Aryan Cities in Central Asia

The airing of a BBC radio program called "Tracking the Aryans", featuring historian Bettany Hughes, has generated a wave of news stories on a group of Bronze Age cities in Russia near the border of Kazakhstan. The cities were discovered by Russian archaeologists using aerial photography, and from the air they have a distinctive spiral shape.

The remains of the ancient city were explored for the first time around 20 years ago shortly after Soviet officials relaxed strict laws banning non-military aerial photography. But because of the region is so remote the incredible cities have remained virtually unknown to the rest of Europe until now. They are about the same size as several of the city states of ancient Greece and would have housed between 1,000 and 2,00 people.

Hughes was driven to the vast region by the expedition's chief archaeologist Professor Gennady Zdanovich who pointed to the cities that were buried in the ground beneath them.

The Aryan's language has been identified as the precursor to a number of modern European tongues. English uses many similar words such as brother, oxen and guest which have all been tracked to the Aryans. . . .

The artifacts were daubed in swastikas which were used in ancient times as symbols of the sun and eternal life.

Evidence of ritual horse burials were found at the site which ties in with ancient Aryan texts that describe the animals being sliced up and buried with their masters.

Hughes, a visiting research fellow at King's College London, added: 'Professor Zdanovich took me to this expanse of grass; you couldn't tell there was anything special. Then, as he pointed to the ground, suddenly I realised I was walking across a buried city. Every now and again you suddenly notice these ghostly shapes of fortresses and cattle sheds and homes and religious sites. I would not have known these had he not shown them to me. These ancient Indian texts and hymns describe sacrifices of horses and burials and the way the meat is cut off and the way the horse is buried with its master. If you match this with the way the skeletons and the graves are being dug up in Russia, they are a millimetre-perfect match.'

More, from the Australian:

The shape of each of the cities, which are mainly in the Chelyabinsk district, resembles an ammonite fossil, divided into segments with a spiral street plan. The settlements, which would each have housed about 2000 people -- the same as an ancient Greek city such as Mycenae -- are all surrounded by a ditch and have a square in the middle.

The first city, known as Arkaim, was discovered in 1989, soon after the soviet authorities allowed non-military aerial photography for the first time.

I have been trying to find out more about these excavations for a decade, since I first heard about them, but the Russian excavators have been very tight with their data and little has made it into the western press. Kudos to Hughes and the BBC for finally getting part of the story out to the public.