Once, among the ancient manuscripts, researchers accidentally came across a small story with a mention of the mysterious Silver City. Then they came across in several other sources mentions of this semi-mythical city located in the region of Central Asia. Was there really such a rich city full of silver in history?
The Silver City became a poetic metaphor and a symbol of the East, sung in ancient legends and myths, according to which it was a heavenly place on earth. The streets of this city were lined with silver slabs, and the walls of the houses were built of gold bars. In the blooming gardens of this ancient mythical city, the most beautiful birds of paradise sang and plants of wonderful extraordinary beauty grew.
A third century AD Chinese historian, Xuan Zhu, described in an ancient treatise the existence of an incredibly wealthy large settlement in northern Asia. Where even stones melt from the heat and sand cracks. In his treatise, he said that for the untold riches of this Silver City, China will definitely start a new war.
Already in the fourteenth century, a similar description is found in the medieval manuscripts of a historian from Bukhara, in which he reports on the assignment of the Mongolian Khan Belbek to his generals to conquer the city of Serebra. Khan urged them during the capture of the richest village not to spare anyone and to destroy everyone on their way, young and old.
The Chinese emperor and the Mongol khan, separated for centuries by a millennium, were striving for the same thing. Their main goal was the conquest of a large, rich mysterious city with huge silver reserves. Can the fiction of a mysterious city of great value be repeated so accurately in ancient historical writings at absolutely different time intervals? And this may mean that the particle is hidden in them and the particle is true.
The city's key name is associated with silver. It is likely that it contained a treasury or natural rich deposits of silver. Only it is not known what kind of culture and civilization he belonged to, where he was precisely located geographically, although, most likely, it was precisely the eastern Central Asian prosperous city.
The famous medieval oriental philosopher, physician, Persian historian of the tenth century AD, thinker Avicenna, in one of his 450 treatises, directly described the Silver City. Avicenna wrote that the ancient sages hid all the gold and riches of the world in various hard-to-reach places, so it is extremely difficult to take possession of them. According to a description from his other treatise, in one of these places - in the country of Mavir Makhma in the rugged mountains near the city of Isfara (a large industrial city still exists in the north of Tajikistan) there was a paradise palace in which bricks were made of gold and silver.
Scientists, according to a description from an Arab treatise, determined the location of the fabulous mountains and came to the conclusion that this is the Turkestan ridge located between the modern cities of Central Asia: Bishkek, Dushanbe and Tashkent. In the archives of the Turkestan circle, located in the Kyrgyz capital since 1895, researchers stumbled upon a protocol dated 1896, instructing archaeologists Malitsky and Andreev to go on an expedition through the Batken region, bordering Isfara from Tajikistan, to study the Silver Land.
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At the edge of the Fergana Valley in the mountainous area of the Batken region along the Tajik border, researchers discovered several tens of tons of waste geological waste, which appeared before them in the form of huge man-made hills. The embankments consisted of a dump of worked-out rock, pieces of broken stone, shale and ore. The mystery was that there were no traces of quarries anywhere in the vicinity, with the exception of one cave, which gradually went down to a depth of almost fifty meters.
The researchers found out that in the depths there was mining of silver ore and lead. The first mentions of this mine appeared in the second century AD, and the last information about it dates back to the sixteenth century. It turns out that this underground mine was developed by hand for almost a millennium and a half, and the silver from its bowels was distributed throughout Central Asia from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to China and the Mongolian steppes.
From the ancient descriptions of the deposits of this area by the famous Arab geographer Istakhri, who lived in the tenth century AD, scientists learned that the oldest silver mine was called Kan-i-Gut, which means the Mine of Perdition. According to legend, the mine was founded by Khan Khudoyar, who uses as miners convicted of guilty people and leaders who are disliked by the Khan, who raise a protest movement among the people. People who fell into the undergrounds of the mine disappeared without a trace and never again rose to the earth's surface. Indeed, during modern surveys of underground labyrinths and passages of a huge underground cave with numerous transitions from level to level, cavers have found not only the remains of ceramic lamps, picks, cauldrons, ancient axes, but also shackles and remains of ancient miners.
The first real Kanigut exploration expedition for a full-scale study of the mine was organized in 1920. The group included specialists from different scientific fields, who, within twenty days, managed to prepare a detailed plan of the underground system of an abandoned mine with all its numerous passages, huge halls and descents at levels up to sixty meters. Scientists proved then that Kun-i-Gut is the most unique mine in all of Central Asia both in terms of scale and duration of natural resource extraction.
Thus, no paradise garden city built of silver and gold bars actually existed. On the site of its supposed geographical position, there was a former silver medieval mine, which took the lives of thousands and thousands of people with hard dangerous labor. In the mines of the Middle Ages, criminals and slaves condemned to death, taken prisoner during military campaigns, always worked with a pick in the hands of the hardest and deadly work. It was for the mine with the silver vein, for the most valuable metal in the Middle Ages, and not for the fabulously rich Paradise Silver City, that so many warriors and generals fought.
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