resembled dwellings in the most ancient city of Asia Minor - Chatal-Guyuk.

Up to 40 dwellings were located along the outer wall of Arkaim, and 27 along the inner wall. Again, when viewed from above, these houses resembled the spokes of a wheel.

Both in the outer ring of Arkaim and in its inner ring, the layout of streets and the arrangement of houses were similar. No signs of sharp social stratification were noticed here. There was no royal palace in Arkaim, as in Troy of today.

At the same time, the severity of the planning is surprising. Why are all dwellings the same and there is no house built for the leader? Someone had to come up with all this, order that dwellings be built according to a single plan, Zdanovich asks.

Arkaim is the oldest city found north of the Caucasus. His discovery suggests that 4,000 years ago, the border between savagery and civilization did not run where we used to think. The culture of the Bronze Age spread much further than it was imagined.

According to Zdanovich, Arkaim, like other cities in the Urals, was a model of the universe. The people who lived here worshiped the sun and fire. Perhaps, the archaeologist believes, it was a temple city and only a few hundred people lived here permanently in the inner ring of dwellings: priests, artisans, guards. The rest came here for religious holidays from the countryside, where their ancestral settlements were located within a radius of several kilometers from Arkaim.

Or maybe the people who lived here were engaged in observing the starry sky? Arkaim is often called the "Russian Stonehenge".

But, perhaps, the smelting of copper was an even more important occupation of the inhabitants of the ancient Ural cities.

So, during the excavations of Olgino (Stone Ambar), archaeologists discovered copper products and slags that accompany the production of copper. Sickles, cleavers were made of this metal, but above all weapons: battle axes, spearheads and arrowheads.

Copper was the most important raw material of the Bronze Age, because bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. The southern Urals abounded in copper ore. That is why it is no coincidence that thousands of years ago, settlements began to appear here, in which workers who mined valuable ore lived. Over time, the settlements became richer and richer. They were surrounded by walls to protect themselves from enemies; they turned into cities, dozens of cities.

Another wealth of Arkaim was gold. In the religious beliefs of the Bronze Age, this metal has a special role. With its dazzling brilliance, gold resembles the sun, which was worshiped by many cultures of antiquity. Items made from it were extremely valuable.

Many legends and legends of that era were associated with gold, with mythical creatures that guarded it, with heroes who managed to get it.

The gold and copper trade has become a source of wealth for recent nomads. They fenced their settlements with powerful walls to protect themselves from the raids of wild tribes. The first cities grew up in the middle of the endless steppe.

The already mentioned city of Olgino, located 100 kilometers from Arkaim, had the shape of a rectangle with rounded corners.

This city was also surrounded by an earthen rampart and a moat. Perhaps the nobility lived behind these walls. In any case, in the vicinity of Holguin, archaeologists have discovered magnificent burials.

The oldest war chariot in the world was found in one of them. Almost 500 years before chariots appeared in Ancient Egypt, they drove around in the southern Russian steppes.

This find indicates that the chariots may have been invented by the inhabitants of Arkaim and Holguin and from there, from the Ural steppes, rushed to other cultural centers of the Bronze Age, to the countries of Mesopotamia and the Middle East, Egypt and Mycenaean Greece.

According to archaeologists, the "Country of Cities" existed in the Urals for 200-250 years. For reasons not yet understood, the inhabitants of Arkaim left their city and completely burned it down.

Where did they move? According to Gennady Zdanovich's assumption, they left across the steppes to the south - to the Volga region, Iran or India. Archaeologists have yet to unravel the mystery of the disappearance arKaimtsev.