Ustyurt is a kind of historical reserve. Traces of ancient civilizations are scattered throughout the plateau - cemeteries with majestic mausoleum-minarets and underground temples, 60 Neolithic sites, the ruins of the ancient city of Shahr-i-Vazir, the Beleuli caravanserai and the Allan fortress. But what was discovered in 1983 became a sensation - nothing like this had ever been found in the steppes of Eurasia. TengriMIX invites you to learn about a unique find in this material.
34 years ago, in the west of the Ustyurt plateau, in the area of the Bayte wells, archaeologists discovered about 70 statues of male warriors - as many as were found in total of Scythian stone steles in the steppes of the Black Sea region for 100 years of searches.
The edge of the Ustyurt plateau / skitalets.ru
Of course, after such an opening, a special group of forwarders went there.
“Some debris was so massive that it was impossible for one person to move them. Probably, this gallery was an impressive sight in the rays of the sun. There, in the direction of the sunset, in the direction of the "land of the dead" their faces were turned … ", - wrote then the head of the expedition Lev Galkin.
The torso of a warrior from the Baite sanctuary / Lev Galkin and Alexander Glazunov, Vokrug Sveta magazine, 1990
All the sculptures were located on hills with a good all-round view at a distance of 1 to 4 kilometers from each other, and from one cult complex one could see the next. There were 3 of them in total.
Stella with runes on the Ustyurt plateau / great-asia.ru
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The Bayte-1 complex consists of a 4-meter-high “royal” mound and two smaller mounds. It was obvious that the first burial mound, near which about 25 monuments once stood, had been plundered in antiquity, so archaeologists found only one beak-shaped stone altar.
Bayte-2 is located about a kilometer from this complex, where no sculptures have been found. But in its vicinity, archaeologists discovered a quarry, in which they mined white-pink limestone, which served as a material for making sculptures.
4 kilometers to the southeast of it there is a group of mounds of the Baite-3 complex, the layout of which resembles the first complex. However, to the west of the central mound, 50 broken statues lay compactly in the shape of the letter "P". Also on Byte-3 they found 2 stone sacrificial tables, which indicated one thing: these complexes are a sanctuary.
Shrine on the mound / maryno.net
Despite the fact that all the statues were knocked down and damaged, scientists still managed to determine their original position - they were located in groups of 2-4 idols at a short distance from each other, forming a stone army up to 4 meters high.
Most of the statues resembled the figure of a standing man with his right hand lowered and his left pressed to his stomach. The protruding cheekbones of their faces and the absence of beards in some cases suggested their Mongoloid origin, although some of them also have European features. On some of the broken statues, relief images of swords, bows and daggers were clearly visible. Scientists believed that these structures belonged to the Massagetae who lived in the IV-III centuries BC, and about whom nothing is really known until now.
The head of a warrior from the sanctuary / Lev Galkin and Alexander Glazunov, magazine “ Around the world ”, 1990.
Almost the only source of information about these tribes is the works of Herodotus. He wrote that the Massagets are a warlike and powerful people who worshiped the Sun and sacrificed horses. They believed in an afterlife, so they built ancestral sanctuaries and protected them.
Also, according to the father of history, the Massagets fought on horseback and on foot, and their weapons consisted of bows, spears, daggers and battle axes. The customs of the people were simple and unpretentious: if the Massageta liked a woman, he simply hung a quiver with arrows on her wagon so that no one would enter, and stayed with his chosen one.
On the mound / skitalets.ru
Where exactly the lands of the Massaget civilization were located is unknown, but they definitely bordered on the countries of Central Asia, which were part of the Achaemenid empire. In the IV century BC, according to some information, the Massagets and their queen Tomiris stopped the advance of the army of the Persian king Cyrus to the east, who was trying to seize their territory. The nomadic people lost the first battle, and the son of the queen Spargapis was captured by the Achaemenids, but the second completely decided the outcome of the war.
Herodotus wrote: “I consider this battle the most brutal of those battles that the barbarians had … Fighting, they held out for a long time, and neither one nor the other did not want to flee, but in the end the Massagetae gained the upper hand. Most of the Persian army was destroyed on the spot, and Cyrus himself perished …"
On the barrow / keyforum.ru
When Alexander the Great came to the eastern lands, his most implacable enemies were again the warlike Massagets. It is believed that then part of the Massaget tribes, who did not obey the invaders, went to the Mangyshlak peninsula, and another part of the tribes became part of and disappeared into the population of Central Asia: the image of the same sign is engraved on stone sculptures, Massaget sacrificial dishes and Khorezm coins.
Stone blocks of the Byte-3 complex / silkadv.com
But back to the stone giants of Ustyurt. To which of the Massaget leaders was the tomb erected? Why was he so honored? Alas, we can only guess about this …