Semiyarka and the Bronze Age Steppes

Perusing old photographs taken by the American Corona spy satellites, British archaeologists spotted this interesting pattern in eastern Kazakhstan. I have already mentioned the Corona program here before; these images are not as clear as modern satellite photos, but since they were taken in the 1960s they show a lot of stuff that has since been covered over or destroyed by modern development.

This image appears to show a community made of up walled compounds, each about 50m across. But how old was it? And who lived there?

The Brits who made this discovered reached out to authorities in Kazakhstan and organized a joint expedition to explore the site; the results of their 2018 study have been leaking out for a while, but they have now published a formal article in Antiquity.

The site is called Semiyarka, the "City of Seven Ravines," and it dates to around 1600 B.C.  It measures about 345-acres, or 145-hectares, making it one of the largest Bronze Age sites of the region. It had actually been recorded in 2000, but the people who found it did not have access to aerial imagery and did not realize its scope.

Early reports associated the site with the Andronovo Culture, which is what archaeologists call the culture of the Indo-Iranian people of the steppes, before they invaded Iran and India. But now the excavators assign it to the "Adronoid Cherkaskul Culture," which they say represents a fusion of the Andronovo culture of the Indo-Iranian interlopers with local traditions.

Some artifacts from the site. One of the main things the archaeologists found was evidence of bronze working. This fits perfectly with the Indo-European tradition; in settlements of the slightly older Sintashta Culture, centered around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, every large house had its own hearth for smelting metals.

Andronovo Bronze Axes

Andronovo Ceramics

Every piece of evidence we find on the steppes, either archaeological or genetic, further confirms the model of Indo-European migration.

Arkaim, the Sintashta Culture, and the Time of the Vedas

The oldest Indian Vedas and the Persian Avesta describe a past society of violent, horse-taming, chariot-riding cattle herders. These people were ruled by chiefs and councils; they were divided into four castes; they worshipped gods recognizably like those of other ancient Indo-European peoples and shared a creation myth and many other stories with their kinsmen. Outside of India, archaeologists, linguists, and mythographers all agree that this society arose on the Eurasian steppe. From there, branches of these people later migrated into India and Iran, bringing with them Indo-European languages. The details of this process are very much disputed, and in the Indian case the Vedas seem to describe the society gradually becoming more settled and agricultural, which presumably happened somewhere south of the steppes and possibly within India.

Where, then, is the archaeological evidence for this imagined Indo-Iranian steppes culture? Scattered all across the steppes, actually, but possibly concentrated in one particular place: at the south end of the Ural Mountains, around the border of Russia and Kazakhstan. Here there is a cluster of a dozen or more Bronze Age settlements dubbed the Land of Towns, the seat of what is called the Sintashta Culture. This culture dates to around 2200 to 1900 BC.

The Sintashta culture is a nearly perfect match for what the Vedas and the Avesta describe. In particular, its leaders were buried with chariots, the oldest two-horse chariots in the world.

Genetically, the people of the Sintashta culture are identical to those of the Corded Ware culture of central and eastern Europe, so a mix of Yamnaya (the likely origin point of Indo Europeans) with European farmers. Which is a little weird; you have to imagine people from the Ukrainian steppes migrating west into Europe, mixing with local farmers, then sending an offshoot east back out onto the steppes where they formed the Sintashta culture. But the genetic evidence is very clear here; Sintashta men are completely identical to the men of Corded Ware Europe. 

The most important sites of the Sintashta culture are Sintashta (no surprise) and Arkaim. It is Arkaim that fascinates me, because of its remarkable structure. Most, at least, of the Sintashta towns were round, but only at Arkaim have the details of the structure been exposed by archaeologists.

Most internet sites say the site was discovered in 1987, but the web site of the Russian institute that actually found it says 1968. Whenever it was found, it seems that not much was done at the site until 1987 when the Soviet Ministry of Water Resources decided to build a dam and flood it. The archaeologists were given a year to extract what they could from the site. They quickly discovered that the time and budget they were alloted were nowhere near enough to properly investigate the site and launched a campaign to either delay the dam or cancel it outright. Fortunately for the archaeologists, late Soviet chaos meant that the Ministry of Water Resources never got their act together to begin construction until the Soviet Union collapsed and the Ministry disappeared. 

Reconstructions of the site. Description, from wikipedia:

The settlement covered approximately 20,000 square metres (220,000 square feet). The diameter of the enclosing wall was about 160 metres (520 feet), and its thickness was of 4 to 5 metres (13 to 16 feet). The height was 5.5 metres (18.04 feet). The settlement was surrounded with a 2-metre (6-foot-7-inch)-deep moat. There were four gates, the main was the western one. 

Reconstruction of one of the houses, in the Arkaim Museum; every house had a hearth for smelting metals. One of the many (to my knowledge) unique things about the site. These houses were pretty big:

The dwellings were between 110 and 180 square metres (1,200 and 1,900 square feet) in area. The dwellings of the outer ring were thirty-nine or forty, with doors opening towards the circular street. The dwellings of the inner ring numbered twenty-seven, arranged along the inner wall, with doors opening towards the central square, which was about 25 by 27 metres (82 by 89 feet) in area.

The excavators thought about 2500 people lived at the site, which would mean 35 to 40 in each dwelling.

Everything about this site is weird: the shape of the settlement and the houses, the size of the dwellings, the ubiquitous smelters, the absence of any particularly large residence for a chief or king. One way the site fits the world of the Vedas is that there is no temple, since the Vedas say much about priests but nothing about temples. Sacrifices were very important in Vedic religion, but most were performed outdoors or in temporary shelters built for the occasion. 

Unfortunately there aren't many pictures of artifacts from the site online. I did find these pots, which look very European

What an amazing place, and how wonderful that this land may have been the place Indians and Persians remembered for thousands of years as their home.