A couple archeological finds:
- "Archaeologists May Have Found the Lost Iron City of the Silk Road in the Remote Highlands of Uzbekistan"--Smithsonian Magazine. The site, called Tugunbulak, is believed to be the long-lost city of Marsmanda which was an iron tool manufacturing hub.
... Miners, smelters and blacksmiths may have converged at this remote site as early as the sixth century A.D. to produce the weapons and tools indispensable for medieval Central Asia. They likely forged swords, arrow tips and horse tack essential to all the great steppe empires, including the Scythians, Huns and Mongols, and presumably made hoes and plows that helped transform marshy lowland oases into productive farmland. These wares radiated out along a shifting network circulating goods, technologies and faiths from Manchuria to the Mediterranean, and from Sri Lanka to Siberia, a network that Ferdinand von Richthofen, a 19th-century German geographer, first described as the Silk Road.
- "Sunken city discovered in Kyrgyzstan lake was a medieval hotspot on the Silk Road — until an earthquake wiped it out"--Live Science. The researchers believe they have found the ruins of a settlement called Toru-Aygyr submerged between 3 feet and 13 feet (1 and 4 m) deep, near the northwest shore of the Lake Issyk-Kul. "At the beginning of the 15th century, as a result of a terrible earthquake, the city went under the waters of the lake … the tragedy can be compared to Pompeii."
Pretty cool!
ReplyDelete