What can be said about the ancient city of Arkaim, this archaeological site was discovered absolutely by accident, one had only to look through the aerial photography? However, the moment of Arkaim's opening was supposed to take place several decades earlier. It didn't work out. And so it didn’t work out that the airplane footage showed a too correct design, which was not perceived as having been created centuries ago.
Too accurate.
Too calibrated.
As if it was planned from a bird's eye view.
Scientists-archaeologists considered that this was not a settlement or a city at all, but a kind of modern military complex of a secret nature. And, having learned from the bitter experience of communicating with the military, they did not even try to find out what kind of a rounded complex there was. The military, apparently, were not very interested in archeology, otherwise they would have made this grandiose discovery first.
However, there was a person who was surprised at the strange appearance of the "modern military base". Honor and praise to him. It was 1987. And already two years later, the entire territory was given to the Ilmensky Reserve. And here the ancient city of Arkaim, together with the adjacent and also very ancient cities of the Chelyabinsk region. I almost found myself at the bottom of the reservoir. The decision was canceled almost at the very last moment. Considering how in the late 1980s they "liked" to cancel decisions, this is truly a miracle. The mystics believe that, probably, Arkaim opened for so long because someone really did not want it, and he was saved by the same mysterious person. Or by the will of its creators, no matter how wild it sounds. The ancient city of Arkaim was not flooded, because people had no right to flood it. This is how one of the versions sounds, which is incomprehensible, and yet, it has a right to exist.
The other is much more trivial: the country was in such decline that extra antiquity would not have hindered it at all. But at the junction of the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions. Russia and Kazakhstan have found not a simple ancient settlement. A huge complex of ancient cities was found, from south to north - about 350 - 400 km long, from west to east - 120 - 150 km. All this steppe area is simply packed with antiquities. Sinashta and Sinashta 2, Sarym-Sakly, Aldanskoye, Isiney, Bersaut, Kizilskoye, Zhurumbay, Olginskoye, Kuysak, Springs, Stepnoye, Chernorechye, Ustye, Andreevskoye and Chekotai … But the main one among the monuments is Arkaim. It is a mysterious, incredible ancient city that is as important in meaning as ancient Ur, or Troy, or ancient Babylon. Why is this find so important?
“After all, this is one of those discoveries,” wrote the researcher Arkaim K. Bystrushkin, “that force scientists to reconsider for decades - if not centuries - the built-up system of views on a vast and ideologically important field of research. The appearance of Arkaim forced historians to change the idea of the Bronze Age on the territory of the Ural-Kazakhstan steppes.
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Now it turned out that they were not the backyards of the world entering the era of civilization: the high level of development of metallurgy provided this region with a rather noticeable place in the cultural space that stretched from the Mediterranean to today's Kazakhstan and Central Asia. And some of the same type of metal objects of amazing workmanship, found somewhere on the coast of the Aegean Sea, then in the Southern Urals and testifying to the length of cultural ties, it turns out, roamed caravan routes not "from there to here", as they used to think, but "from here to there" … Obviously, it is not necessary to say that a correct understanding of the direction of such flows is important not only for the satisfaction of local patriotic ambitions. Discoveries of this level are rarely made in reality - perhaps once in a hundred years."
According to the latest estimates, this archaeological site is approximately 4,800 years old. There is only one analogue of this type of building in the world - Stonehenge in England, in the county of Salisbury. Stonehenge is known to everyone today, according to researchers it seems to be an ancient observatory, but its purpose is still vague and incomprehensible to this day. How unclear, actually, and the exact date. According to some data - about 5,000 years ago, according to others - as much as 140,000 years ago. But if Stonehenge is clearly a cult building, then in Arkaim life and faith were merged to such an extent that it is difficult to separate where civil construction ends (houses, workshops, etc.) and the cult begins. This is a single complex.
“The building developed in height, there were solid walls and ceiling, galleries, pavements, superstructures on the second floor and high wooden towers,” experts say. - Its total area is about 20,000 square meters. m., and the plan of the settlement looks like this: two rings of powerful defensive walls inscribed into one another (the outer one is surrounded by a moat 1.5-2.5 m deep), two circular streets of dwellings that have clung to these walls from the inside, and in the geometric center of the rings - a platform in the form of a slightly flattened circle, the diameter of which is 25 - 27 meters, carefully leveled, rammed and, possibly, even reinforced with a certain cement mortar. The outer wall is about 150 meters in diameter and 4 - 5 meters thick at the base.
It was erected from log stands clogged with soil mixed with lime, and from the outside it was lined with mud blocks, starting from the bottom of the ditch and up to the upper cut - in total 5 - 6 meters. The inner wall was apparently surrounded by a citadel - about 85 meters in diameter. The thickness of this wall was less - 3-4 meters, and the height, most likely, was greater than that of the outer one. It was strictly vertical and outside - along the log facing - was coated with clay. The rings of dwellings were divided into sectors by radial walls - in plan they are like the spokes of a wheel. These walls were common for every two rooms in the neighborhood. Near the outer wall there were, as it was established with the help of geophysical studies, 35 dwellings, near the inner 25, but so far, 29 of them have been excavated: in the outer ring - 17 and in the inner - 12.
Add to all this a rather complex and well-thought-out internal layout of dwellings and circular streets, a cunning trap for the destruction of uninvited guests at the connector of the outer defensive wall and other fortifications, a rational storm sewer system; even the colors of the facing materials used by the ancient Arkaims were functionally and aesthetically significant. Now - even based on such a meager verbal sketch - you will be able to assess for yourself to what extent the ordered, intelligently organized life of a large community of people once proceeded outside these walls."
If you try to imagine all this, the image of a surprisingly powerful and well-thought-out building that was planned in advance appears before your eyes. In other words, this structure was first calculated, a work plan was created, and only then they began to build. And they erected it not in parts, but immediately, without rebuilding or completing anything. That for ancient civilizations is a fact in itself quite fantastic. And if we consider that this is a circular building, then all that remains is to shrug. The construction of such a complex almost 5,000 years ago requires a knowledge of geometry that was previously considered available only to the highly developed peoples of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. And here is the Urals. Places that have always been considered "wild". And in these "empty" steppes … one of the most mysterious structures has been built.
Bystrushkin believes it is an ancient observatory. According to many others, this is a priestly sanctuary, such an educational complex for those who were preparing for initiation, for students. Still others believe that this is the center from where the knowledge of the survivors spread throughout the newborn world. The first researchers of Arkaim G. Zdanovich and I. Batanina wrote that the circular layout of the ancient city of Arkaim is close to the principle of mandate - one of the main sacred symbols of Buddhist philosophy. The word "mandala" itself in translation means "circle", "disc", "circular". In the Rig Veda, where it first appears, the word has many meanings: "wheel", "ring", "country", "space", "society", "assembly" …
There is a universal interpretation of the mandala as a model of the Universe, a "map of the cosmos", and the Universe is modeled and depicted in plan using a circle, a square or their combination. Arkaim and his dwellings, where the wall of one house is the wall of another, possibly reflect the "circle of time", in which each unit is determined by the previous one and determines the next. According to archaeologist Alexander Tishkin, Arkaim is a citadel. It is a temple city that has been a repository of knowledge and genetic material for future generations. And the main defense of Arkaim was precisely in the correct location of the stone monoliths. After all, the stones were placed on the ground for a reason, but only in those places that required their installation.
If we perceive Arkaim as an ancient observatory, and no one argues with this anymore, then Arkaim served its inhabitants as a model of the Universe, and a calendar, and had ritual significance … And the people who managed to calculate with amazing accuracy the precession (the shift of the coordinates of the stars as a the axis of the Earth along a circular cone), having outstripped the ancient Greeks in this, it is hardly possible to take for the uncivilized. The end of Arkaim also looks strange - it was burned. And judging by the fact that all the residents left the city, leaving nothing, there are no traces of death of people, there is no surprise effect, then the people of Arkaim burned it themselves …
V. Pimenova