Arkaim. There are names already in themselves possessing some kind of attractive magical power. When I first learned about the mysterious "Country of Cities", I felt an urgent need to learn as much as possible about this place, to feel my involvement with it. It was as if I was being pulled there by some force, as a person is drawn to the desire to visit the places where he was once born. Finally, this dream has come true.
How often can you hear now that the era of geographical discoveries is over, that there are no white spots left on Earth, that our planet has been studied up and down. One can imagine how boring and insipid life would become if this were true. Fortunately, this is not the case, and Arkaim is a clear confirmation of this. After all, it was found not a hundred years ago, but in 1987 and not in the wilds of the Amazon or the deserted islands of the Pacific Ocean, but in the studied-re-studied South Urals.
Arkaim is a real tangle of mysteries that still have to be solved. The Laboratory of Archaeological Research of the Chelyabinsk State University is engaged in this. Ulyanov Ivan and Novikov Igor, who took part in archaeological excavations of ancient cities, told me about the secrets of the "Country of Cities".
It should be noted right away that Arkaim is a contemporary of the pyramids of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and the famous palaces of the Cretan-Mycenaean culture, and as an astronomical complex for observing the heavenly bodies, it can be safely placed on a par with the legendary Stonehenge. The heyday of this mysterious civilization fell on the 17-18 centuries BC. There are more questions than answers in her story.
So who are they, the inhabitants of this ancient country? Alas, even experts are still wary of giving the exact name. As in the famous fairy tale there were "inhabitants of the Emerald City", so here they are called "inhabitants of the Country of Cities".
There is a hypothesis belonging to Mary Boyce, according to which it was here, in the South Urals, that the homeland of the ancient Indo-Iranians, who called themselves "Arya", was located. This is where the well-known term "Aryan peoples" came from. The Aryans were the creators of the famous religion of fire worshipers and left behind outstanding written monuments - "Rig Veda" and "Avesta".
The mystery of the belonging of the inhabitants of Arkaim to this or that nation is closely connected with the mystery of their appearance in these places. No one can tell exactly where they came from? Although for researchers it is quite obvious the foreignness, the dissimilarity of this civilization to other cultures then widespread in this region. To date, there are three assumptions on this issue.
According to the first, they moved from south to north, slowly moving from Central Asia. According to the second, they went from west to east, as the advanced part of the so-called Abashev circle of tribes living in the Urals. And, finally, according to the third assumption, which, however, does not pretend to be scientific, these are some aliens who suddenly appeared here out of nowhere.
Promotional video:
By the way, the weak points of the first two assumptions are indicated by the fact that cities of the typically Arkaim type have not been found either in Central Asia or in the Urals.
In the Country of Cities today there are up to 20 settlements. The area is 400 kilometers from north to south and 200 kilometers from east to west. They are located mainly along the tributaries of the Tobol and Ural rivers. The total area of the ancient monument is neither more nor less - 20 thousand square kilometers, and the excavation area - 8 thousand square kilometers. Archaeologists have noted certain patterns in the construction of cities.
So the first of them had an ovoid, oval shape. Then they were replaced by round and, finally, square. There is a point of view that square cities were military settlements, and round ones were civil, administrative, and cult. This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the squares are located along the perimeter of the territory, and the circles are in the center.
During the research work, some more interesting patterns were revealed. So the Country of Cities is stretched wedge-shaped to the northeast, as if outlining a landmark for further advancement. It should be noted that militant, armed to the teeth nomadic tribes, the so-called "Varangians of the Bronze Age", were moving towards them. So, everything suggests that these bone breakers were terrified of the inhabitants of the Country of Cities. In the south of the Chelyabinsk Region, where the city of Troitsk is now located, having stumbled upon settlements, they dutifully rounded them and left home. One can only guess why they were so frightened by the Arkaim people.
It must be said that no traces of military clashes were found in the central part of the country, just as no more or less serious weapons were found. All this suggests that the belligerent environment, for some reason, treated the foreigners with great respect and did not dare to quarrel with them.
One of the proofs that the Arkaim people were “not local people” is the material from which the cities were built. That material was wood! Anyone who has ever been to the steppe understands perfectly well that finding even a small bush for making a fire can be a very big problem in the local area. What can we say here about the construction of wooden fortress walls! By the way, the indigenous inhabitants of the steppes still live in yurts and adobe huts, but not in wooden huts.
Of course, the Arkaim people lived on the border of the forest-steppe zone, where trees were in small numbers. It was they who went to the construction of cities. But here it should be noted that the perfect construction technology suggests that the forest for the Arkaim people was a familiar, traditional building material. Where they lived before, there was a lot of it!
There is another amazing mystery associated with Arkaim. Ceramist Alexander Ivanovich Gudkov, studying the finds of clay products, noticed that within the same settlement there is ceramics belonging to the most different cultures! At that time, mainly women were engaged in the manufacture of clay utensils. It seemed as if the men recruited wives from a wide variety of tribes and peoples, who then made dishes according to their local traditions.
Surely many remember the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when every peasant family was required to have an individual blast furnace to melt cast iron. Then China pulled out ahead of the rest in terms of the amount of pig iron per capita. But, as always, the new is the well-forgotten old, because even then in every Arkaim house there was a metallurgical furnace! It should be noted that the smelting technologies were quite perfect, and the yard was 1800 BC.
One more mystery is connected with the Arkaim metallurgy. Everyone understands that in order to melt metal, ore is needed. Since the inhabitants of the Country of Cities were very fond of bronze products, a lot of ore was required. Geologists, however, say that there was almost no ore in these parts at the accessible depth, with the exception of the small mine "Vorovskaya Yama". But even in this case, there was clearly not enough ore on the surface, and it was quite far away. Considering that neither dump trucks nor steam locomotives were invented at that time, the question arises, how did they deliver tons of ore to the smelting site?
There are three more points that make you think. First, when analyzing bronze items for arsenic content, it turned out that part of the bronze is local, and part is clearly not of Ural origin. Secondly, metal smelting requires a huge amount of coal, that is, recycled wood. Paleobotanists argue that the forest was not thicker in the local steppe regions at that time. And, thirdly, when they tried to smelt metal in the furnace restored by archaeologists, there was so little of it that there could be no question of industrial production of products.
The next feature of Arkaim is the arrangement of the settlements themselves. The city was surrounded by a ring ditch, then there was the first fortress wall, then the second, and in the center was the central square. One could get into the city only through one entrance, but one could get to the center only along a narrow street that skirted almost the entire inner city. Since the street passed between the solid roofs of houses and the inner fortress wall, the potential enemy had no chance of getting to the city center alive. The height of the wall was 4 meters, the width of the ditch was 7 meters, and the depth was 3 meters. The diameter of the city was 160 meters. The moat was filled with water only during the spring flood.
Inside each ring, like spokes in a wheel, dwellings were located, which had one common wall and a roof, which made up a kind of wooden avenue. The roof could be reached by a special staircase. There were no passages between the houses. There were only exits to the inner street and the central square. The whole complex consisted of 35 houses in the outer circle and 25 houses in the inner circle. Chimneys were installed above each house.
The house consisted of two parts - utility and residential. The household part contained a cellar, a blast furnace and a well. The well was connected to the cellar with a special duct, supplying cold air from the water there. At the same time, air from the well through another air duct was supplied to the metallurgical furnace, due to which there was a natural draft necessary to maintain a strong fire.
The other half of the house was divided into small rooms in which families lived. Such a house could accommodate about 50 people.
The city was built on the principle of a shell, gradually adding sector by sector. It turns out that you can determine in which direction the city developed by studying items made of bronze and ceramics - the more perfect the items, the younger the urban area. It turned out that the first was the southwestern region, then the eastern and northern. In the "new buildings" were the most advanced metallurgical furnaces, there were almost no signs of repair and modernization. In the inner houses, the stoves were rebuilt 2-3 times.
Over time, the inner moat, left from the time when there was no second ring, began to interfere with the townspeople and was blocked with a log deck. The result is a kind of wooden pavement and storm sewer at the same time. Even special settling wells have been preserved, from where the water filtered by sand went into the river.
The construction technology of Arkaim's fortress walls and residential buildings is considered unique. At first, a wooden cage was built, something like a formwork, which was then clogged with a wet sandy composition. After ramming, it solidified and turned into a monolith, which even now can be difficult to destroy with a crowbar.
What were the people of Arkaim doing? Mainly, cattle breeding and metallurgy. It was not possible to find direct signs that they were plowing and sowing. No boats were found, although the cities were on rivers, and the climate was practically the same as it is now. Swords and spears were not found, but only small arrowheads and bronze knives, necessary in the economy, but not in war. In the summer they moved in chariots. What we drove in the winter, it was not yet possible to establish.
In general, these were purely civilians who did not fight with anyone, but for some reason were not afraid of anyone. They lived quietly, peacefully and richly. It was found that the average age of the inhabitants was 35 years old, but they died a natural death. There were no diseases and epidemics in the cities. Undoubtedly, they were more developed than the peoples around them. The country of cities flourished by all indications! And therefore the greatest mystery is the further fate of this ancient civilization.
One fine day in the 16th century BC, the inhabitants of all cities at the same time collected the necessary things, burned the cities and disappeared in an unknown direction!
This last mystery is perhaps the one that most strongly occupies the minds of Arkaim's researchers. It is obvious that the inhabitants burned the cities themselves - they did it in an organized way, setting them on fire from different sides. There was enough time to get ready, because we took everything we needed, leaving only unnecessary, broken or simply lost things. Such a picture can be observed in Arkaim, and Sintashta, and Ustye … What caused the departure is not clear, one thing is clear - there was no panic.
There is an assumption that an ecological catastrophe broke out - the forest was cut down, the mines were depleted, the cattle trampled pastures - and the Arkaim people were forced to leave these places. Maybe this is so, but where they went in search of new natural resources is not completely clear. There are similar settlements in Asia, Turkey, but they are similar only in form, but not in content. So the main thing in the study of Arkaim is still ahead. Perhaps someone will be able to find traces of this amazing civilization, and again the biblical truth will turn out to be right: “Seek and find”!
E. V. GOLOMOLZIN