Site Description
The site indicates an early steppe presence in the Zarafshan Valley. About 5000 years ago it was "the largest metallurgical center of Central Asia engaged in export". It was abandoned after the arrival of the Indo-Iranians, around 2000 BC.
The city is believed to have been revived as a mining point to collect from nearby sources of turquoise. Established no later that 1500 BC, the city also served as an important regional agricultural and copper production center.
The town was discovered by a local farmer named Ashurali Tailonov in 1976 who found a copper dagger protruding from a nearby construction site. It was excavated by Abdullo Isakov and French archaeologists beginning in 1977.
Read more about this topic: Sarazm
Famous quotes containing the words site and/or description:
“That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is. When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)