The Ustyurt Plateau is a huge territory with an area of about 200,000 square kilometers, until the 80s of the last century it was a kind of archaeological reserve, a continuous "blank spot" on the history map.
But in 1986, scientists from the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan decided to survey medieval architectural monuments from the air, and discovered something completely mysterious. The area between the villages of Sai-Utes and Beineu was lined with strange drawings, visible only from the air, which very much resembled similar drawings in the Nazca desert.
The arrows, as scientists called them, stretched out in an almost continuous chain from Cape Duan in the Aral Sea deep into the Ustyurt plateau. They differ little from each other in shape and size, and are deployed to the north. Each is like a bag with a retracted top with a wide passageway to which a guide shaft leads. The upper edges of the bag form two arrows with tips in the form of an elongated triangle, into which a narrow passage leads from the body of the arrow. At the vertices of the triangle there are rings 10m in diameter, which were probably at one time holes. The length of each boom is 800 - 900 meters, and together with the guide shaft it reaches 1500 meters, the width is 400 - 600 meters, the height of the fence reaches 80 cm, but in the past it was much higher.
This is how the arrow looks on the ground
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This entire system of arrow drawings on the Ustyurt plateau can be traced over an area of 100 km, but scientists believe that it is much larger and exceeds in its length the system of mysterious drawings in the Nazca desert.
All arrows are slightly different from each other - some have straight lines, while others are concave. In some drawings, the lines of some arrows are overlapped by the outlines of others. This, according to scientists, is due to the fact that new ones were erected on the site of the old structures.
On the ground, the arrow can be identified by a barely visible stone ridge, in which traces of the cementing mortar are visible. On the inside of the bag, an earthen ditch was dug, the earth from which formed a rampart, on which a stone ridge was installed. Along the entire ditch, green grass grows violently, which is clearly visible against the background of withered grass on the plateau. This green grass makes it easy to identify the outline of an arrow.
Why were these arrows created? There are not so many hypotheses - only two. The Ustyurt plateau is a rocky upland. There are no trees, open reservoirs and rivers on the plateau, but from deep (up to 60m) wells you can get slightly brackish water. There is no rain in summer, and the total amount of precipitation together with snow is up to 150 mm per year. The grasses dry up, and the steppe becomes yellow-gray, and lush green grass grows along the arrows, that is, more moisture accumulates there even now. This led scientists to believe that the arrows represent ancient watering structures.
Ditches with ramparts on the outer side retained the flow of water from the entire inner territory and directed it into the arrow-shaped reservoirs located below. Ring-shaped depressions at the corners of the triangles (formerly deep pits) served as reservoirs for water.
Archaeologist Vadim Nikolaevich Yagodin (Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan), based on the found fragments of ceramics belonging to the 7th-8th centuries and located in a later cultural layer, assigns this date to the upper boundary of the arrow-raising period, and how far in the centuries the lower boundary goes is unknown.
But another scientist-archaeologist, Lev Leonidovich Galkin, head of the Volga-Ural expedition, believes that arrows are ancient cattle corrals. Some of the paddock arrows are lined with flat stones driven into the ground with narrow ends and sticking out flat plates upward, probably these are the most recent "paddock" structures. The nomads called the pens "arans". According to Galkin, nomadic tribes began to create Arans back in the XIV-XII centuries BC, that is, in the Bronze Age. The date was established by a stone arrowhead found among the stones of the mound; there is no other evidence yet.
In the same area there is a locality called Kalamkas. It is named after a girl who, according to the legend existing in this area, died during the corral of mouflons, falling into the pit with the animals. The tradition of building arans, according to local residents, existed until the 19th century, when huge herds of saigas, moufflons (mountain sheep), kulans and wild horses - tarpan roamed around the Ustyurt plateau.
The Ustyurt plateau is located between the Mangyshlak Peninsula and the Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay, the Aral Sea and the Kara-Kum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts. Currently, the plateau rises above the plain by 180-300 meters. The edges of the plateau are called chinks, and you can climb up them only in certain places. The main landscape of the plateau is a desert with almost no vegetation or water. The groundwater found in these sediments is salty and undrinkable, apart from a few well-known wells. There are harsh (up to -40 degrees) winters and a scorching, drying out all living heat in summer. And wind. An exhausting wind constantly blowing in different directions.
Once in ancient times, this place was the Tethys Sea. On the plateau, you can see clusters of shells, and some layers of the plateau are solid shell rock. The sea is also reminiscent of the stone balls - iron-manganese nodules that formed once at the bottom of the sea and are found at the lower level of the relief. When the rocks around them weathered, they appeared on the surface of the plateau. The limestone-chalk slopes of the plateau represent a truly bewitching sight, like a fantastic world of another reality.
And in these places, ancient people once lived, a culture unknown to us was born, although then, perhaps, the climate was somewhat different. What about the ancient builders of these arrows? In the area of arrows, a huge complex of mysterious unique cult structures and huge burial grounds of ancient nomads was found, undoubtedly somehow connected with the builders of arrows. As a result, the previously unknown ancient nomadic culture of Ustyurt was discovered. Who are these people?