S. P. Tolstov.

MOSCOW ORDER OF LENIN STATE UNIVERSITY NAMED AFTER M. V. LOMONOSOV

S. P. TOLSTOV

ANCIENT KHORESM

Experience of historical and archaeological research

EDITION MSU MOSCOW-1948

Cover, frontispiece, half-titles, endings and color tables by the artist N. P. Tolstov.

After all, so many hands touched the stone of these walls,

That prints lay on every corner.

The ruler of Babylon was the gatekeeper here, -

Oh, listen, Turkestan, - the military horn blows.

Balconies collapsed, beams burst.

There was once a floor here, here is a round ceiling.

Do not be surprised! Where the nightingales chirped

One owl screams its deplorable reproach.

Afzal-ad-Din Khagani.

The mass of years will break through

And it will appear weighty, rudely, visibly,

How the plumbing came in today,

Made by the slaves of Rome.

V. Mayakovsky.

List of accepted abbreviations ........ 6

Chapter I - Desert Wall

I. Prehistory of the Great Khorezm... 13

II. "Lands of ancient irrigation" and the Khorezm expedition of 1937-1940. ... 27

Chapter II - Rustaki Gavkhore

I. To the history of the issue ......... 37

II. Monuments of the pre-irrigation period 39

III. Dynamics of the Ancient Irrigation Network................... 43

IV. Historical prerequisites for the reduction of the irrigation network of Khorezm ... 48

V. To the history of re-development of the “lands of ancient irrigation” of Khorezm…. 55

Chapter III - Afriga Tower

I. Time of fishermen's huts..... 59

1. Khorezm Neolithic..... 59

2. Bronze Age of Khorezm.... 66

3. Early Iron Age of Khorezm.. 68

4. On the issue of proto-Khorezmian writing.......... 71

II. The Time of a Thousand Cities....... 77

1. Settlements with residential walls.. 77

2. Settlements of the Kangju time 84

3. Settlements of the Kushan period 102

4. Kushano-Afrigid monuments 119

III. The Time of Twelve Thousand Castles… 128

1. Dead oasis Berkut-kala.... 128

2. Teshik-kala.......... 138

3. Questions of social history.. 150

IV. Time of the "Great Khorezmshahs".... 154

Chapter IV - Khorezm Horseman

I. Coins of Siyavushids-Afrigids.... 173

II. Ancient Khorezmian terracotta.... 196

III. Cavalry of Kangyui ........ 211

Excursus I-The Threat of Euthydemus

I. Greek colonization ...... 231

II. The emergence of the Greco-Bactrian and Parthian kingdoms..... 232

III. Euthydemus of Magnesia and Antiochus III 236

IV. Pushyamitra, the Yavanas and the Mauryan successors............. 237

V. Eucratides and Heliocles ........ 238

VI. Migridates I, the Massagets-Yuezhi and the fall of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom...................... 241

Excursion II-Tirannia Abruya

I. The legend of Abrui ........ 248

II. Abrui and Abo-kagan....... 250

III. The crisis of the Turkic Khaganate in the 80s of the VI century. n. e. and the uprising of Abo-Kagan .......... 256

IV. Social base movement of Abo-Abrui in Lower Sogdiana.... 269

V Hephthalites, Mazdak and Abruy.... 276

Excursion III-The Path of Corybants

I. Kawi and Karapans........ 282

1. Fergana Nauruz..... 282

2. Agura Mazda and Angro Mainyu 286

3. Azhi-Dahaka and Tretaona... 292

4. Serpent and horse ......... 303

5. Kawi and Karapans...... 307

6. Atesh-kede.......... 314

7. Kawi, Kayanids and king-priests of pre-Muslim Central Asia…. 317

II. Mukanna's corruption........ 320

1. Text of Nershakhi....... 320

2. Massagetae custom.... 321

3. Sukan and enarei...... 323

4. Yavananis.......... 325

5. Mazdak, Muqanna, Karmatians…. 331

Chapter V - The Experience of Historical Synthesis.... 341

Working in 1931-1937. on the issues of the early history of Central Asia and other countries of the Near and Middle East, the author of this work was forced to make sure that the interpretation of the socio-economic system of the pre-Muslim period that existed in the literature, as an established feudal system, was not correct and, in essence, was not based on anything. On the contrary, written sources undoubtedly signaled the presence of many features characteristic of the slave system. The author in a number of his works tried to substantiate this position (for the Arabs - in 1932, for nomadic peoples Central and Central Asia - in 1934, in general theoretical, comparative ethnographic terms - in 1935, and finally, for the settled peoples of Central Asia - in 1935 - 1938) 1 .

In this work, the author was greatly assisted methodologically by the works of Academician V. V. Struve, who showed the untenability of the feudal concept of ancient Eastern history using extensive material from the classical East.

However, defending his point of view in a whole series of discussions2, the author could not fail to see weaknesses their argumentation, which are an inevitable consequence of the paucity of sources, their fragmentation, allowing a wide variety of interpretations. It became clear to him that only a campaign for new, hidden in the ground, historical facts, only broad-based and purposeful archaeological work can put the development of debatable problems of the ancient history of Central Asia on a solid base that does not allow misunderstandings. Prior to this, the author could only use extremely fragmentary, albeit very interesting material, mostly coming from random collections of pre-revolutionary collectors, from methodologically very imperfect excavations of the only pre-Muslim monument (not counting Anau) studied before the revolution - Afrasiab 3 and even very few data of the first Soviet expeditions, of which the works of the Museum expedition should be especially noted oriental cultures under the direction of B. P. Denike in Termez 4 , the work of M. V. Voevodsky, M. P. Gryaznov 5 and A. I. Terenozhkin 6 on the Usun burial grounds of Semirechie, the work of the Termez expedition of M. E. Masson, related to the discovery in 1933 a fragment of a sculptural cornice of the beginning of AD. e. in Airtam near Termez 7 and the excavations of the expedition of A. A. Freiman on Mount Mug on the upper Zeravshan, enriching science with a brilliant complex of Sogdian documents from the beginning of the 8th century. 8 Only in the process of work, the author was able to get acquainted with the excellent results of the work of the Termez expedition of M. E. Masson in 1936 - 1938.

The author chose Khorezm as the object of his field research. This choice was not accidental. The author has been associated with Khorezm since 1929, when he first came here as a member of the RANION historical and ethnographic expedition to the Kunya-Urgench and Khodjeyly regions. This expedition determined the whole direction of the author's subsequent work, the focus of which, wherever he was distracted by various incoming tasks, remained the history, ethnography and archeology of this peculiar region of Central Asia, "Central Asian Egypt", one of the most ancient cultural regions of our country. Field research, begun in 1929, was continued by him as the head of the Central Asian Historical and Ethnographic Expedition of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, fulfilling the plan of which, in 1932 and 1934. the author visited Khiva, Turtkul and Chimbai regions. All these works, leading the author to the conclusion about the exceptional role of Khorezm in the system of historical and cultural ties between Central Asia and the Eurasian North, also dictated the need for an archaeological deepening of these studies. Since both lines of the author's research interests crossed on the Khorezm territory, this predetermined the choice of Khorezm as a base for the development of widely staged archaeological work.

This work is the result of four years of field research led by the author of the Khorezm archaeological expedition of the Moscow branch of the IIMK of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the targets of which were determined by the above provisions.

This book is by no means an attempt at a systematic publication of the abundant and varied materials obtained by the expedition during the four years of work. The development of these materials is being continued by the author and his collaborators, and many years will pass before they can be fully introduced into scientific circulation.

However, now is the time to sum up some of the results of the work done, to summarize the most significant of those historical and historical-cultural conclusions that the material already allows us to draw. This is necessary both so that the most important results of our work become the property of wide circles of Soviet historians and do their part in resolving the above debatable issues, and so that we ourselves can continue to develop the extracted materials more systematically and purposefully. The experience of such a final work, summarizing the conclusions that our material gives the right to on the most important lines of research (the history of irrigation, types of dwellings and settlements, fortification, weapons, numismatics, numismatic epigraphy, fine arts), is the present book.

It should be noted that the author and the team of workers of the Khorezm expedition headed by him were not alone in their work to identify new documents on the history of pre-Muslim Central Asia. Almost simultaneously, work is being carried out on a large scale in a number of other regions. Let us note the large Termez complex expedition of M.E. Masson (1936-1938) 9 , which continued the work of the Termez expedition of the Museum of Oriental Cultures in 1926-1927, the long-term works of G.V. 10 , and the brilliant results of the study by the same author of the ancient city of Tali-Barzu near Samarkand 11 , the expedition of M.E. Bernshtam to Kyrgyzstan and the South-East. Kazakhstan (1933 - 1946) 13 , the work of V. A. Shishkin on the western outskirts of the Bukhara oasis in 1937 14 , finally, the work of A. I. Terenozhkin in Ak-tepe near Tashkent 15 and on the Tashkent Canal named after. Molotov 16 .

These works gave us the opportunity to rely on a variety of comparative material and in many respects to support and clarify our conclusions and conclusions. The socio-economic conclusions that many of these authors draw from the analysis of their material are in many respects in common with ours, formulated back in the works of 1938-1941. and developed below. So, M. E. Masson, in the conclusion of his work in the Proceedings of TAKE, writes: “At one time, when the archaeological research of Central Asia was in its infancy, V. V. Bartold, operating because of this, mainly written sources, very limited for time before the Arab conquest, stated that according to them he did not see a significant difference in the life of Turkestan between the 4th century BC. e. and 7th century AD. e. And since by the time of the Arab conquest in the region of Maverannakhr one can see a number of signs of feudal relations, a tendency was unwittingly created to attribute them in Central Asia to the depths of millennia. With such a situation, the now known archaeological data, gleaned from the study of monuments of material culture, reflecting the relations of production contemporary to their creation, would, perhaps, be in blatant conflict” 17 .

And below, the author, analyzing the cultural crisis of the 5th - 6th centuries, stated by him according to archaeological data, asks the question: “Is it not on the verge of the formation of a new formation, when the process of decomposition of the basis of the previous formation, with a corresponding push from the outside, began to take place with great intensity? » eighteen

A. N. Bernshtam comes to an even more decisive formulation when he defines the method of production of the Sogdian colonies of the Semirechye, which he has studied archaeologically, as slave-owning 19 .

The fact that this book, offered to the attention of the reader, is based on new, only partially and previously published material, makes it especially difficult to solve the problem of its construction. In an effort to give a consistent presentation of the history of the culture of Khorezm, as it appears to us in the light of our monuments, the author simultaneously had to substantiate his chronological definitions, based on a set of features related to various areas of culture, and only in general making these definitions sufficiently convincing. Mutual crossing of numismatic, ceramic, historical-architectural and other studies made it extremely difficult to consistently thematic and chronological arrangement of the material. Therefore, the author was forced, bearing in mind Marx's instructions, to refuse to subordinate the method of presentation to the method of research. Having distributed the material according to the thematic-chronological principle, in order to facilitate orientation, he gave at the beginning a brief chronological classification of the monuments, introducing the reader to the systematics and terminology adopted by the author. The reader will find a detailed justification for each of the definitions of this classification in the relevant sections of the following chapters.

At the same time, a number of conclusions made by the author cannot be substantiated on the basis of Khorezmian material alone. This applies, first of all, to many facts of the socio-economic system and social movements of ancient Khorezm, signaled by archaeological data, but comprehended only in the light of all the Central Asian documentary material that we have. Therefore, in order not to load the main text with material foreign to Khorezm, we considered it most expedient to include in our book as a special excursion an essay devoted to the analysis of political events in Central Asia in the 2nd - 1st centuries. BC e., which makes it possible to clarify the role of Kangkha-Khorezm in this era, and our work of 1938 "Tyrannia of Abruy" (in a somewhat revised form), which supplements our archaeological material with data from all written sources known to us in adjacent regions of Central Asia, primarily Sogd, and thus substantiates our final conclusions from a new angle, and, finally, a small study of the problem of the remnants of the traditions of the primitive community in Central Asia in ancient and medieval eras, based on the involvement of a wide comparative ethnographic material in the coverage of archaeological data and ancient texts.

When writing the main text of the book, the author also used in a number of places the text of his previously published articles in the BDI 1938 No. 4, VDI 1939 No. 2 and 3, VDI 1941 No. 1, subjecting it, however, to a radical revision and addition. Chapters I and II, the first and fourth sections of Chapter III, the second and third sections of IV and the entire V Chapter, excursions I and III were rewritten.

In conclusion, the author considers it his pleasant duty to express his deep gratitude, first of all, to the friendly team of his colleagues on the expedition, without whose selfless work the creation of this book would not have been possible, primarily to the archaeologists Ya. G. Gulyamov and A. I. Terenozhkin and the artist N. P. Tolstov, IIMK laboratory assistant V.V. Shtylko, who provided us with exceptionally great assistance in organizing cameral work on the collections, as well as all those who, in the process of eight years of work on the material, helped him with instructions, advice and criticism - Academician V.V. Struve, Academician I. A. Orbeli, corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR A. A. Freiman, S. E. Malov, K. V. Trever, A. Yu. Yakubovsky, professors M. E. Masson, V. D. Blavatsky, the late A.N. Zograf and B.P. Denika and many others.

1 See our works: "Essays on Primitive Islam". "Soviet Ethnography", 1932, No. 2. "The Genesis of Feudalism in Nomadic Pastoral Societies." Sat. "Problems of the genesis and development of feudalism". L. 1934. "Military democracy and the problem of the genetic revolution" PIDO, 1935, No. 7 - 8. "Main Questions of the Ancient History of Central Asia", VDI, 1938, No. 1. "Tyrannia of Abruy", IZ, 1938, III.

2 Plenum of GAIMK in June 1933, Central Asian plenum of GAIMK, 1935, etc.

3 V. L. Vyatkin. Afrasiab is the settlement of the former Samarkand. Samarkand - Tashkent, 1927.

4 "Culture of the East". Issue. 1, M., 1927. Issue. 2, M., 1928.

5 M. V. Voevodsky and M. P. Gryaznov. VDI, 1938, No. 3 - 4.

6 A. I. Terenozhkin. PIDO. 1935, No. 5 - 6.

7 M. E. Masson. The discovery of a fragment of a sculptural cornice of the first centuries AD. e. Tashkent, 1933.

8 Sogdian collection. Ed. Academy of Sciences of the USSR. L. 1934.

9 Termez complex archaeological expedition of 1936 Proceedings of UzAFN, series 1, c. 2, Tashkent, 1941.

10 G. V. Grigoriev. Report on archaeological exploration in the Yangiyul region of the Uzbek SSR in 1934. Tashkent, 1935. His own, Brief report on the work of the Yangiyul archaeological expedition of 1937. Tashkent, 1940. His own, Kaunchi-tepe. UzFAN, 1940.

11 His own. Tali-Barzu. TOVE, I.

12 M. E. Masson. KSIIMK, V.

13 A.N. Bernshtam. Archaeological sketch of Northern Kirghizia. MIIKK IV, Frunze, 1941, as well as his own Monuments of Antiquity in the Talas Valley. Alma-Ata, 1941, and reports in VDI, 1939, No. 4, 1940, No. 2, KSIIMK No. 1 and No. 2.

14 V. A. Shishkin. Archaeological work in 1937 in the western part of the Bukhara oasis. Ed. UzFAN. Tashkent, 1940.

15 A. I. Terenozhkin. Excavations of Ak-tepe hill near Tashkent. Izv. UzFAN, 1941, No. 3.

16 His own. Monuments of material culture on the Tashkent Canal. Izv. UzFAN, 1940, No. 9.

17 M. E. Masson. Settlements of Old Termez and their study. Proceedings of UzFAN. Series 1, no. 2, p. 102.

18 Ibid., p. 103. In the article “The Termez Archaeological Complex Expedition” in KSIIMK, VIII, 1940, p. 114. M. E. Masson directly speaks of the “period of the slave-owning formation”.

19 Op. cit., p. 57.

It is difficult for me to forget the impressions of the day when our expedition first arrived at the Guldursun state farm, located on the edge of the desert, 26 kilometers northeast of the then capital of Kara-Kalpakstan - the city of Turtkul.

Already many kilometers before Guldursun, on the northeastern horizon, above the dense greenery of gardens, above the picturesque "mounds" of collective farmers, a mighty silhouette of one of the largest medieval fortresses of Khorezm - Big Guldursun arose. The closer, the more majestic the panorama of this once formidable stronghold unfolded, standing like a silent guard on the border of the wasteland and flowering irrigated lands of the right-bank Khorezm. Untouched for centuries, an endless double row of towers pushed far forward was drawn in the evening sky.

The road to Guldursun attracted the imagination in itself. It soon became clear that this was not an easy road: the path lay along a wide dry bed of a dead ancient canal, which ran parallel to the modern Taza-Bag-Yab ditch and then, branching out, engulfing the ruins of the fortress on both sides. At the foot of the ruins, on the one hand, regular rows of miniature, in comparison with the dead giant, state farm buildings were spread out, and on the other hand, over the space of goth fields, then here rose mounds of medieval estates destroyed by time and people - the remains of the once richly populated "rustak" (agricultural district) of Guldursun. Even further to the west, behind the bed of the ancient canal, a rectangle of walls and towers of the medieval castle Small Guldursun was clearly drawn, behind which fields and gardens, advancing on the desert of collective farm Khorezm, stretched further and further.

The grandiose ruins of Guldursun are covered with legends and tales. Until recently, people believed that this is a cursed place, that an underground passage guarded by a dragon is hidden in the fortress, that anyone who tries to look for the innumerable treasures of Guldursun must die.

A local native, a young Kara-Kalpak scientist U. Kozhurov, told us a legend he had heard in childhood about "Gulistan" - "Rose Flower Garden". According to legend, it was a rich city with a flourishing, water-abundant neighborhood. The city was ruled by an old padishah, who had a beautiful daughter named Guldursun. And a misfortune befell the happy city: hordes of Kalmyks came from the desert, destroying everything in their path. The Kalmyks devastated the flowering fields and gardens and surrounded the city in a dense ring. The inhabitants bravely defended themselves, and the enemies were unable to overcome their resistance. Months passed, and an even more terrible enemy came to the aid of the conquerors - hunger. Stocks have run out. People were dying in the streets. The thinned defenders could hardly hold their weapons in weakened hands. Then the padishah convened for the advice of his nobles and generals. And there was one among them who offered to try the last means of salvation. It was a cunning plan. The besieged Gulistans secretly brought the best of the few remaining bulls to the palace, fed him the last wheat from the royal bins and released him outside the city wall.

And not only the besieged, but also the besiegers suffered from hunger. Having devastated the district, the Kalmyks ate everything that could be eaten during the many months of the siege, and in the camp they began to talk about the inevitability of lifting the siege. Hungry Kalmyks caught and killed the bull, and when they saw that his stomach was full of selected wheat grain, they were dismayed: “If they feed cattle like that, what other reserves do they have! shouted the warriors. “The siege is hopeless, the city is impregnable, we must leave before we die of hunger.”

The military leaders of the Kalmyks decided so, and preparations for the return trip began in the camp.

But the daughter of the padishah, Guldursun, decided otherwise. For many months she watched from the walls for the leader of the Kalmyks, a handsome young man, a brave knight - the son of the Kalmyk king. An uncontrollable passion flared up in her heart for the leader of the enemies of her people. And when she saw that the cunning of the besieged had succeeded, that the roar of loaded camels was standing over the enemy camp, the rolled up countless yurts of the Kalmyks disappeared one after another, that it would not take even a few hours for them to leave and the handsome prince would leave with them forever, she did an unworthy case: with a devoted maid, she sent a letter to the Kalmyk knight, where she described her passion for him and betrayed the secret of the Gyulistans. “Wait another day,” she wrote, “and you will see for yourself that the city will surrender.”

The Kalmyks unloaded their camels, and countless camp fires lit up again in the night. And when at dawn the Gyulistans saw that the enemies had engulfed the city even more closely, that their cunning was not crowned with success, they fell into despair, and the starving city surrendered to the mercy of the conqueror.

The city was plundered and burned, the inhabitants were partly killed, partly taken into slavery. The traitor Guldursun was brought before the prince. He looked at her and said: “If she betrayed her people and her father because of an unworthy passion for the enemy of her homeland, what will she do with me if someone else awakens her passion? Tie her to the tails of wild stallions so that she can no longer betray anyone."

And the horses tore the body of Guldursun into small pieces and scattered it over the fields. And from the cursed blood of the traitor, this place was deserted and they began to call him not Polistan, but Guldursun.

There is a grain of historical truth in this tragic tale. In the legends of the peoples of Central Asia, under the name of the Kalmyks - formidable conquerors of the 17th-18th centuries, who passed through Kazakhstan and the northern part of Central Asia with fire and sword, even more ferocious conquerors of the 13th century, the Mongols of Genghis Khan, are hiding very often. And it was during the days of the Mongol invasion that life ended in the walls and fields of Guldursun, which is flourishing again in our days.

With natural impatience, having barely finished unloading the expedition caravan, we moved to the ruins. After passing through the gloomy labyrinth of gate defenses and crossing the huge inner space, covered with overgrown bushes and mounds of ruined buildings covered with sand, we climbed the northern wall along a steep sandy slope, and from here, from a height of fifteen meters, a grandiose, unforgettable panorama of ancient Khorezm conquered by the desert opened before us, in front of which such a vivid impression of ruins of Guldursun. Ahead of us, spreading like a boundless sea to the west, east and north, lay the dead sands. Only far on the northern horizon, through the haze of distance, was the bluish silhouette of the Sultan-Uizdag Mountains. And everywhere, among the frozen waves of dunes, now in dense clusters, now in solitary islands, lay countless ruins of castles, fortresses, fortified estates, entire large cities. The binoculars, expanding their horizons, opened up more and more ruins, sometimes seeming very close, so that one could see walls, gates and towers, sometimes distant, drawing indistinct silhouettes.

The desert surrounding the oasis of Khorezm from the west and east is a strange desert. Between heavy ridges of sand, among the crests of dune chains, on the tops of the desert motley rocks of the spurs of the Sultan-Uizdag, on the cliffs of the Ustyurt Chink, on the flat pinkish surfaces of takyrs - everywhere on an area of ​​hundreds of thousands of hectares we meet traces of human activity. These are double lines of weather-beaten mounds stretching like a dotted line for tens of kilometers - the remains of the sides of ancient main canals, the checkered pattern of the irrigation network on takyrs. These are countless fragments of ceramics covering takyrs for tens of square kilometers, sometimes red smooth and sonorous, sometimes rough reddish-brown, sometimes multi-color glazed, fragments of copper, iron, tips of ancient triangular bronze arrows, earrings, pendants, bracelets and rings, among which are it is not uncommon to find gems depicting horsemen, griffins and hippocampi, terracotta figurines of men and women in peculiar clothes, figures of horses and camels, bulls and rams, coins depicting kings in magnificent attire on one side and horsemen surrounded by signs of the ancient alphabet on the other . These are the remains of ancient dwellings, settlements, cities.

Sometimes it is only faint traces on the shiny surface of the takyr - the remains of the cladding of ancient dwellings, the reddish rings once dug into the ground and cut into the level with the takyr poufs - hums. Sometimes these are whole dead cities, villages, fortresses, castles, ruins of entire, once inhabited areas. Their buildings rise 10–20 meters above the channels of dry, wind-swept and sandy canals. Majestic are their harsh walls with narrow slits of arrow-shaped loopholes, formidable towers, round and lancet arches of portals.

I remember once, after a difficult transition through the sands, I and my companions - a Kazakh worker S. Uryumov and a photographer E. A. Polyakov - went out to the space of the Angka-Kalinsky takyrs. At the feet of our camels, at the foot of the passed sandy hills, there was a smooth clay plain, covered with a crimson scattering of ancient ceramics. And above it rose a square of grayish-pink adobe walls, covered with frequent, high crevices of lancet loopholes with rectangular towers at the corners and in the middle of the spans.

The fortress, which stood for more than a millennium and a half, seemed abandoned only yesterday.

Our little caravan passed between the powerful pylons of the gate, inside the passage of which the dark slits of the loopholes also looked warily, and came out onto the echoing platform of the courtyard. The takyr of the courtyard, cracked with polyhedrons, in the cracks between which sprouts of desert vegetation were green, seemed like a paved cobblestone. I climbed the sandy slope to the wall and went along the narrow corridor of the shooting gallery, frightening the steppe fox that had found shelter here along the way.

The crimson flames of the sunset, engulfing the western half of the horizon, foreshadowed the next day's sandstorm. And there, in the west, behind the heavy ridge of sands we had traversed, the black silhouettes of countless towers, houses, castles crashed into the crimson sea of ​​dawn. It seemed to be the silhouette of a large populous city, stretching far to the north, where the outline of the harsh ridges of the Sultan-Uizdag darkens, closing the horizon from the north.

But the dead silence of the desert, the pre-stormy silence of the sands surrounded me. This world, once created by human labor, was dead. Castles and fortresses, cities and dwellings have become the property of ravens, lizards and snakes.

This feeling of fabulousness, the ghostliness of the surroundings, forgotten in the midst of work, in the revival of the expeditionary camp, invariably appeared on the days of lonely reconnaissance. When I spent whole days wandering alone through the takyrs of the dead oases of Berkut-Kala and Kavat-Kala, putting the ruins on the tablet, this feeling often became especially acute. The houses and castles of the 8th-12th centuries stood almost untouched by time. The smooth surface of the takyrs was green with ephemeral vegetation. Everywhere the silhouettes of buildings rose up to the horizon among the sands. It seemed that you were lost in some enchanted realm, in the world of a mirage that had become three-dimensional and material. But the fairy tale had to be made history. It was necessary to read the clay chronicle of the dead Khorezm.

We knew very little about ancient Khorezm, almost nothing. Little information has come down to us about the period preceding the Arab conquests here. During the years of fierce battles and the enslavement of Central Asia by the Arabs (in the 7th and 8th centuries), many of the treasures of the ancient civilization perished. The ancient historical chronicles of Khorezm, burned by the Arab commander Kuteiba, who conquered Khorezm in 712, also perished.

The great Khorezmian scientist of the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries Abu-Raykhan al-Biruni tells us in his book about the chronology of ancient peoples:

“And by all means Kuteyba scattered and destroyed everyone who knew the writing of the Khorezmians, who kept their traditions, all the scientists that were among them, so that all this was covered with darkness and there is no true knowledge of what was known from their history at the time of the advent. Islam to them."

And it was important for us to know exactly the time that preceded the invasion of the Arabs and the advent of Islam.

We needed to find out what the system was like in the era before the Arab conquests, what kind of writing was, how crafts and arts were developed; how agriculture was developed, what were the cultural ties with other countries of Asia Minor.

Bourgeois historians spoke a lot about the beneficial influence of Arab culture on the development of Central Asian civilization. Is it so? Were the campaigns of foreign invaders really beneficial, who passed through the flowering lands of Central Asia with fire and sword?

Historical data tell us that at the beginning of the XII century Khorezm became the center of the greatest empire of the East, stretching from the borders of Georgia to Ferghana and from the Indus to the North Aral steppes. The events of his history are in the center of attention of Eastern sources. This dizzying rise of a hitherto almost unknown country located on the outskirts of the Muslim world comes as a complete surprise.

What is the role of Khorezm in the ancient history of the Middle East?

The pages of the lost book destroyed by Kuteiba could only be restored by archaeologists. Before us was a brilliant example. We all know that at the beginning of the 19th century little was known about the ancient history of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria. Science actually knew nothing about such powerful states of the ancient East as the Hittite, Mitanni, Urartian.

That vast chapter of world history, which is now the property of every literate person, owes its creation almost entirely to the persistent archaeological work that unfolded in the Near East in the 19th century and continues with success at the present time.

In the footsteps of archaeologists, relying on the materials they obtained, an army of philologists of various specialties moved. The emergence of these specialties would not have been possible without the success of archeology.

Only on the basis of a truly titanic, incredibly laborious and complex rough work of archaeologists was it possible to create a grandiose picture of ancient Eastern history, without taking into account which it is now unthinkable to understand the general course of the world historical process.

At the same time, we know how many difficulties, mistakes and disappointments were on this path, how many points of view were put forward on each, often the most petty, question, how many hypotheses were discarded and how many, after everything that was done, remained unclear, controversial, unexplored .

Our task was to penetrate into the enchanted kingdom of ancient Khorezm, to see the outlines of historical truth behind a fantastic cover, to learn to read a kind of clay chronicle of dead cities. The task was far from easy. Many years passed before the place of the initial definitions and experiments in the historical comprehension of individual facts was taken by a picture of the historical development of the Khorezmian civilization, although far from complete, but still coherent in its general outlines.

On the lands of ancient irrigation

We were not the first Soviet archaeologists to visit the ruins of ancient Khorezm. In 1928-1929, in the area of ​​the ruins of the medieval capital of the Khorezmshahs - Urgench (now the town of Kunya-Urgench in the Tashauz region of the TSSR), the expedition of A. Yu. Yakubovsky worked, who gave the first scientific description of the Urgench complex of architectural monuments.

In 1934, in the Tashauz region of the TSSR, on the ruins of the medieval Zamakhshar, the expedition of M.V. Voevodsky worked. However, both expeditions touched upon only the medieval layers of these monuments. Ancient, pre-Muslim Khorezm was first touched by the expedition of Tashkent archaeologists Y. Gulyamov and T. Mirgiyazov, who unearthed in 1936 a Zoroastrian burial ground of the middle of the 1st millennium AD on the Kubatau hill, near Mangyt.

In 1937, Ya... Gulyamov resumed his work on the "lands of ancient irrigation" of southern Kara-Kalpakia. In the same year and in the same area, our expedition began work.

The choice of this area was not accidental. The task was to go beyond the boundaries of the cultural zone, into the depths of the desert, where one could expect to find monuments of the deepest antiquity spared by time and man. This was taught to us by the experience of expeditions at the beginning of our century to Eastern Turkestan.

"Lands of ancient irrigation" - vast areas of the desert, bearing traces of irrigation and abounding in ruins - have been known in Central Asia and in particular in the part of the Kzyl-Kum and Kara-Kum surrounding the Khorezm oasis for a long time. They were noted by numerous travelers. A significant part of them was plotted on geographical maps. The very origin of these lands, the reasons for their desolation have long worried not only historians, but also geographers and geologists. They were one of the historical and geographical mysteries of ancient Central Asia. What only theories about this were not put forward! Some explained this by a change in the course of rivers, others - by the inevitable advance of forests and the salinization of soils allegedly generated by irrigation itself and, finally, by the general catastrophic "drying of Central Asia."

But all this was just speculation, essentially unsubstantiated, because not only the causes, but even the time of desolation of these lands remained unknown. The decisive word belonged to historians and archaeologists, and this constituted a large independent research task, which determined, among others, our exit into the desert.

We had some historical information about the "lands of ancient irrigation" of South-Eastern Kara-Kalpakia. They allowed us to assume a very early desolation of these lands. We knew that until the 10th century the right bank of southern Khorezm was the center of the ancient Khorezmian kingdom. Here lay the pre-Muslim capital of the country - the city of Kyat. But at the end of the X century the center political life The country moved to Urgench, and since then this territory has been receding into the background and is clearly falling into decay. The residences of the ancient Khorezmshahs - the castle of Fil, or Fir - was washed away by the Amu Darya in 997. In the XII century, the Arab geographer Sam'ani reports that some cities of the right bank lay in ruins and their area was plowed up. And in the XIV century, the famous Arab traveler ibn-Batuta, on the way from Kyat to Bukhara, that is, just on the territory of southern Kara-Kalpakia, did not meet a single village, while in the left-bank Khorezm, especially in Urgench and its district, in the days of ibn-Batuta, life was still in full swing.

Many monuments preserved between Guldursun and the Sultan-Uizdag mountains gave us reason to believe that it is here that the most chances are to find monuments of the pre-Muslim era untouched by time.

In 1938, our expedition launched a great work of excavating the monuments of ancient Khorezm of the pre-Muslim era.

The first object of excavation was the castle of the 8th century Teshiak-Kala, which perfectly preserved its external appearance. This castle witnessed the Arab conquest of Khorezm. From the base in Teshik-Kala, reconnaissance was carried out for the most remote chain of ruins deep into the desert - Koi-Krylgan-Kala, Angka-Kala and others.

Even at the height of the excavations, our attention was drawn to the peculiar silhouette of a fortress that was drawn on the eastern horizon, not similar to the surrounding castles of the 7th-8th centuries, sunk in a sea of ​​sands. We looked at it through binoculars for a long time and exchanged guesses. Above the ridges of heavy dunes rose the trapezoid outlines of the corner towers of the fortress that closed the strip of walls, evoking associations with monuments of the classical East. And as soon as it turned out to be a more or less calm day at the excavations, the photographer E. Polyakov and the camel breeder Sansyzbay Uryumov and I went out on camels towards the mysterious ruins.

The transition was extremely difficult. The path lay through rows of huge, menacingly rearing manes of dunes. Their ridges, along which our camels carefully walked, sheerly fell into the failures of deep "uev" - blowout basins. On the bottom of these basins lying deep below us, the wind twisted whirlwinds of blackish sand sparkling with sparkles of mica.

The ruins sank into the sea of ​​dunes - they were not visible either from behind or from the front, but our guide confidently led us along a winding path, now skirting the "ui", then climbing the sandy slopes. And suddenly, from the crest of one of the dunes, a wide area of ​​takyrs, covered with a scattering of crimson-red shards, unexpectedly opened up in front of us. Above the takyrs rose the bizarre outlines of the ruins of a strange fortress, unlike anything we have seen so far. It was still a long way to our destination. This fortress (as we later found out, it was Koi-Krylgan-Kala) did not have a prominent tower of the Teshik-Kala castle. The dilapidated walls of the eighteen-sided citadel were surrounded by a regular circle of an almost flattened outer wall with the remains of nine towers. The edges of the walls of the citadel, made of huge square raw bricks, rising in places by 5-6 meters, were cut through by narrow and frequent slots of loopholes. And inside and around the citadel lay countless fragments of vessels of excellent workmanship and firing, with the surface now covered with red lacquer, now decorated with cut-out ornaments in the form of corners and triangles, followed by red, brown and black coloring on a pinkish-yellow background. Among the sherds, we picked up a bronze two-pronged arrowhead of the early Scythian type and a pair of terracotta figurines - a headless figurine of a man sitting with one knee tucked under him and his hand on the other, and an image of a woman sitting with her legs down to one side, on the back of a fantastic beast.

Before us was another epoch, much more ancient than the one we were studying at Teshik-Kala; before us was the first monument of early antiquity of Khorezm.

At sunset, having passed new ridges of heavy sands, we reached the takyrs, to the goal of our journey - Angka-Kdla, also belonging to the ancient era, but to a later period - to the first centuries of our era. At the takyr, we raised a copper coin with the image of the king in a kind of crown in the form of an eagle. This coin belongs to the third century AD. Subsequently, she helped us date the most interesting finds at the excavations of the Toprak-Kala castle.

On the "lands of ancient irrigation" of southern Kara-Kalpakia, we excavated four sites. During the excavations of one of them in Dzhanbas-Kala, the expedition members, students of Moscow University Abramovich and Vakturskaya, discovered the location of flint tools and ceramics decorated with stamped ornaments in a vast sandy basin. It was the site of the primitive Khorezmians, much older than the sites bronze age. According to the custom of archaeologists, we named it after the nearest settlement of the Keltemnkara culture. The time of existence of this culture takes us to the beginning of the III, and maybe in the IV millennium BC.

The excavations of Dzhanbas-Kala-4 allowed us to restore the general appearance of this peculiar culture.

The Kelteminarians made their tools exclusively from stone and bone. The cultural layer of the site contained countless flint handicrafts - scrapers, scrapers, piercers, liners, blades of large bone tools. Original miniature arrowheads were made from such plates.

The food was mainly fish, mainly pike and catfish. Fish bones literally overwhelm the cultural layer of the site. But along with this, hunting also played a significant role. Many bones of wild boar, deer, and waterfowl were found.

Food was cooked in clay vessels made without a potter's wheel, with a pointed bottom and covered with rich stamped ornaments. Ceramic products amaze with a variety of shapes and richness of ornament.

In huge dwellings made of wood and reeds, an entire tribal community lived - about 100-120 people, including children.

An analysis of the materials obtained at the excavations of the Kelteminar settlements makes it possible to outline some lines of cultural ties between the ancient population of Khorezm and the tribes that lived in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as well as with India and Iran. In the Minusinsk Territory, in burials of the 3rd millennium BC, jewelry made from Lower Amu Darya shells was found, and beads of Kelteminar women were made from shells brought from India. Among the shells found by us in Dzhanbas-Kala-4, two species live in the waters of the Indian Ocean basin - in the Red Sea, the Persian and Arabian Gulfs. The constant color of the vessels in red, as well as their relatively high technical quality, apparently reflect the influence of the ancient cultures of the agricultural tribes of southern Turkmenistan and the Iranian plateau.

Thus, the monuments of the primitive Keltemetarian culture told us about the cultural ties of Khorezm with the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and distant countries of the north as early as the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

Direct darkness of the Celtemiyars were people of the Tazabagyab culture, who lived in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The sites of that time are located partly on the dunes, partly on the takyrs. We found here flint tools resembling the tools of the Kelteminar people, the remains of copper tools and flat-bottomed dishes with a stamped ornament, which in many respects resembles the dishes of the Bronze Age in Siberia and Kazakhstan. We do not yet have direct data on the economy of the Tazabagyab people, but there is every reason to believe that they were engaged in cattle breeding and hoe farming.

The absence of traces of irrigation in the vicinity of the Tazabagyab sites suggests that agriculture in this era was not yet based on artificial irrigation and used the natural moisture of the floodplain areas.

Flight through the Millennium

Our expedition did a great job of studying the ancient monuments of Khorezm. During the four pre-war years, extensive and varied material was collected. We have traveled over 1500 kilometers of exploration routes, discovered 400 monuments, which allowed us to see the ancient world of Khorezm in a new way over a vast period of time - from the turn of the 4th millennium BC to the 14th century AD. About 4.5 millennia were represented by an almost uninterrupted chain of monuments, making it possible to trace the main lines of development of the ancient Khorezmian civilization. The main contours of the historical dynamics of cultural lands and political borders of southern Khorezm in antiquity and the Middle Ages were clarified, general scheme of the ancient irrigation network, the time and conditions for the desolation of the "lands of ancient irrigation" are determined.

Work on the types of settlements and on the monuments of the history of agriculture and crafts made it possible to approach the solution of the central historical problem facing us, the problem of the history of the social system of ancient Khorezm. Numerous coins found by us helped us to shed light on many issues of political history. At the same time, they turned out to be the first monuments of Khorezmian writing. The same coins, seals, numerous and various terracotta figurines and, finally, hundreds of perfectly preserved architectural monuments lifted the curtain on the history of the spiritual culture of Khorezm, its art and religion.

But the further we delved into our material, the more new and new problems arose. The summer of 1941 found our team in a feverish preparation of new field work. It is necessary to complete the excavations of the Neolithic site Dzhanbas-4, to expand work on the most interesting ancient settlement of Toprak-Kala; extensive reconnaissance was planned in the northern Kyzyl-Kum and in Ustyurt in order to clarify the northeastern and northwestern historical and cultural ties of ancient Khorezm.

The treacherous attack of the Nazi hordes on the Soviet country, which interrupted the peaceful creative work of the Soviet people in building a socialist society, interrupted our research as well.

Almost all the personnel of the expedition went to the front. Fulfilling their duty to the Motherland, they became artillerymen, pilots, and sappers. One of us - a young archaeologist, a passionate hunter who changed the central gun to a sniper rifle - N. A. Sugrobov, we did not count in our ranks when, after the victory, we again gathered together. He died a heroic death defending his native Moscow.

Only in 1945 we resumed our work, and in July 1946, extensive excavations of Toprak-Kala, a grandiose settlement of the 1st century BC - VI century AD, began.

The castle-palace of the ruler of the city was chosen as the main object. Three seasons of preliminary surveys made it possible to finally come to the conclusion that Toprak-Kala, of all the ancient monuments known to us, opens up the broadest prospects. At the excavations of Toprak-Kala, our expedition for the first time used aviation for archaeological work. Aviation was supposed to help us solve a number of important problems that could not be solved using only ground work.

First, aerial photography was supposed to help us study the ancient irrigation network. Secondly, shooting from an aircraft made it possible to clarify the layout of the ancient settlements, some parts of which are not traceable from the ground at all. Thirdly, both planned and prospective aerial photography made it possible to record as accurately as possible not only the layout, but also the entire architectural appearance of the monument in its modern, dilapidated state. Fourthly, route visual air reconnaissance in the desert, thanks to a wide field of view, guaranteed against the danger of missing the monuments hiding behind the dunes; with a land route, a desert explorer is too dependent on a map and a guide and always runs the risk of passing by a monument hidden by the terrain.

But the most important thing was that for the first time there was an opportunity to explore the wide periphery of ancient Khorezm with access to the desert not for tens, but for hundreds of kilometers. To do such work by ground means is possible only over many years, and besides, huge expenditures of funds would be required. Aviation made it possible to cover a large area with a dense network of routes in a short time. We decided to combine aerial reconnaissance with ground surveys and accordingly use aviation as a landing craft.

August 25 at 6:30 a.m. In the morning, the flight team of the expedition, consisting of pilots E. V. Ponevezhsky and A. P. Beley, head of the expedition S. P. Tolstov, researcher M. A. Orlov and cameraman K. Mukhammedov, flew from the landing site in in the vicinity of Toprak-Kala for aerial survey of the main area of ​​the expedition's work - the "lands of ancient irrigation" of southern Kara-Kalpakia along the route Kyzyl-Kala - Kavat-Kala - Dzhildyk-Kala - Guldursun - Teshik-Kala - Berkut-Kala - Kyrk-Kyz - Small Kyrk -Kyz - Ayaz-Kala - Toprak-Kala.

A wide panorama of the monuments opens from the height. Against the background of dark gray puffy solonchaks, the irrigation system is clearly visible - a large canal in the form of a double light dotted line of weathered mounds, the remains of side dams with several parallel stripes of lateral, older channels, going from Kavat-Kala to Kzyl-Kala, passing from south to north, to east of the ruins. We fly over Toprak-Kala, and immediately before us appear in a new form the surroundings of the fortress, which we have traveled many times. From the ground - this is a monotonous expanse of blackish-gray dead withered salt marshes, in places covered with overgrown mounds. Now before us, outside the walls of the city, a picture of complex planning opens up.

To the north of the city looms the outline of a vast rectangular suburb, larger than the city itself. Clearly visible are the light stripes of the outer walls of the suburb, to which the mounds that have not been deciphered from the ground are attached, and the black lattice of the internal layouts.

To the south from the gates of the city, directly continuing the line of its main street, a straight light strip stretches - apparently, the trace of a large ancient road leading to the city.

We take a direction to the south, to the ruins of the dead oasis of Kavat-Kala, Below us is Dzhildyk-Kala, Duman-Kala and, finally, Guldursun, Around ancient giant- countless tiny boxes of gardens and fields bathed in greenery of collective farm houses. The ancient irrigation system is clearly visible. Not one, as we thought, but two ancient canals approach Guldursun from the south. They stretch in parallel, at a distance of about 1.5 kilometers from one another.

Kum-Baskan makes a striking impression from the air. A huge castle with mighty towers and a double rectangle of high clay walls is completely crushed by giant waves of dunes that have swept over it.

We fly further west along the hilly ridge. On one of the rocky capes of this ridge, halfway to Toprak, the outlines of the fortress are clearly visible. irregular shape with strongly eroded walls and a tower-like building in the middle. We did not find it during our land routes. We put a new monument on the map.

The following days were devoted to new flights, the lines of which crossed the "lands of ancient irrigation" in other directions and covered previously untouched groups of monuments. As a result, the map of the ancient irrigation network was almost completely clarified, all the most important monuments were photographed in general and in detail, a number of new ones, invisible from the ground, were unmasked and filmed.

On October 21, 18 days after the start of the Zhanydarya route, after a difficult night crossing through the Kunyabugut sands, we returned to Takhta-Kupyr. "Flight through the Millennium" was completed. 9,000 kilometers of air routes left behind, which gave us a huge, newly explored territory and over 200 new monuments from the early antique ruins of the middle of the 1st millennium BC to the late medieval Kara-Kalpak monuments of Zhany-Darya and Kuvan-Darya.

We sum up the results of exploration work on the plane and involuntarily compare them with the work done in the desert before the war. If a good camel can walk 4 kilometers per hour, how many years would it take us to explore such a vast territory, which is now plotted on our archaeological map? How much effort, energy and money would be required to make such a map with the old ground-based imaging equipment? We remember our faithful PO-2s, who obediently sat down among the thickets of saxaul and dune ridges to give us the opportunity to view new beautiful monuments of ancient Khorezm, which we subsequently studied in detail during excavations. We think with gratitude of our Soviet aviation, which knows how to serve not only the defense of the fatherland, but also the flourishing of science.

Treasures of Toprak-Kala

Preliminary excavations of the Toprak-Kala castle in 1945 provided us with many interesting materials. But the most attractive thing for us was the discovery of a multi-color wall painting. On the floor of one of the rooms, we found numerous fragments of clay plaster with multicolor painting on white ground. And above the surviving section of the vault of this room, we found a surviving corner of the room on the second floor, where the painted plaster was preserved directly on the wall. Before us were still very insignificant, but promising remains of a monument of a new type of artistic culture of ancient Khorezm for us - monumental wall paintings, and this promised wide prospects for various discoveries, because wall painting, being the most interesting monument of art, at the same time sheds light on the most diverse aspects material culture of the people who created it.

We know what role the wonderful frescoes of the Buddhist cave monasteries of the last centuries of the 1st millennium AD played in the development of questions of the history of the culture of the cities of eastern Turkestan.

On the territory of Soviet Central Asia, antique wall painting was almost unknown. Its only monument, and even then relatively very late (around the 5th century AD), were fragments of a painting in one of the rooms of the royal palace in Varakhsha, near Bukhara, discovered and published by V. A. Shishkin in 1938. We were faced with the fascinating task of discovering Khorezmian monumental painting. In the new field season of 1946, Toprak-Kala Castle became the main object of our excavations, which were continued on an even larger scale in 1947.

The grandiose castle-palace overwhelms with its harsh grandeur. Dwarfs in front of him seem to be the huge large-family residential buildings of the city. The central massif of the castle rises 16 meters above sea level, and three towers, each 40x40 meters in area, raise their flat tops 25 meters.

The now excavated northern half of the central massif and all three towers, in total about 100 rooms located on three floors, occupy about 6000 meters out of about 11 thousand meters of the total area of ​​the huge building.

The premises of the central part of the castle were raised above the ground on a powerful fourteen-meter plinth, representing a system of intersecting adobe walls, the space between which was filled with mud brick masonry, free, without mortar, laid in sand separating individual bricks. This sandy-brick laying of the socles of structures is a characteristic feature of the construction industry of ancient Khorezm.

Many finds have been made in the rooms. In addition to the remains of food - the bones of fruit plants (apricots, peaches, grapes), seeds of wheat, barley, millet, melon, numerous animal bones, mainly goats, then sheep, pigs, cattle, camel horses, as well as wild animals - wild sheep, deer and gazelle - numerous fragments and whole vessels of the Late Antique type were found, characterized by a special fineness of workmanship; fragments of paper, wool and silk fabrics, parts of leather shoes, an iron spearhead, three tetrahedral iron arrowheads, gilded belt plates with glass inserts, and several copper coins from the 3rd century AD. At the southeastern corner of the city, during excavations of the city wall, a large alabaster figurine of a naked woman was found - the third example of alabaster sculpture for Khorezm.

Painting on the walls of Toprak-Kala castle

1 - Flower petals

2 - Tiger head

3 - Fragment of a female head

4 - Pheasant

5 - White Lily

Among the fragments of processed wood, in 1947, a small wooden tag was found with an inscription in black ink of four words written in the characters of the ancient Khorezmian alphabet (apparently, an economic document) - the first Khorezmian document of this kind. Later, during excavations in 1948, we discovered a whole archive of ancient Khorezmian texts on wood and paper. These were also economic documents, but for us they had the greatest meaning; this was another confirmation of the high culture of Khorezm in ancient times.

But the most important treasure of Toprak-Kala turned out to be monumental paintings and a monumental clay sculpture found in 1947.

The painting was done with mineral paints on an adhesive on clay plaster, mostly covered with a thin layer of alabaster primer. The basis almost everywhere is a white background, on which other colors are applied, sometimes completely hiding it. The image is always outlined with a clear black line, the space inside which is filled with spots of appropriate tone and strokes of varying density, sometimes thin and careful, sometimes wide and bold, conveying the relief of forms and light reflections.

The murals appeared in most of the rooms, apparently in all residential and front rooms. Of the premises discovered in 1946, room No. 5 on the second floor, overlooking the northern courtyard of the castle, was especially richly decorated. It was a huge hall with a flat ceiling resting on four columns. The hall had, apparently, a ceremonial character, its walls were painted with magnificent ornaments, representing a system of intersecting stripes of black and yellow tones, ornamented with hearts, rosettes, acanthus leaves and forming rhombic fields used for picturesque images of musicians. One of them has survived almost completely: it is an elegant image of a harpist, made in yellowish tones. The fingers of somewhat mannered hands in bracelets lie on the strings of a large triangular harp, reminiscent of the Assyrian one. The roundness of the shoulders and the oval of the face, everything graphic solution image leads us into the world of Kushano-Gandhara artistic traditions.

Two other fragments of images of female faces found in the same room, especially one of them - a part of a face turned to the front, with a bold decision of straight-looking, wide-cut eyes and fused eyebrows - takes us into the world of other artistic associations. Parallels here must be sought in the Syro-Egyptian, partly North Black Sea fine arts of the Roman period.

The second of the fragments - part of the profile of a female head with a proud turn of the neck, bordered by a richly ornamented collar, with a heavy knot of black hair caught in a red bandage - is also closer to the images of the art of the ancient Mediterranean. Thus, two art schools, two traditions, intersect in the paintings of one room, received, however, on the Khorezmian soil a completely peculiar refraction.

The room also had other decorations. Numerous fragments of stucco clay (with an admixture of wool) garlands of leaves and fruits painted in green, saffron and red were found near its western wall, as well as a huge hand of a high relief image of a man leaning with the ends of his fingers on some object of rectangular rounded shape - a gesture well known from the images on the coins of the Kushan kings Vima Kadfiz and Kaiishka. In the niche was a picture - a life-size image of two figures sitting opposite each other in solemn poses - male and female. In the adjoining room, a picturesque composition, made in warm crimson-red colors, is revealed - an image of a woman picking grapes and peaches in an apron. Above it are hanging bunches of grapes and a part of a garden arbor made of wicker twigs.

In a number of rooms, the lower parts of the paintings preserved on the walls were discovered - ornamental panels 0.5–0.75 meters wide. Particularly impressive is a blue panel found in one of the rooms of the western tower of the palace, depicting waves with dark paint on a blue background, in which white and red fish swim. Above this panel was a picturesque composition depicting people, animals; bunches of grapes and leaves on a black and red background.

In the paintings, floral ornaments are combined with pictorial subjects. Fragments of three images of tigers, four images of horses, and a completely preserved image of a bird (pheasant) made in a gray-lilac tone on a red background were found in different rooms.

Many of the murals found by us are characterized by extreme originality, which allows us to speak about the existence of a completely independent Khorezm art center, which should take a special place among the art centers of the late Mediterranean and the Middle East.

In the field of color, this school is characterized by an extraordinary richness of the palette. Almost all possible colors are presented here: various shades of red, crimson, pink, blue, blue, green, orange, yellow, purple, white, black, gray. The combination of colors strikes with boldness and variety: images are given on a scarlet, dark blue, black background, forming striking color combinations. Particularly memorable are the hunting scenes made in grayish and ocher-yellow tones on an intensely scarlet background, elegant white and red lilies scattered over a dark blue background, a person’s face depicted in pinkish tones on a blue background, white and red floral patterns and an image of a human face on a black background. background.

The images are characterized by great freedom and realism, original concise and convincing techniques in the transfer of relief with strokes and color highlights. Particularly good are light green highlights on the yellowish surface of a naked human body in the “red room” of the western tower and confident red strokes on a pinkish background, conveying the bulge of the chin of the female image of the multi-figured composition noted above.

The range of ornamental motifs reflected in the fragments of painting found in various rooms is rich and varied. Here are both floral and geometric plots - garlands, flowers and leaves, rosettes, hearts, crosses with branching and bent ends in the form of ram's horns, circles and spirals, stripes of oval purple beads on a black background, straight to wavy colored lines.

The ornament is very peculiar, as is the painting. In the compositional solution of the murals, he has many points of contact with the "Sarmatian" murals of the Kerch catacombs. But most of all, it is associated with the world of images of folk textile ornament of the modern peoples of Central Asia - Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kara-Kalpaks, Kazakhs. We will find a lot in common here with the pattern of Khiva heels, Uzbek and Tajik suzani, Kara-Kalpak patterned kosh. This contact between wall painting and decorative fabrics is hardly accidental. They perform the same function, and it is quite natural to transfer the design of the fabric, which serves as a wall ornament, to the wall itself, as well as the reverse influence of painting on the fabric ornament. So the roots of modern folk art of the heirs of the ancient civilization of Central Asia - the modern Central Asian peoples - go back to ancient times.

A completely new page in the history of ancient Khorezmian art was the monumental sculpture discovered by excavations in 1947, represented by exceptionally abundant material. Unbaked clay statues were discovered in nine rooms. Total number statues in fragments exceeds 30, of which two are almost complete statues.

Most of the statues were found in life size, some on a smaller scale, a few statues were one and a half to two times the size of a human being. The statues were painted: faces in skin color, clothes in various colors - white, green, pink, blue, red, black, etc. Ornaments of clothes, apparently embroideries, are given in multicolor coloring.

The execution of statues, no less than painting, testifies to the high skill of Khorezm artists, the maturity and independence of Khorezm art, although associated with the Gandhara Indo-Buddhist art school, but creatively transforming its influence and subordinating it to its artistic traditions.

The faces of the statues are conveyed with exceptional realism, are undoubtedly portraits and are not inferior in subtlety of execution. the best samples sculptures of any other center of late Hellenistic art.

Most of the found statues were concentrated in the so-called "hall of the kings" - a vast hall in the northeastern part of the palace. A wide elevation ledge along its walls, divided by transverse walls - lattices of figured bricks - into separate niches, in each of which a group of statues was located. In two of these niches, originally, apparently, huge (approximately twice their natural size) seated male statues, sitting on the above-mentioned elevation, were preserved, around which 3-5 standing male, female and children's statues were grouped. The walls behind the seated statues were painted with the aforementioned white and red lilies on a dark blue background, above a pink and orange monochrome panel. The discovery of two headdresses made it possible to determine the plot of these sculptural groups: the headdresses turned out to be identical with the individual crowns of two Khorezmian kings of the 3rd century AD, known to us from images on coins. Of particular interest is the heavy sculptural crown in the form of a white eagle, known to us from the earliest coins of the 3rd century, minted by one of the first Khwarezmian kings who freed themselves from Kushan dependence, whose name is read on the coins as Vazamar.

The foregoing leaves no doubt that we have before us a kind of portrait gallery of the dynasty of Khorezmian kings, covering the rulers of the 3rd century.

Seated huge figures, apparently, depicted kings, and those around them - family members and, possibly, patron gods, as evidenced by the discovery in one of the niches of the torso of a woman with a pomegranate apple in her hand - a characteristic attribute of the fertility goddess Anahita.

The opening of the "portrait gallery" of the kings convinces us that the Toprak-Kala palace was not the palace of local princes, but the shahs of all Khorezm, and Toprak-Kala was their ancient residence before the transfer, which took place, according to al-Biruni, in 305 AD residences in the city of Kyat. This explains both the gigantic size of the palace, which has no equal among the monuments of ancient Khorezm, and the fact that the palace was abandoned in the 4th century AD, while the city of Toprak-Kala continued to live in the 6th century, which still remains unexplained.

Ancient Khorezm created a high and unique artistic culture. Monumental architecture, striking with the proud majesty of its forms, magnificent plasticity of monumental clay statues, terracotta figurines and reliefs, the fine art of ancient Khorezmian medalists and, finally, a rich range of graphic pictorial images of murals make up a deeply original and integral complex, testifying to independence, strength and maturity of figurative thinking and artistic skill of the creators of the ancient Khorezmian civilization.

The harpist and her companions open the door for us to the most inaccessible world of ancient art for the researcher - the world of music. We know the role that the classical Khorezmian musical school played in the history of the musical culture of the peoples of Central Asia in the late Middle Ages and in modern times. And the graceful image of a harpist with an “Assyrian” instrument in her hands is a new link in the chain of connections of the ancient Khorezmian civilization traced above by us at its origins with the non-Asian world and, at the same time, a precious monument of the prehistory of the high musical culture of later, medieval and modern Khorezm.

In the land of fortified castles

Numerous monuments of Khorezm, studied by us during many years of excavations, as if in a mirror, reflected the history of the distant past of this mysterious and almost forgotten country. New finds each time supplemented the fragmentary information of ancient historians, which accidentally came down to us and previously told us so little, but now suddenly became understandable and reliable when material evidence turned out to be in front of us.

It was as if we saw the time of the birth of feudalism, and the severe struggle of the peoples of Central Asia for their freedom and independence, and the fiercer raids of militant neighbors striving to take possession of a rich and prosperous country.

“So it was before King Afrig, and he was one of this dynasty. And he earned a bad reputation, as Ezdegerd (Ezdegerd I, 399-420) earned it among the Persians.

And he built (Afrig) his castle inside Al-Fnra in 660 after Alexander (Macedonian). And they lead the reckoning or of him (Afriga) and his descendants. And Al-Fir was a fortress near the city of Khorezm with three walls built of clay and mud brick, one inside the other, following each other in height, and surpassed all their castle of kings, just like Gumdan in Yemen, when it was the residence of the Tobbs ... And Al-Fir was visible from a distance of ten miles or more."

This is how al-Biruni describes the circumstances that accompanied the establishment of the third and last pre-Muslim Khorezmian era.

Behind this condensed text, one can feel the breath of great social events that made the adoption of a new era by the Khorezmians by no means an accidental act.

The establishment of a new dynasty, the image of a cruel despot king that entered the people's memory, the creation by him of a grandiose fortified castle, which stood as a formidable symbol of the power of the Afrigids until their fall - all this cannot but be considered as links in one chain.

The portrait of Afriq has been preserved on the Khorezmian coins. Before us is a predatory profile of a hook-nosed man with a pointed liquid beard, with a tense gaze of large bulging eyes. A double line of beads wraps around his neck. A hemispherical tiara, covered with scales of plaques and with a nape, adorned with a crescent moon on the forehead, crowns the donator's head. On the reverse - a traditional horseman with a tamga behind him, traces of a Greek inscription on top and a Khorezmian inscription under the horse's feet, reading "King Afrig".

In the vicinity of Shabbaz, a town that arose in the late Middle Ages on the site of the pre-feudal capital of Khorezm, the ruins of a grandiose late antique fortress, popularly known as Pil-Kala, still stand. This castle belongs to the era of Afriga and rises to this day as the only monument of the Afrigid capital, whose name it still bears.

The time of Africa is the time of a great historical turning point. And now, perhaps, we can reveal the essence of this turning point, hidden behind the mean words of al-Biruni.

Starting from the 4th century, we really observe more and more rapid development of processes that led to a sharp change in the entire economy, social structure, life and political life of Khorezm. And this change is most clearly reflected in the emergence of a completely new type of settlements and dwellings, the main form of which is the r. in full accordance with the story of Biruni, the castle.

The unfortified settlements of the 3rd century, widely spread under the protection of mighty fortresses erected and maintained by the state, are being replaced by a heavily fortified farmer's estate lying isolated among the eagles - a miniature castle. And above these peasant "castles" the formidable fortifications of the castles of the aristocracy proudly rise. The ancient fortresses that close the oasis fall into decay from the side of the desert.

Here is Teshik-Kala - one of the large estates of this era. She depicts for us the life of a major representative of the Khorezmian aristocracy. The spectacular decoration of the outer stacks with massive half-columns connected at the top with promising arches, the rich decoration of the interior, in particular, the friezes made of raw clay that adorned the upper part of the rooms of the residential tower - everything indicates that we have before us the dwelling of a family of representatives of powerful Khorezm landowners, dekhkans. On the contrary, small "castles" testify to the ordinary life of an ordinary peasant family. But this peasant family had its own "castle": a residential tower with loopholes, powerful defensive walls, and the layout of such a peasant "castle" in essence did not fundamentally differ from an aristocratic estate, except for the size and richness of decoration.

Before us, undoubtedly, is not yet the serf peasantry, but such a social stratum of farmers, to whom the aristocracy has not yet opposed as an antagonist class. Each owner of a small castle is also a kind of "dekhkan", and it is no coincidence that at present this word means "peasant", while earlier it meant a representative of the aristocracy, sometimes it was the title of kings.

The entire cultural landscape around these estates is gloomy and harsh. Before us is a country of fortified castles, behind the clay walls of which the inhabitants were always ready to repel the attack of the enemy. Before us is a landscape that speaks of a turbulent era of continuous wars, of people who lived in constant fear of an enemy attack, in constant readiness to defend their lives and property with weapons in their hands.

Feudalism has not yet triumphed, but signs of its advance are felt everywhere. Formidable castles of the aristocracy lock the heads of branches of large canals, commanding the estates of peasants. The very fortification of the latter clearly testifies not only to the constant threat of external attack. The peasant is forced to defend his freedom from a much more serious threat from the owners of large castles. Indeed, as soon as information about the internal life of Khorezm appears on the pages of sources, we find ourselves in the thick of a cruel and bloody civil war, culminating in Arab intervention. Even more sharply than in the countryside, new historical conditions are manifested in the life of the city.

Cities are in decline. Toprak-Kala with a deserted castle-palace survives, at most, until the 6th century.

External trade relations are weakening. We no longer find in the Afrigid monuments a rich assortment of Mediterranean Syro-Egyptian and North Sea glass, tin and stone beads. Simple carnelian and chalcedony spherical beads are imported from Iran or made locally.

The result of the decline of cities by the end of the Afrigid period found a vivid expression in the stories of Arab writers about the conquest of Khorezm at the beginning of the 8th century.

According to al-Tabari, there were only three cities in Khorezm in 712: the capital Kyat (Fil), Khazarasp and, apparently, Urgench. This figure is probably underestimated, but to a large extent it is also confirmed by archaeological materials. The place of "thousands" of cities is occupied by tens of thousands of castles. As far back as the 10th century, on the eve of the final collapse of the Afrngids, at the dawn of a new rise in Khorezm, according to al-Maqdisi, there were 12 thousand castles in the vicinity of the city of Mazdahkan alone (now the settlement of Gyaurkala near Khodjeyli).

The center of public life leaves the dying city for the countryside. But even in the countryside we observe signs of a decline in the productive forces, expressed primarily in the reduction of the irrigation system. More than half of the eastern branch of Gavkhore is decommissioned. Life stops on the takyrs Angka-Kala, Koi-Krylgan-Kala and Dzhanbas-Kala, located on the branches of this canal. The northeastern section of the Berkut-Kalinsky canal, which irrigated the vicinity of Kurgashin-Kala, is being decommissioned.

Even more dramatic is the decline of the irrigation network on the left bank, where the entire system of the grandiose Chermen-Yab canal ceases to exist, on the banks of which, to the west of Zmukhshir, monuments of the Afrigid era are completely absent.

We have no information about the political division of Khorezm in this era. He, apparently, constituted a single possession, occupying a somewhat special place in the overall political picture.

In the power of Kuteiba

The history of the formation of a huge semi-barbarian Arab empire is inseparable from the history of the crisis of the slave system in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Byzantine and Iranian empires, just as the history of the formation of the Ephtalite and Turkic states cannot be understood without studying the crisis of the slave society in China, the Central Asian states and Iran itself.

Distant tribes and primitive urban communities of western Arabia were also drawn into this crisis, acutely affected by the disastrous consequences of the economic decline of Byzantium, in particular the decline of its eastern trade, from which the commercial, usurious and slave-owning nobility of the Arab urban communities derived considerable benefits in the past. An attempt on the part of this nobility to shift the burden of the crisis onto the plebeian masses of the cities and the Bedouin tribes, who quickly found themselves in the networks of usurious bondage, caused a sharp explosion of social struggle, culminating in the creation of a strong military-slave-owning state.

During the 30s of the 7th century, the Meccan-Medinian military-pirate political community subjugated the whole of Arabia and began raids on the territory of the Asian possessions of Byzantium and on Iran. These raids ended with the expulsion of the Byzantine troops from Syria and Palestine, and in 642 the general battle of Nyhavend decided the fate of the Sasanian state. The last "shahinshah of Iran and non-Iran" Ezdegerd III repeated the path that the last Achaemenid Darius III had traveled a thousand years before him, fleeing from Alexander. He, at the head of 1000 horsemen and the same number of palace servants, confectioners, hairdressers, etc., fled to Merv. However, the rulers of the city, like the once eastern satraps of Achaemenid Persia, turned out to be little disposed to sacrifice themselves to save the lord of Iran and his state.

At the news of the approach of the Arabs (651), they called for help from the old enemies of the Sassanids, and Ezdegerd, abandoned by everyone, was forced to wander in the vicinity of the city, where he died at the hands of an accidental killer, seduced by the magnificent clothes of the last Sasakid king.

In the same 661, the Arabs first appeared on the borders of Central Asia - under the walls of Merv, Herat, Balkh, limiting themselves at first to only concluding agreements and imposing significant indemnities. Merv and Balkh become operational bases for further predatory raids into the depths of Central Asia.

The head of the wife of King Vazamar from the portrait gallery of the dynasty of the Khorezmian kings (3rd century). Toprak-Kala Palace

Beleuli (general view of the portal)

External view of "Kaptar Khana" near Narinjan (XII-XIII centuries)

Pylons of the Kum-Baskan-Kala gate

Fortress of Angka-Kala. Ancient era of Khorezmian civilization (III century)

The ruins of the Koi-Krylgan-Kala fortress (4th–3rd centuries BC)

Castle No. 13, Afrigid era

Statue of a priest from Toprak-Kala Castle, found in Toprak-Kala

The oldest Khorezmian coin known to us

Arab sources speak of the twofold "conquest" of Khorezm by the Arab commanders Salma ibn Ziyad and Umayya ibn Abdallah. However, in practice, only the same predatory raids took place here, as in relation to the cities of Maverannahr.

Only from the beginning of the 8th century, a firm conquest of the interior Central Asian regions was associated with the name of the governor of Khorasan, Kuteiba ibn Muslim. The loss of independence of the power of the Khorezmshahs, which had withstood the previous centuries full of political storms, falls on the year 712. The circumstances of the conquest of Khorezm by Kuteiba are extremely significant - for the first time we learn here from direct evidence of written sources about those events in the internal socio-political history of Khorezm, which are hinted to us archaeological sites.

Caravans go to Kyat

The historical and archaeological monuments of Khorezm of the 10th century speak of the rapid economic growth of the country, the growth of cities and trade relations, and the creation of a powerful feudal state.

Arab sources vividly paint us a picture of the exceptional economic activity of Khorezm in the 10th century, and the arena of activity of Khorezm merchants, as in ancient times, is, firstly, the steppes of present-day Turkmenistan and Western Kazakhstan and, secondly, the Volga region - Khazaria and Bulgaria, and further extensive Slavic world Of Eastern Europe.

Isgahri tells us already at the beginning of the 10th century: “Khorezm is a city (madina) fertile, abundant in food and fruits, it lacks only nuts; it produces many items of cotton and wool, which are exported to distant places. Among the properties of its inhabitants are wealth and the desire to show their courage. They are more than all the inhabitants of Khorasan scattered (in foreign places) and travel more than anyone; in Khorasan there is no large city in which there would not be a large number of inhabitants of Khorezm ... In their country there is no gold and silver mines and no precious stones; most of their wealth comes from trade with the Turks and cattle breeding. They get most of the slaves of the Slavs, the Khazars and those neighboring them, as well as the Turkic slaves, and most of the furs of the steppe foxes, sables, beavers and others.

The anonymous Persian author of the geographical work of the end of the 10th century “Khudud al-Alem” (the borders of the world) writes: “Kyat is the main city of Khorezm, the gate to Turkestan Guz, a storage place for the goods of the Turks, Turkestan, Maverannahr and the Khazar region, a place of confluence of merchants ... The city has great wealth. Cushion covers, quilted clothes, paper fabrics, felt, ruhbin (a kind of cheese) are exported from there.”

We find especially interesting information from al-Maqdisi. When describing items exported to the countries of the Caliphate from the regions of Khorasan, the longest list is given to them for Khorezm.

“From Khorezm - sable, earring squirrels, ermines, steppe foxes, martens, foxes, beavers, painted hares, goats, wax, arrows, white bark, poplars, caps, fish glue and fish teeth, beaver stream, ambergris, kimukht (variety leather), honey, hazelnuts, falcons, swords, chain mail, birch, slaves from the Slavs, sheep and cows - all this is from the Bulgars. And it produces grapes, a lot of raisins, cookies, sesame, striped clothes, carpets, blankets, fine brocades, shulham bedspreads, locks, colored clothes, bows that only the strongest people can pull on, special cheese, whey, fish. Ships are being built and finished there.”

This list is doubly interesting. Firstly, it gives us a significant expansion of the range of products of the Khorezmian handicraft industry exported from Khorezm. According to Istakhri and Khudud al-Alem, Khorezm is portrayed as a predominantly agricultural and cattle-breeding country and, at the same time, a center of intermediary trade between the countries of the East, the Turks and the Volga region, in particular, the largest market for the slave trade. The composition of exports includes, along with northern raw materials and local agricultural products, products of the local textile industry. At al-Maqdisi, we see the appearance in the composition of exports of items of the metalworking industry, the shipbuilding industry.

On the other hand, the abundance and variety of items imported at the end of the 10th century "from the Bulgars", i.e., from the countries of Eastern Europe, is striking, indicating that this side of the economic activity of the Khorezmians is developing rapidly.

The growth of the role of trade with Eastern Europe put forward in the first place in Khorezm the city that became the natural center of this trade - Urgench, the extreme northwestern outpost of the Khorezmian civilization, advanced to the beginning of the branching of the routes going through the desert Ustyurt to the west - to the piers of Mangyshlak, to the north -west - to the lower Emba and further to the Volga and to the south, through the Kara-Kum, to Dzhurjan, and thus located on the shortest route from Iraq and Iran to Eastern Europe.

“This is the largest city in Khorezm after the capital: it is a place of trade with the Guzes, and from there caravans go to Jurjan, to the Khazars, to Khorasan,” writes al-Istakhri.

The rise of science, the rise of the country

On the eve of the Mongol invasion, Khorezm was visited by the famous Arab traveler and geographer Yakut, the author of a multi-volume geographical encyclopedia, which knows no equal among the monuments of medieval geographical literature around the world.

“I don’t think,” Yakut writes, “that there are vast lands anywhere in the world wider than the Khorezmian and more populated, despite the fact that the inhabitants are confined to a difficult life and contentment to a few. Most of the villages of Khorezm are cities with markets, livelihoods and shops. As a rarity, there are villages in which there is no market. All this with general security and complete serenity.

“I don’t think,” he says elsewhere, “that there is a city in the world similar to the main city of Khorezm in terms of abundance of wealth and the size of the capital, a large population and proximity to goodness and the fulfillment of religious prescriptions and faith.”

And the testimony of Yakut, who traveled around a significant part of the Muslim world, is quite authoritative.

We saw the irrigation facilities of the era of the great Khorezm shahs. They can be traced especially brightly in the area of ​​the "lands of ancient irrigation" of southwestern Khorezm - in the basin of the huge dead canal Chermen-Yab. This canal, which is a continuation of the modern Ghazavat canal, in the early Middle Ages, in the Afrigid and Mamunid times, reaches only the city of Zamakhshara (the modern settlement of Zmukhshir).

Life is intensively developing on the irrigated lands of the Gavkhore basin. The surroundings of the ruins of the Kavat-Kala fortress are a magnificently preserved monument of this era. This is a whole dead oasis, spectacular ruins of a whole “rustak”, stretching from the ruins of Dzhildyk-Kala to Kavat-Kala and further north for about a third of the distance between Kavat-Kala and Toprak-Kala.

This is a strip of takyrs 2-3 kilometers wide, stretching for 15 kilometers along the dry channel of Gavkhore, completely covered with countless ruins of fortresses, castles and unfortified peasant estates, scattered among perfectly preserved layouts of medieval fields, contoured by strips of canals of the distribution and irrigation network.

We have registered more than 90 peasant estates on the strip of 8 square kilometers directly adjacent to Kavat-Kala. If we compare the rustak of the Kavat-Kala fortress with the Afrigid rustak of Berkut-Kala, where about 100 estates are located on an area of ​​35 square kilometers, we will see that the population density has increased approximately four times.

The rise of the Khorezmshahs' empire, outlined already in the 11th century, embracing the 12th century and reaching its peak by the beginning of the 13th century, is not similar to the history of the formation of the previous, and partly subsequent, feudal eastern empires.

This is not the result of the lightning-fast movement of hordes of cavalry barbarian nomads, like the Arab Caliphate, the Seljuk and Karakhanid states. This is not the result of a military coup that moves the center of a weakened empire to a new place, as was the case with the states of the Samanids and Ghaznavids.

This is the result of a long, slow process of "gathering land" around a certain center of economic and political gravity. The heyday of Khorezm at the beginning of the 13th century became possible thanks to the thousand-year-old culture of the people, who with extraordinary tenacity conquered lands from the desert, built irrigation canals, owned advanced construction equipment for that time, had a well-trained army that defended the interests of their state.

Khorezm appears before us in the X-XII centuries as a natural center of gravity for the nomadic tribes of Central Asia, as an outpost of the Near Asian Muslim civilization in the Guz and Kipchak steppes. The cities of Khorezm conduct extensive trade operations with the steppe.

Khorezmian merchants are connected with nomads by close ties, which ensure the security of trade. The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan writes:

“None of the Muslims can come to their country until they appoint a friend from among them, with whom he stays and they bring him clothes from the country of Islam, and for his wife a coverlet, a little pepper, millet, raisins and nuts. The Turkic custom is the same: if he leaves for al-Dzhurjaniya (Urgench) and asks about his guest, he stays with him until he leaves (back).

Mangyshlak and the lower Syr Darya, connected by close economic ties with Khorezm, are the first to enter the sphere of its political hegemony.

However, this is not the end of the matter. Khorezm of the X-XII centuries stands before us as the most important center of economic relations between the countries of the Caliphate, on the one hand, and the vast expanses of Eastern Europe and Western Siberia, on the other.

So, al-Istakhri said: “They (the Khorezmians) are more than all the inhabitants of Khorasan scattered in foreign places and travel more than anyone.”

It is characteristic that the special desire of the Khorezmians for long-distance trading expeditions is also emphasized by earlier sources. In the history of the Tang Dynasty, we read the following description of the Khorezmians of the era of the Arab conquest:

“Among all the Western barbarians, this is the only people who harness bulls to carts; merchants ride them to distant countries.

According to Ibi-Fadlan, in the 10th century a significant colony of Khorezmians was in Bulgar. In the same 10th century, a large Muslim colony in Itil, the capital of Khazaria, consisted almost entirely of Khorezmians.

But Khorezm rises among the countries of the East not only as an economic and political center, where the interests of many civilized peoples intersect. It also occupies an outstanding place as a center of science and culture of the countries of the ancient East.

We know little about the science of pre-Muslim, ancient and Afrigid Khorezm. But a careful analysis of the monuments of material culture suggests that even then the exact and natural sciences reached a high level of development in Khorezm: precise canons of architectural proportions, careful construction calculations, grandiose irrigation facilities, impossible without scrupulous leveling of the terrain, described by Biruni Khorezm calendar and detailed astronomical terminology , the richness and variety of mineral colors in the paintings of Toprak-Kala, the magnificent antique glass from the same place - all this would have been impossible without advanced geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, topography, chemistry, and mineralogy. Long journeys of Khorezmian merchants, which the Arabs and Chinese unanimously testify to, would have been impossible without the development and accumulation of geographical knowledge.

And when late Afrigid Khorezm enters the system of the Arab caliphate, its scientists immediately occupy an outstanding, perhaps the most prominent place among the creators of the so-called "Arab science" - Arabic in language, which has become a kind of Eastern Latin - but in fact created by scientists from Iran, Transcaucasia, Malaya Asia, Central Asia, later Spain.

Already by the end of the 8th - beginning of the 9th century, the life and work of the recognized founder of "Arab" mathematics and mathematical geography, the Khorezmian ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, dates back. His name still lives in the well-known mathematical term "algorithm" (general solution of any mathematical problem). From one of the words in the title of the mathematical treatise al-Khwarizmi "al-Jabr" the name of algebra originated.

Al-Khwarizmi - not only a mathematician, but also an astronomer, geographer and historian - occupies a major post at the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. It is generally recognized that in his works that synthesis of Indian algebra and Greek geometry, which lies at the origins of modern mathematical science, was realized. But was it only the individual creativity of al-Khwarizmi? The history of the ancient and Afrigid culture of Khorezm, which provided such convincing evidence in the cultural monuments we found, allows us to assert that al-Khwarizmi is strong not only because of his personal mathematical genius, but also because he relied on the centuries-old tradition of Khorezmian mathematics, which grew up on the basis of practical needs. irrigation, travel, construction and trade. Al-Khwarizmi introduced semi-barbarian Arabs to this mature Khorezmian mathematical science, and then, in Latin translations, to the European scientific world.

The history of Khorezmian science reaches its climax in the work of al-Biruni. In his person, the great encyclopedist of the medieval East, astronomer, geographer, mineralogist, ethnographer, historian and poet appears before us. He wrote a number of major treatises on various branches of science, and in all of them he manifests himself not only as an outstanding erudite and first-class researcher, but also as a thinker who paves new paths in science. His recognition of the equality of the geocentric and heliocentric pictures of the world is a major step forward in comparison with the concept of Ptolemy that dominated among the "Arab" scientists. His historical-geological theories on the history of the landscape of the North Indian Lowland and on the history of changes in the course of the Amu Darya are far ahead of the views of the then science, approaching modern scientific concepts. Biruni's early work, Al-Asar al-Bakiyat, has come down to us - a treatise on the chronology of the peoples of the world, testifying to the extraordinary breadth of the erudition of the Khorezmian scientist and being a real storehouse of information on the history of culture, philosophy, astronomy, religion of various peoples. A treatise on mathematical and descriptive geography "Kanon Masuda" and a short guide to determining the location of localities, containing, in addition to geodesics, also historical and geographical information, are still waiting for their publisher. Biruni's work on mineralogy has recently been published. The wonderful "History of India" by Biruni, published by Zahau, testifies to the author's deep knowledge of the language and customs of the country, the richest Sanskrit scientific literature, geography and history of India, is a brilliant example of a historical and ethnographic monograph that has no equal in medieval literature. Birunp’s “History of Khorezm” has not come down to us, it has been lost or has not yet been found, but, judging by the passages from it by Beyhaki and the historical materials in Biruni’s own monograph on chronology, it was a work of paramount importance.

Apparently, a special role belongs to Biruni, like al-Khorezmi, in developing the geography and ethnography of Eastern Europe, in familiarizing the countries of the Muslim East with the Slavs and other Eastern European peoples. There is every reason to believe that it was thanks to Biruni that the Varangians first became known to the Arabs - the Normans and the peoples of the "country of darkness" - the population of the European and Asian Arctic.

The terrible catastrophe of the Mongol invasion cut off the ascending line of the developed feudal Central Asia under the hegemony of the Shahs of Khorezm. This catastrophe, which swept over other countries, simultaneously with Central Asia, experiencing a period of economic, political and cultural upsurge - Vladimir-Suzdal Rus, over the Bulgarians, over flowering Georgia - again makes these countries related, linking them with a common destiny, a single heroic mission of saving European civilization from Mongol barbarism.

The fact that the rise of the Khorezmian empire was not accidental, that it corresponded to the progressive tendencies of the historical development of the peoples of Central Asia, is evidenced by the further course of history. Two powerful feudal associations rising in the 14th century, headed by dynasties of Mongolian origin - the Golden Horde and the empire of Timur - to a certain extent develop and continue both in the political and cultural spheres the tendencies of the empire of Khorezm shahs.

Throwing a glance back, we see that the role of Khorezm as the main core of the first feudal monarchy of Central Asia was not accidental. Behind the back of the “great Khorezmshahs” was the economic power: the power of Khorezm as a powerful agrarian and craft center, strong with its centuries-old economic ties with the Turkic steppe and Eastern European countries. Behind the Khorezmshahs was a thousand-year history of one of the outstanding centers of ancient civilization, which repeatedly became the core of vast slave-owning empires.

Secret of Uzboy

The study of the monuments of ancient Khorezm helped us to reveal another mystery of great interest to science - this is the mystery of the ancient Caspian channel of the Amu Darya - Uzboy. The problem of the origin and age of the Uzboy, whose ancient channel crosses the western part of the Kara-Kum desert, has long been of concern to researchers. Historians and geographers, geologists and irrigators, scientists and amateurs have devoted many pages to this problem. And yet, until recently, the mystery of Uzboy remained a mystery.

We have received a variety of information about this disappeared channel. The Persian geographer of the XIV century, Hamdallah Qazvini, when describing the Caspian Sea, says that “... Jeyhun (Amu-Darya), which previously flowed into the Eastern Sea, located opposite the country of Yazhudzh and Majudzh, about the time the Mongols appeared, changed its course, I went to this (Caspian) sea ".

In a very confused form, we find the same evidence in the 15th-century writer Khafizi Abru, where it is combined with incredible reports about the disappearance of the Aral Sea by 1417 and the confluence of the Syr Darya into the Amu Darya at the same time. Finally, in the 17th century, the famous Khorezm Khan-historian Abulgazi spoke about the same. Narrating the events of the beginning of the 16th century, he says that at that time the Amu Darya flowed past Urgench to the southwest to the eastern edge of the Balkhan Mountains, from there it turned west and flowed into the Caspian.

“On both banks of the Amu Darya from Ogurcha (a tract near the Krasnovodskaya Bay), - says Abulgazi, - there were arable lands, vineyards and groves ... There were no limits to the population and the flourishing state” ...

Abulgazi reports elsewhere that 30 years before his birth, i.e. in 1573, the river turned into its current course and the flow of water into the Caspian stopped. The Khiva chronicle of Munis (XIX century) refers this event to 1578.

An analysis of these testimonies, as well as earlier materials, led the largest Russian historian and orientalist V.V. Bartold to the firm conclusion that while the data on the ancient flow of the Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea, preserved by ancient authors and Makdisi, belong to mythical times and long before the 10th century, the river flowed, as it does now, into the Aral - between the 13th and 14th centuries it turns into the Caspian, filling the ancient Uzboy riverbed meandering along the eastern slope of the Ustyurt and the southern slopes of the Balkhan Mountains, stretching from the Sarykamysh depression to the Krayonovodskaya bay.

The legend about the recent flow of the Amu Darya into the Caspian, brought by the Turkmen ambassadors to Russia, captivated Peter the Great and was one of the motives for sending him the Bekovich-Cherkassky expedition to the eastern shores of the Caspian and Khiva. The expedition, among other tasks, was entrusted with finding out the possibility of establishing a continuous route to India.

If we talk about the current state of the issue, then two points of view can be clearly expressed: one of them belongs to historians and is based on the above considerations of Barthold; the other, shared by geographers and geologists, was reflected in the recently published monograph by A. S. Kes and in the consolidated works on paleogeography of the USSR written by I. P. Gerasimov and K. K. Markov.

The authors of these works, representing the last word of modern Soviet geographical science, come to the conclusion that there is no reason to attribute the existence of the Uzboy as a river to historical time. Not to mention the fact that the Uzboy, by its size, could never be the main channel of the Amu Darya, A.S. Kes writes that “... at present, the question of the time of the cessation of the flow along the Uzboy has not yet been resolved: did it still exist in historical time or not. The study of the Uzboy plains is undoubtedly of interest. It would be very important to establish the former purpose of these monuments and the time of their construction. It is possible that this information would give many interesting and completely unexpected results for the solution of the question of interest to us.

It was clear that the decisive word in the dispute between historians and geologists undoubtedly belongs to archaeologists.

At the beginning of October 1947, our expedition tried to contribute its share to the solution of the Uzboy problem.

In our explorations, we did not take it upon ourselves to cover the problem completely; we decided at first to leave aside the monuments of primitive culture and focus on the problem of the history of the Uzboy valley in the historical period, from which the above-ground structures remained. This limitation made it possible for us to rely entirely on aviation in our work, on a combination of visual aerial reconnaissance with photography of monuments and landings in areas of the most interesting of them.

The base of our work in the Uzboy-Sarykamysh region, we chose the ruins of the old Vazir already familiar to us - now the ruins of Dev-Kesken. This gave us the opportunity to use our free time from flights for a detailed archaeological and architectural description of these ruins and the nearby large medieval city of Shemakha-Kala.

October 3–4 were devoted to flights over the Yerburun tract adjoining Vazir from the west and even more to the west into the depths of Ustyurt, to the Assake-Kaudan depression. Here we discovered the ruins of a small stone fortress - a contemporary of the late medieval Vazir. We returned to the base through the northern outskirts of the Sarykamysh basin.

On October 5, we finally took off on our decisive flight south, along the Uzboy, to the Ak-Yaylinskaya bow. We devoted the entire previous evening to the careful development of the route. The weather is somewhat worrying: the sun has set in crimson clouds that have unfolded like a fan. At dawn, the southern horizon is hazy, foreshadowing a strong wind. It's quiet on the plateau. At 09:38, the planes take off from the ground. At 9:45 we cross the Daryalyk - wide meanders of the old channel, a gray bottom overgrown with saxaul, gray banks covered with small shrubs. Like yesterday, there are traces of the layouts of late medieval fields and canals everywhere.

9 hours 55 minutes. Ahead of the Meander, the Daudana oxbow is a very flat, weakly expressed channel, approaching the course from the east and deviating to the southwest. Along the banks of Daudan, traces of irrigation are imperceptible.

10 hours 03 minutes. The channel now crosses the course, then deviates to the left. On the right, between the Daudan and Daryalyk rivers, one can see the layouts of fields and orchards.

10 hours 09 minutes. Ahead on the left - the outlines of the Tarym-Gaya hill. Another 5 minutes - I landscape below is changing. Instead of a gray clay plain overgrown with sparse shrubs, there are smooth white takyrs with small sand dunes. There are no traces of culture.

The weather is clearly not favorable. Already about 20 minutes, as to the right of the course, everything is covered with a thick haze, the Buten-Tau hill is almost invisible. Now a thick yellowish-gray haze is rapidly advancing ahead, covering the sky and the earth. The wind is getting stronger every minute, the planes are thrown up and down.

A few minutes - and we break through the front of the sandstorm and plunge into the restless darkness. The pilot plane is barely visible. Earth and sky are lost. Aircraft shakes mercilessly. We are trying to break through to the south for a few more minutes - maybe the storm will not last long. But it soon becomes clear that it is useless. Have to return.

10 hours 20 minutes. Samum is coming with us. West, east, south - everything is covered with whirlwinds of sand and dust rushing to the northeast. The sun is not visible. And ahead, in the north, everything is also covered in sandy haze: there are no landmarks, we go exclusively by compass. The raging wind blows you off course. For almost an hour we fly in this chaos of wind and dust, not seeing anything around. Finally, very close ahead, out of the mist, the white ragged cliffs of the southern Chink - the Dev-Kesken Cape of Ustyurt, loomed. The wind carried us far to the right. We turn to the west, along the Chink, and at 11:25 we land at our airfield. The wind was so strong that the camp did not hear our approach.

October 6, at 9:30 the weather is favorable. We go over the caravan road towards the first ruins of the Uzboy zone, marked on the maps - Yarty Gumbez. Beneath us are heavy ridge sands with weak vegetation. A thin thread of the road winds along the slopes, In one of the hollows among the sands, ruins open. This is a mausoleum with a collapsed dome and a dilapidated portal arch. Building; fired bricks. The building can be tentatively dated to the late Middle Ages. We make a circle. Landing is not possible. At 9:50 we head to the wells of Orta-Kuyu and Uzboy. We go over more and more powerful manes of ridge and cellular sands. We pass over one, then over another caravan. We are going down. Turkmens greet planes, waving their black hats. We wave back. Below Orta-Kuyu, black takyrs with rowan wells, several resting caravans, dozens of camels and people. Another exchange of greetings. We go over the sands further. Mount Kugunek is ahead.

10 hours 15 minutes, Uzboy. Here, at Kugunek, the channel is flat with well-defined meanders. There are no traces of irrigation anywhere. We go above the riverbed - at the bottom there are traces of irrigation, but at the bottom of the riverbed you can see a clear pattern of the breakdown of fields, outlined by dark lines of vegetation.

At 10:27 we pass over the Bala-Ishem wells. There are also traces of fields at the bottom of the channel. All around, on both sides of the channel, a dead plain; flat rocky black-gray surface of the plateau on the right, to the west; dark yellowish-brown sands with blackish-gray spots of takyrs on the left, to the east. Outside the channel there is not the slightest trace of irrigation and ancient settlements. The further the channel is, the more clearly expressed. The farther, the more often swamps and lakes gleam at the bottom of Uzboy, either clean, reflecting the cliffs of the coast and our planes, or covered with a white crust of salts.

Ahead, on the left, eastern bank, is a round spot of the famous ruins of Talai-Khan-Ata. We make a circle and sit down on the white surface of the takyr. Before us is a round stone fortification 60 meters in diameter with baked brick buildings grouped around the central courtyard. Ceramic data, as well as architectural data, leave no doubt that we have before us one of the links in a single chain of fortified forts - caravanserais of the XII-XIII centuries, erected by the Khorezmshahs on one of the main trade and strategic routes connecting Urgench with western Khorasan. No hint of habitation in the area, not the slightest trace of irrigation.

Further reconnaissance showed us the famous "Ak-Yailinsky water pipeline". Above the cliff on the left bank of the Uzboy is a mound of a large building that has been bunded. A narrow reddish strip about a kilometer long stretches from it to the northeast - the remains of a water trough that has been repeatedly described. On the northern bank of the Uzboy we see a swollen hillock of an adobe building. To the south, further along the Uzboy, there are two smaller mounds. Along the coast for 150 meters, on takyrs, there are a few fragments of early medieval household ceramics. But the most interesting thing is the “water supply”. This is a narrow chute made of the same burnt brick, well preserved in places. At the very eastern end, it ends with a kind of bell - a water intake, near which there is a small round hillock - the remains of a watchtower.

We quickly make sure that the chute of the water supply goes with a significant slope to the west, towards Uzboy. This is even more emphasized by the fact that parallel to the aqueduct, sometimes crossing it, towards the Uzboy, a winding strip of a deep ravine, the "tributary" of the Uzboy, formed after the aqueduct ceased to operate, stretches towards the Uzboy.

Water, no longer regulated by man, made its own way in the same direction. The picture becomes clear enough. The ruins of a structure on the banks of the Uzboy are nothing more than a kind of "sardoba" - a water cistern fed by rain and snow water collected on takyrs, from where they were discharged through a canal into a cistern. The nature and location of the finds around the cistern allow us to conclude that in the early Middle Ages there was a stopping place for caravans. All taken together serves as proof that there was no water in Uzboi during the operation of the Ak-Yayli water pipeline.

We go back along the Uzboy; we again check the observations made earlier and again we are convinced of the absence of any signs of irrigation and settlements on the banks of the Uzboy. We pass the area of ​​the Charyshly wells. The traces of the channel finally blur. We pass over the strip of coastal ramparts of the ancient Sarykamysh lake. We are flying over the lifeless blackish-gray plain of the Sarykamysh depression. On the right traverse, behind a huge expanse of black takyrs, the top of Koi-Kyrlan sparkles brightly illuminated by the sun.

Below, the colors and character of the terrain change, remaining, however, just as flat and lifeless. We walk over white and gray rough takyrs, sometimes covered with sparse bushes, sometimes completely naked. No traces of human activity. Somewhat later, Sarykamysh was below us. In the north, a blue mirror of water glistens, directly below the white salt surface of the bottom of a dried-up lake, cracked with huge multi-material polyhedrons - some kind of fantastic monstrous takyr.

At the end of the journey, we fly up to the northern coastal ramparts of the ancient lake. Before us is the Buten-Tau hill, already familiar to us from the flight on October 4th. And immediately the character of the area changes. At the foot of the mountains, the farther, the denser, large and small ditches, ruins of estates, buildings, fences go one after another. We are again over the "lands of ancient irrigation" of the Daryalyk valley, the region of the late medieval cities of Vazir and Adak.

We sum up our research and come to the conclusion that in the dispute between geologists and historians, the truth is on the side of geologists. Bartold is wrong. In the late Middle Ages, water did not flow in Uzboi. The ruins on Uzboi are by no means traces of settlements that once were here, as Obruchev thought. These are traces of the early medieval caravan road going from Urgench to western Khorasan almost along the same route, along which the caravan trail from Khorezm to Kzyl-Arvat still runs today.

There was no agriculture in Uzboy even in antiquity. The water stopped its flow, apparently, shortly before the beginning of agriculture in Khorezm, from which the vague legends told by Herodotus and Arab authors, especially Makdisi, hint.

Herodotus has a legend about the Akes River (Oka - Amu-Darya), which irrigated a valley that belonged to the Khorezmians and was blocked by a certain king in mountain passes with dams, which led to the formation of a huge lake (obviously the Aral Sea) and dehydration of a number of areas in which one should see the zone of Uzboy .

Makdisi has a story about an ancient Khorezmian king who turned the course of the Amu Darya, which led to the desolation of the ancient settlements on Uzboi.

A. S. Kes writes in his monograph about Uzboy:

“Such a change in the flow (towards Sarykamysh - Uzboy) would lead to the fact that the river would flow along the lower reaches of the delta, leaving the entire Khiva oasis with its large population engaged in irrigated agriculture, without water and, therefore, without sources of livelihood. In view of this, man seeks by artificial measures to preserve this unstable balance of nature and thus, perhaps, does not allow the river Uzboya to reappear.

These "artificial measures" consist primarily in the very existence of the artificial irrigation system, which from the moment of its inception has become an essential regulator in the history of this capricious river, as if fixed in place by human labor.

It was not by chance that the creation of an irrigation network entered the people's memory as the reason for the drying up of Uzboy. There is every evidence to believe that it was the huge consumption of water for irrigation that led to the cessation of the supply of Sarykamysh and its corresponding drying up.

Where does the legend about the “turn of the Amu-Darya” in the post-Mongolian period, told by Abulgazi with such confidence, come from?

The answer is clear. The "pivot" of the Amu Darya did indeed take place, but it was not a "pivot to the Caspian Sea". It was only a turn of one of the channels of the Amu Darya - the Daryalyk to the Sarykamysh lake. Abulgazi's story refers not to Uzboy, but to Daryalyk and Sarykamysh. The banks of Daryalyk up to the coast of the ancient Sarykamysh present a complete contrast with the lifeless desert of the Uzboy coasts, showing everywhere traces of intensive agriculture of the late Middle Ages.

In the legends summarized by Abulgazi, memories of the actual population of the Daryalyk valley and the banks of the Sarykamysh, associated with the formation in the 13th century of a part of the waters of the Amu Darya in Sarykamysh, were confused - memories of this real "turn of the river to the west" - with vague folk legends ascending to prehistoric times, and my own impressions of Uzboy.

Indeed, the flight over Uzboy better than anything else can explain the origin of the Uzbek legend. In appearance, this is really a real river, as if it had stopped flowing just yesterday. Water stands in the channel of not only the lower, but also the middle Uzboy, sometimes for tens of kilometers, creating a complete illusion of a real river. But this is not a river, but only a system of lakes fed by rain and snow water from Ustyurt.

Apparently, Abulgazi was not so wrong in his story about the settlement of Uzboy in the 14th and 16th centuries. Let me remind you of his words: “On both banks of the Amu Darya up to Gurcha there were arable lands, vineyards and groves. In the spring, the inhabitants went to lofty places; when flies and horseflies appeared, people who had herds went to distant wells, located at a distance of almost two day's march from the river. When the gadfly stopped, they came again to the banks of the river.

We are talking about the nomadic Turkmen population, whose monuments are traces of arable land at the bottom of the Uzboy. Nomad camps of the Turkmens were arranged near the Uzbek wells and lakes. And there really were vineyards and groves, but they did not end at Cucumber, but at Sarykamysh.

By bringing together the pages of history, legends and tales preserved in the memory of the people, and the data of our research, we can imagine the main features of the history of Uzboy. The Mongol invasion, having destroyed the irrigation economy of Khorezm, really led to the violation of the regime of the lower Amu Darya that had been established for two millennia. Part of the excess water not used for irrigation broke through to the west, along the old channel of the Daryalyk, into Lake Sarykamysh.

Here, on the extreme western outskirts of Khorezm, at the end of XIII - early XIV century, a new center of agricultural and urban culture arose. Its rise was associated with the role that this part of Khorezm had to play in the economic, political and cultural history of the Golden Horde state.

The barbarians - the rulers of this state - were interested in using the cultural traditions of Khorezm in their own interests. It was necessary to build new cities - the capitals of the Horde khans on the Volga. It was necessary to organize the production of consumer goods and luxury items for the countless Horde nobility who had profited from predatory campaigns. Finally, bread, fruits and other agricultural products were needed.

A. Yu. Yakubovsky convincingly showed that the so-called "Golden Horde culture" is in fact nothing more than the Khorezmian culture imported to the Volga. All the legends about the allegedly high cultural level of the Golden Horde Tatars have no basis. The entire outward brilliance of the Golden Horde monuments is stolen, just as the very existence of this reactionary, predatory, semi-slave-owning, barbarian power was based on military and fiscal robbery.

Urgench, needed by the Golden Horde khans as the main source of this stolen splendor, gets the opportunity to rise again from the ashes and become a craft and trade center.

Ibn-Batuta, who visited Khorezm around 1340 and left us evidence of a sharp decline in population in southern Khorezm, at the same time admires the splendor of Urgench and speaks of it as the largest and most luxurious "of the Turkic cities." Archaeological monuments also testify to this. Most of the magnificent monuments of the Muslim church architecture of Urgench, for example, the mausoleum of Tyurabek-khanym, amazing in its elegance, the giant “big minaret” (62 meters high), the mausoleum of Najmeddin Kubra, date back to the time of Ibn Baguta’s travel. The masters and artists of Urgench - the residence of the Horde prince Kugluk-Timur - develop the traditions of the artistic culture of Khorezm from the time of the Khorezmshahs. However, at the end of the 14th century, this short-term rise in Urgench was put to an end by the devastating invasion of Timur.

The history of the western, Daryalyk Khorezm of the 15th-16th centuries is a significant but brief historical episode. We know that in the 16th and early 17th centuries this isolated region that arose in the process of the feudal disintegration of Khorezm, which became an area of ​​especially intensive mixing of Turkic (Turkmen and Uzbek) and Turkicized Khorezm elements, played a rather large political role. At the beginning of the 16th century, Vazir was the initiator and center of a popular uprising against the Persians who seized power in Khorezm. In Vazir, a new Uzbek dynasty of descendants of Berke Sultan initially strengthened. The dominance of the Uzbeks over Khorezm spreads, and after that Vazir repeatedly acts as a competitor to Urgench, more than once becoming the residence of the khan and the capital of the country.

However, the only author who left us a description of the city of Vaznra, Anthony Jenkinson, who was here in 1558, correctly predicted quick death the city and the region surrounding it: “The water that this whole country uses is taken from the ditches drawn from the Oxus River, to the great exhaustion of this river: that is why it no longer flows into the Caspian Sea, as in past times. In a not too distant future, this whole country will surely be ruined and become a desert due to lack of water, when the waters of the Oxus are lacking.

Gradual revival of the destroyed Mongol invasion and the pogroms of Timur, the irrigation network of southern and middle Khorezm predetermined the reduction in the amount of water supplying the Daryalyk. At first, it stopped reaching Sarykamysh, which caused the earlier death of Adak, then all areas supplied by Daryalyk began to experience a sharp lack of water - not only Vazir, but also Urgench. A complete reconstruction of the irrigation network was required, the construction of huge highways based directly on the main channel of the Amu Darya, but in the historical setting of the era this was unthinkable. In the 16th century, the most pronounced feudal fragmentation Khorezm, divided into specific possessions of the Uzbek princes, continuously passing from hand to hand with endless feudal squabbling.

Vazir ekes out a miserable existence in the 17th century, continuing to remain, like Urgench, which is in deep decline, a base for discontented feudal elements - pretenders to the khan's throne. At the same time, the political center of the country passes into the largest city of southern Khorezm - Khiva. Finally, the most prominent of the Uzbek rulers of Khorezm, Khan-historian Abulgazi, pursuing a resolute policy of centralization and neutralization of the opposition feudal lords of the outskirts, brings the remnants of the population of Vazir and Urgench to southern Khorezm, where these settlers create a new Urgench - now the capital of the Khorezm region of the Uzbek SSR, the largest city of Khorezm oasis.

Thus, in the second half of the 17th century, the process of desolation of the Vazir region was completed - the formation of the latest in time "lands of ancient irrigation" of Khorezm.

Our journey is over

The work of our expedition, as well as the work of other teams of Soviet archaeologists, showed the complete inconsistency of the ideas of bourgeois historians about the hopeless stagnation of the society of the ancient East. Our works have shown how groundless are the claims that only Western Europe is characterized by the ancient stage of historical development, while the East is doomed for thousands of years to revolve in the vicious circle of some kind of prehistoric feudalism. The historian of Khorezm is now revealed to us as the story of the transition from the primitive communal system to the ancient slave-owning system, ending around the 8th-7th centuries BC - approximately at the same time when the ancient states of Greece were formed - with the creation of a powerful Khorezmian state, waging a stubborn struggle against Achaemenid Persia , which retained its independence in the turbulent years of the Macedonian conquest and exerted a powerful cultural influence on the tribes of Eastern Europe - our distant ancestors.

Our expedition with complete certainty resolved for many decades the question of the reasons for the desolation of vast, once irrigated and populated territories in various countries of the Near East and Central Asia, which has occupied scientists for many decades. Based on the material of Khorezm, confirmed by the results of expeditions to other regions of Central Asia, we were able to prove that it was not the natural-historical reasons (as many people thought) that matter here. It is not the "drying of Central Asia" and the change in the course of the river, not the onset of sands and saline soils that explain this phenomenon. Its causes are rooted in the processes of social history. The transition from antique to feudal strictly and accompanying it barbarian conquests with subsequent feudal strife and the invasion of nomads - this is the brilliantly indicated by Marx and now documented solution to this problem. And what is destroyed by man, he can also be recreated. And a vivid evidence of this is the history of Khorezm of our days.

The Great October Socialist Revolution brought the peoples of Khorezm out of the age-old feudal stagnation and colonial slavery caused by the catastrophes of the 13th-14th centuries. The new, socialist Khorezm, the true heir to the great labor and cultural achievements of its ancestors, is again entering a broad historical field. Cotton growers, fighters of people's construction projects went to an unprecedented battle with the desert.

The water glitters and the banks of the canal, created by the method of folk construction during the Patriotic War, stretching along the "dead" oasis of Berkut-Kala a few years ago, whose formidable castles, abandoned in the 8th century, stood untouched for more than 1000 years, are green. Now fields and buildings of collective farms are widely spread near the majestic walls of the dead strongholds.

The peoples of the Khorezm oasis - Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kara-Kalpaks, Kazakhs - entered a period of new, unprecedented prosperity, leaving far behind the highest achievements of the ancient and medieval civilization of Khorezm.

Khorezm became the territory of one of the great Stalinist construction projects of communism. The Main Turkmen Canal will pass through the "lands of ancient irrigation", designed to defeat the terrible desert of "black sands". Legends and legends about fertile fields, orchards and vineyards on Uzboy, reflecting the centuries-old dreams of the peoples of Khorezm, primarily the Turkmen people, will come to life in a few years.

Our journey is over. We must look back at the path we have traveled. And the first thing that cannot be overlooked is the incompleteness of our information. The Chronicle of the Dead Cities of ancient and medieval Khorezm is still full of gaps, full of undeciphered pages. But, even if imperfect, it still exists, and we read it.

Things once again said their word where the writing is silent.

Itina M.A., Pershits A.I.

Creative life of S.P. Tolstov was relatively short, however, numerous works belonging to his pen, first of all, draw attention to themselves with a huge range of his scientific interests. S.P. Tolstov called himself an ethnographer, orientalist and archaeologist.

It seems that the point here is not what place each of these disciplines occupied in the circle of his scientific interests. The main thing is that all of them in his multifaceted scientific activity were combined, mutually complementing each other. For S.P. Tolstov, this was completely natural, for he belonged to a pleiad of scientists for whom the only possible approach was a very broad approach, far from the one that we now have, often highly specialized, in the formulation and study of historical problems. This approach, based on great scientific erudition, accumulated in the process of continuous scientific research experience, finally, talent, allowed at least three very important qualities of S.P. Tolstov - a scientist.

First, this is what is commonly called scientific intuition. Having at times a rather limited number of facts, S.P. Tolstov built scientific concepts, many of which were confirmed by subsequent studies, and if not, they awakened scientific thought and contributed to the search for truth.

Secondly, and more importantly, S.P. Tolstov looked far ahead, his scientific research was directed to the future, the problems he posed and studied were not limited to the tasks of today, they were aimed at the distant future.

And finally, S.P. Tolstov was a scientist and a citizen who sensitively grasped, and sometimes even foresaw, the possibilities that opened up for historical science when it was used for the needs of the present.

S.P. Tolstov (1907 - 1976) was born in St. Petersburg in a military family. He received his secondary education in Moscow. In 1930 he graduated from Moscow State University, where he studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and the Faculty of History and Ethnology. It was then that the activities of S.P. Tolstov - an ethnographer, ethnologist, follower of the Anuchin school, an adherent of complex research methods.

In 1934 S.P. Tolstov graduated from the graduate school of the GAIMK with a degree in history and archeology of Central Asia. In 1929-1936. he is an employee of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, scientific secretary, and then head of the Moscow branch of the IIMK of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At the same time, S.P. Tolstov began his teaching career, for many years he was a professor at Moscow State University, head of the department of ethnography (1939-1952), dean of the Faculty of History (1943-1945).

Immediately after the start of the Great Patriotic War, S.P. Tolstov joined the ranks of the people's militia, participated in the battles near Yelnya and Mozhaisk, and was wounded. After demobilization, he again worked at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and in 1942 was appointed director of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In this post, S.P. Tolstov worked for 25 years, combining this work with his activities as a scientific secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1949-1954).

In 1944, S.P. Tolstov joined the ranks of the CPSU. In 1953 he was elected Corresponding Member. Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

The scientific activity of S.P. Tolstov was highly appreciated in our country and abroad. He was awarded the State Prize, was awarded the title of Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the Uzbek SSR, Honored Worker of Science of the Tajik SSR and the Karakalpak ASSR. In 1956 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR. The recognition of S.P. Tolstov’s scientific merits was his election as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, an honorary member of the Italian Institute of Secondary and Far East, Asian and Anthropological Society of Paris, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Archaeological Department of India, Corresponding Member of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

S.P. Tolstov began his scientific activity as an ethnographer. While still a student, he worked as part of a complex anthropological expedition of Moscow State University in the Vetluzhsky region, the Upper Volga region, and the Volga-Oka Mesopotamia. He conducted research as part of an ethnographic detachment that studied Russians, Maris, various ethnographic groups of Mordovians, Tver Karelians, and Kasimov Tatars. As a result, he published several articles on the peoples of the central industrial region, including the article “On the history of the Teryukhansk folk culture” (co-authored with M.T. Markelov), in which, based on field studies of the material and spiritual culture of this ethnic group, the Mordovians a broad picture of ethnic processes is given, linking it with the Finno-Ugric, Volga-Bulgarian cultural components and with the later distinct influence of Russian culture on it.

The article “On the problem of acculturation” belongs to the same circle of works, where, in a polemic with a prominent ethnographer of that time, D.K. Zelenin, the problem of historical and cultural ties between Russians and Finno-Ugric peoples is considered. Both of these articles draw attention to themselves with an integrated approach to the study of ethnographic materials and in this respect clearly reflect the creative credo of S.P. Tolstov, which he followed throughout his life. Already in his earliest works, Sergei Pavlovich Tolstov acted not only as an actual ethnographer (ethnologist), but also as a historian of primitive society.

This was explained, along with the exceptional breadth of his scientific interests, by the special position that primitive history occupied from the very beginning in the system of the new domestic historical knowledge. It was believed that primitive historical research is by no means only an area of ​​abstract science. The opinion was undividedly dominant that since the time of L.G. Morgan’s “Ancient Society” and his ideas reflected in F. Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, we are talking here about the most fundamental problems of understanding the world-historical process. Initially private property, class inequality and coercive power separated from the people? Are they immanent in human society and therefore eternal? Read in 1919 by V.I. Lenin's lecture "On the State" drew the attention of the general public to the problems of primitive collectivism, the relatively late emergence of class society and its inevitable doom. In addition, in the West, the sharp criticism of the views of L.G. Morgan (and thus Engels) due to the groundlessness of some of his theoretical propositions and the obsolescence of others. This was perceived as militant anti-historicism and anti-Marxism, undermining the very foundations of scientific communism, and this had to be fought in every possible way. Under these conditions, primitive (“primitive communist”) topics were perceived as topical, and the science of primitive history as perhaps the most important area of ​​history.

Lectures on these topics were read at factories and factories, in railway depots and sewing workshops. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, with the beginning of “depeasantization”, one more practical side of primitive history was added to this. It was necessary to understand the pre-class, incl. communal-tribal, relations and survivals among many peoples of the East of our country, in order, as it was believed, to help reorganize their economy and life. Thus primitive history was grossly politicized. Those who did not want to reckon with this had to receive a “ban on the profession” (like Professor A.N. Maksimov), or disappear altogether (like Professor P.F. Preobrazhensky). Those who thoughtlessly believed in all the inconsistencies of outdated views, for the most part, prospered. But there was one more way on which it was possible, balancing on the edge of the abyss, to do what you love. Those who walked along it, scrolled through the “prayer mill” the prescribed number of times, giving the due to both Morgan and Engels, and to everyone who was due, and then tried to sprout new sprouts in the thickness of the obsolete. Among the latter belonged to one of the most talented and enthusiastic historians of his time, Sergei Pavlovich Tolstov. And evaluating what he did in the science of primitive history, we will, as it should be in historiography, proceed not only from today's achievements in science, but also from the state of science in those years when he worked. S.P. Tolstov is remarkable, first of all, by the fact that as the science of the ancient past of mankind developed, he largely changed the approach to the main and secondary issues in his problems. If at first the task was seen as defending the scheme coming from Morgan in all its details (including almost the historical reconstruction of the consanguineous and punalual family), then later the focus began to shift more and more to the development of the conceptual core of Morgan's doctrine of primitive society - the idea of ​​primitive society. collectivism. At the same time, without exception, all the primitive-historical works of S.P. Tolstov's works contain light and bright thoughts, and many of them retain their significance, having received reinforcement in newly discovered facts or continuing to be discussed by modern researchers. S.P. Tolstov entered the historiography of primitive history with a large article “Problems of prenatal society”. It was published in 1930, shortly before P.P. Efimenko and P.I. Until the early 1930s, the appearance of the tribal system was usually attributed to the Neolithic, and in the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic, not tribal, but “prenatal”, “totemic”, etc., were reconstructed. communities. Such a reconstruction was also undertaken by S.P. Tolstov, and subsequently he abandoned it 2 . The great value of his article lies elsewhere: it was the first to express and, as far as the factual material of that time allowed it, argued the idea that ancient mankind did not know a purely collective stage of development and that from the very beginning of anthroposociogenesis, hunting was one of the important factors of the latter. This idea was directed against the view, widespread in physical anthropology of those years, of the herbivorous way of life of prehumans and ancient people and even more - against the initial purely collective stage of the economy, constructed by the cultural-historical school of W. Schmidt, which opened up scope for the theory of primitive individualistic Robinsonade. To this “vegetarian” concept, S.P. Tolstov opposed the concept of hunting as the leading form of labor activity, which alone and only alone could stimulate the joint efforts of the team. Data on sporadic hunting already in the herds of some higher primates, and especially the numerous finds of the prehuman hunter Homo habilis, the direct ancestor of the most ancient people, which began in the 1950s, brilliantly confirmed the idea of ​​S.P. Tolstov. In the mid-1930s, S.P. Tolstov again returned to the historical reconstruction of the initial stage of primitiveness, but this time he focused on the problems of the emergence of the tribal system. In 1935, in the article “Remnants of totemism and dual organization among the Turkmens”, he develops the idea expressed by M.M. Kovalevsky and M.P. Zhakov 3 that the emergence of exogamy was associated with the need to streamline production activities within primitive collectives. At the same time, he was the first to put the appearance of exogamy in connection with the establishment of sexual taboos, arising as a result of contradictions between promiscuous sexual relations, and thereby continuous clashes on the basis of jealousy and the needs for the development of the production activity of primitive collectives. The problem of the origin of exogamy is still one of the most controversial in primitive history. The specific picture of the formation of this institution drawn by S.P. Tolstov cannot be called sufficiently reasoned, but the approach he proposed to the problem is of great theoretical value and is considered by many modern researchers as the most productive. In the same article, the idea of ​​the initial dislocality (alocality) of the marriage settlement was developed, which M.O. This initial dislocality is the only way to explain the initial coincidence of clan and community. The idea continues to develop at the present time, although now it has fewer supporters than opponents 5 . Several early works of S.P. Tolstov are devoted to the problems of class formation or related subjects. The largest of these are Essays on Primitive Islam (1932), The Genesis of Feudalism in Nomadic Pastoral Societies (1934), and Military Democracy and the Problem of “Genetic Revolution” (1935). The main idea of ​​the Essays on Primitive Islam, which is that the life and work of the Prophet Muhammad is a myth that has absorbed a variety of other Eastern myths, belongs to the past. Now, more than half a century later, no one doubts the authenticity of Muhammad, the very question of the historicity of certain prophets is considered as of little importance for religious studies. The “side” ideas of the work turned out to be more important. One of them lies in the allocation on the basis of geographical differentiation of production activities of certain types of economy - the allocation, later developed by M.G. Levin and N.N. Cheboksarov in the doctrine of economic and cultural types 6 . Others relate to the range of problems of class formation among sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralists and were developed by S.P. Tolstov himself in subsequent works. Until the early 1930s, there were heated discussions in Russian historical and ethnographic science about the nature of the social system of nomadic pastoralists. They had not only theoretical, but also practical significance, since the tasks of economic and cultural construction among the backward peoples of the east of our country in the past required the study of the characteristics of their social organization. In the publications of those years, on the one hand, the thesis traditional for pre-revolutionary literature about the classlessness of nomadic societies continued to develop, on the other hand, the position was put forward that nomads had complete class relations. Therefore, an important milestone in the theoretical development of the problem was two works published simultaneously - “The social system of the Mongols. Mongolian nomadic feudalism” by B.Ya. Vladimirtsova and “Genesis of feudalism in nomadic pastoral societies” by S.P. Tolstov. In both works, the concept of nomadic feudalism is developed, but in the second it is presented more carefully and balanced: it is not so much about feudalism as about patriarchal-feudal relations. According to S.P. Tolstov, nomadic pastoralists, passing, like their sedentary neighbors, the stage of slavery, but not rising, in contrast to them, above the primitive military-slave-owning democracy, they develop a special, nomadic version of feudalism. The main thing in it is the main grain from which its entire system grows - sauna relations, which find an analogy in the precaria of classical feudalism. Various extortions from the population also play a certain role. But sauna relations are a feudalized form of tribal mutual assistance, and therefore feudalism in nomadic pastoralism forever remains associated with the remnants of a patriarchal tribal organization. The preservation of the latter is also facilitated by the fact that nomadism does not create sufficiently strong territorial ties and the nomadic neighboring community acts in the form of a tribal community. The most difficult question is the nature of feudal ownership of land. In an undisguised form, it exists only in agriculture associated with cattle breeding. In the cattle-breeding economy proper, the ownership of pastures nominally remains tribal, but in fact belongs to those who monopolize the ownership of cattle, in other words, it is mediated by relations of cattle ownership. The solutions proposed here by S.P. Tolstov, for the most part, prevailed in Soviet historical and ethnographic nomad studies for a long time and only since the 1960s have again become the subject of lively debate. It was found that slavery was never the dominant form of exploitation among the nomads, and sauna relations, as bonded relations, had not a specifically feudal, but an inter-formation character. Once again, a discussion flared up about the nature of the social system of nomadic pastoralists in the pre-class or early class 7 . But no matter how these issues are resolved today, the work of S.P. Tolstov retains not only historiographical, but also theoretical significance. It outlines almost the entire set of issues of the social system of nomadic pastoralists that continue to be discussed and developed: the role of agriculture and cattle-owning in it, sauna exploitation and exploitation through non-fixed or fixed requisitions from the population, the ratio of the territorial community of settled and tribal communities of nomads, and most importantly, the role patriarchal-tribal relations in the processes of class formation among nomads. In many respects, the fate of another major work by S.P. Tolstov “Military democracy and the problem of the “genetic revolution” is similar. It develops three main ideas. The first—that the initial form of exploitation is always slavery and that most class societies arise as slave-owning societies—is now cleared up by only a few researchers. The second - that the transition from primary to secondary socio-economic formation was inevitably accompanied by a social revolution - remains debatable, but it has few supporters 9 . S.P. Tolstov is absolutely right when he draws attention to the fact that such a revolution could not have been a struggle between different strata of the class that was coming to power. But his idea that it was “genetic” uprisings of slaves during the formation of the slave-owning mode of production does not fit well with both the general meaning of the concept of revolution and the idea of ​​a progressive change in historical stages. From the point of view of the theory of progress in the history of the uprising of slaves during the emergence of slave ownership and the revolution of slaves during the transition from slave ownership to feudalism had a different historical direction. But we emphasize once again that the issue remains controversial. The third idea of ​​S.P. Tolstov about the special position of the era of military democracy in the system of socio-economic formations had the greatest influence on the subsequent development of historical and ethnographic science. “The society of the era of military democracy is a pre-class and class, more precisely, a slave-owning society at the same time,” and “the era of military democracy itself lies a historical boundary, a period of revolutionary restructuring of society between primitive communism and the first antagonistic formation of society. And if, from the point of view of the history of pre-class society, we have the right to speak of the era of military democracy as the last stage of the tribal system, then from the point of view of the history of class society, we have before us the first stage of the slave-owning formation. This first proposed by S.P. Tolstov, the dialectically contradictory characterization of the era of transition from primitive to class society was perceived by a number of researchers, although usually not in the stated form (both pre-class and class society), but in the exact opposite (not pre-class and not class society) 11 . And about this nature of the transitional stage (as well as about the adequacy of its name "the era of military democracy") 12 in modern science, few people share this point of view, but for us in this case it is important that the start of the disputes was laid by the sharp and meaningful work of S.P. Tolstov. The problems of the history of primitive society remained in the sphere of scientific interests of S.P. Tolstov and in post-war decades when he acted as the organizer and head of national ethnography. Developing these problems and contributing to their development, he opposed two extremes in relation to this field of knowledge. One of them is the desire, emerging in the mid-1930s, to narrow the profile of ethnography by studying primarily the primitive communal system and its remnants in the later history of mankind, up to the present. Another is the underestimation of the significance of the study of primitive historical problems, which remains one of the leading areas of theoretical work in the development of the materialist concept of the historical process and the primitive communal system as the initial link in this process. And here, in connection with the accumulation of new facts, creative development the concept of primitive collectivism, the differentiation in it, on the one hand, of the materialistic concept of primitive history, on the other hand, various kinds of secondary decisions of Morgan or Engels' statements on particular issues, which, of course, required significant clarifications in the course of updating the factual base of science. One of the first who laid the foundation for such work at a level determined by the conditions for the development of science in the mid-1940s was S.P. Tolstov. Already in the first post-war issue of the journal “Soviet Ethnography” his article “On the Question of the Periodization of the History of Primitive Society” appeared, devoted to assessing and clarifying the primitive historical periodization of Morgal, reproduced by Engels in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”. It noted that since the base of this periodization ‘’. It noted that since the basis of this periodization is “the most important stages in the development of productive forces”, “all attempts, based on the presence of certain erroneous or outdated provisions in Morgal’s periodization, to indiscriminately deny its significance for modern science ". But at the same time, it was also emphasized that “the canonization of obsolete passages and errors in Morgan’s periodization plays into the hands of only the opponents of his theory” 13 . In the modified periodization proposed by S.P. Tolstov, three stages of primitive history are singled out as the main ones: the primitive herd, the establishment of primitive society), the primitive community (the flourishing of primitive society) and military democracy (the transformation of primitive society into a class society). Each of these stages is determined by major milestones in the development of the productive forces. Insisting on the fundamental importance of this particular criterion as a division of the primitive historical process, S.P. Tolstov connected the onset of the identified stages with the beginning of the use of tools, the introduction of tools for the production of tools and the development of metal. In his opinion, such a periodization "removes, but does not cancel" Morgan's periodization, which, with appropriate amendments, retains its significance for a more detailed characterization of the primitive historical process. Therefore, the first and third of the stages he singled out are compared with the lower stage of savagery and the highest stage of barbarism, and the second stage is divided into four periods, each of which is correlated (with amendments in the criteria) with a certain stage of the savage and barbarian eras. Due to its duality, S.P. Tolstov’s scheme subsequently influenced many new periodizations developed in Soviet science, both generalized (proposed mainly by ethnographers) and more fractional (proposed mainly by archaeologists) 14 . The development of the problems of the history of primitive society by S.P. Tolstov ceased in the first half of the 1960s, when an active process of generalization and rethinking of the latest facts of ethnography, archeology and paleoanthropology was just beginning in domestic science in order to clarify the historical reconstruction of the primitive past. Therefore, having issued a fundamentally important warning against the canonization of obsolete places and errors in previous reconstructions of primitiveness, S.P. Tolstov himself managed to do little to differentiate the general collectivist concept of the primitive communal system and the obsolete particular solutions that concretize it to one degree or another. So, in his periodization, the primitive community is identified with the maternal clan, while later it was found that such a community could also be associated with the maternal paternal clan that arose early to replace the maternal clan (for example, among a significant part of the Australian Aborigines) 15 . In general, S. P. Tolstov gave, perhaps, unjustifiably great importance It was precisely the maternal form of the primitive tribal community and back in 1961 in the work “Some Problems of World History in the Light of Data of Modern Historical Ethnography” defended the view that in the “classical” primitive society the maternal clan was everywhere preserved, inclusive, until the late Neolithic, and the paternal clan developed mainly on the periphery of civilizations and not without their influence. One can find in his primitive historical works of the post-war period many other provisions that are now not shared by researchers or at least debatable: about group marriage, about matriarchy as the domination of women, about the relationship between clan and community, etc. 16 . At the same time, all the primitive historical works of Sergei Pavlovich Tolstov, right down to the very last, contain fundamentally important provisions that still continue to exert their influence on the development of science. In particular, in the already cited article “Some Problems of All-Dimensional History in the Light of Modern Historical Ethnography,” he energetically drew attention to the need to establish an absolute chronology of ethnographic materials on primitive history, and thereby to a more rigorous approach in the synthesis of ethnographic, archaeological, and proper historical facts. Very early, from the end of the 1920s, the scientific interests of S.P. Tolstov began to focus on Oriental problems, he was increasingly interested in questions of the history and ethnography of Central Asia. This was largely facilitated by his participation in the RANION expedition in the Tashauz region of the Turkmen SSR, in which he studied the tribal composition and material culture of the Kunyaurgench Turkmen Yaiuds.
These materials were published in the article “On the survivals of totemism and dual organization among the Turkmens”, they were used by S.P. Tolstov in other works related to the problems of the history of primitive society and ethnogenesis. Having first arrived in Khorezm in 1929 as an ethnographer, S.P. Tolstov realized that from now on he was forever associated with this unique historical and cultural region of Central Asia, “Central Asian Egypt,” as he called it. The fact that in the late 1930s work began on creating the history of the young Central Asian republics also played a role. At the same time, the focus was on the problems of the social system of the peoples of the East, in particular, the controversial issues of the social system of the peoples of pre-Muslim Central Asia. The need to obtain new sources to solve the whole complex of historical problems that arose led to the organization of large archaeological expeditions, one of which - Khorezm - was headed by S.P. Tolstov. Studies of the Khorezm archaeological, and later archaeological and ethnographic, expedition became the life work of S.P. Tolstov and brought him worldwide fame. The large territorial and chronological scope of the work of the expedition, their complex nature - all this allowed S.P. Tolstov to involve archaeological sources in solving major historical problems, the significance of which sometimes goes beyond the framework of the Central Asian theme itself. S.P. Tolstov himself named the largest of these problems in the introduction to his book “On the ancient deltas of the Oxus and Jaksart”: the social structure of the population of the agricultural oases of Central Asia; the history of the ancient channels of the Amudarya and Syrdarya (their formation and settlement by man) and the related history of the Khorezm irrigation; the history of the semi-nomadic and nomadic population of the pastoral periphery of the oases, its relationship with the agricultural population of the latter, the historical role of these contacts in the economic and cultural life of the country. The scale and significance of all these issues that arise in the process of research, the need to answer more and more new questions, the advantages of a comprehensive study of a single large historical and cultural region - all this predetermined the longevity of the work begun by SL. Tolstov, which continues to this day 17 .
In his books “Ancient Khorezm” (M. 1948), “Following the traces of the ancient Khorezmian civilization” (M., 1948), already mentioned “Along the ancient deltas of the Oks and Yaksart” (M., 1962), numerous articles by S.P. Tolstov traced on the archaeological materials of Khorezm not only all the stages of its historical development from the Neolithic era to the Middle Ages inclusive, but also saw in its example a number of patterns inherent in the development of historical processes in Central Asia and the East as a whole. Ethnographer, orientalist and archaeologist S.P. Tolstov, along with the development of problems directly related to the history of the Central Asian peoples, in many cases relying on Central Asian sources and materials, conducted research in the field of general problems of ethnography, the history of primitive society, ethnogenesis and ethnic history, the history of culture, etc. The most striking example in this regard is the monograph “Ancient Khorezm”, in which, in particular, S.P. Tolstov again turned to the problem of the social structure of early class societies. He collected and systematized data testifying to the dominance of the slave-owning way of life in Central Asia in pre-Muslim times. This thesis, however, was then put forward on a rather limited circle of sources. Today, as a result of ongoing archaeological work in Khorezm, he found confirmation when deciphering the palace archive of Toprak-kala (II-III centuries BC) 18 . According to V.A. Livshits, who researched and determined how Khorezmian inscriptions from the cult center at the settlement of Kalala-gyr 2 (IV-II centuries BC) 19 , one of them, on an ostracon, contains the word “slaves” 20 , which is such Thus, the earliest evidence of the existence of this form of dependence in Khorezm. One of the most difficult historical problems - ethnogenesis and ethnic history of the peoples of Central Asia is considered by S.P. Tolstov in the articles “Basic Issues of the Ethnogenesis of the Peoples of Central Asia”, “The Aral Knot of the Ethnogonic Process”, “On the Question of the Origins of the Karakalpak People”, “Cities of Guz” and other works using a wide range of sources. It is natural that new archaeological, historical and ethnographic discoveries introduce clarifications and make it possible to reveal new aspects in the approach to this problem. However, the main conclusions of S.P. Tolstov about the most ancient and medieval stages of the ethnogenesis of the peoples of Central Asia were established in science. Among them, a very important thesis should be mentioned that the basis of the ethnogenesis of each of the modern Central Asian peoples is not a single, but many ethnic components that do not separate, but unite them, requiring consideration of ethnic processes on the territory of this vast historical and cultural region in their interconnectedness and in the context of those historical processes that covered the territory of Central Asia and adjacent regions as a whole. The linguistic aspect of the problem over the past years has been enriched with new discoveries and hypotheses, which, without removing the significance of the theses put forward at the time by S.P. both chronologically and geographically 21 . The already mentioned article “City of Guzes” very clearly reveals the work of S.P. Tolstov’s research thought on the problem, which he later called one of the main ones developed by him. We are talking about the relationship of the nomadic and semi-nomadic population of the steppes with the settled agricultural population of the oases, their connection with the cities, their role in the economic and cultural life of the country. This issue is general historical, but for the Aral Sea region, as evidenced by archaeological and historical sources, it is extremely relevant throughout the history of this region, starting from the Late Bronze Age. It must be said that the need for an archaeological and ethnographic approach in the development of many aspects of historical problems led S.P. Tolstov to distinguish a special department of ethnographic science - paleoethnography 22 , whose sources are ethnographic and archaeological materials. This approach was widespread among ethnographers and archaeologists of his generation, nowadays it is gradually finding more and more supporters among representatives of both sciences, and in terms of complex field studies, including those widely promoted and carried out by S.P. Tolstov and his colleagues and students in the postwar years. It should be noted that now, among the supporters of the method of ethnoarchaeological research widely used in the West, called ethnoarchaeology 23 , which is based on the practice of archaeologists studying abandoned modern settlements and even conducting purely ethnographic work, including work with informants, voices are heard precisely in favor of complex archeological research. -ethnographic research by representatives of both specialties, which would provide the most qualified approach to business. It is impossible not to mention one more direction in the research of S.P. Tolstov. Being the head of the Institute and developing traditional ethnography, he initiated the appeal of Soviet ethnographic science to the study of modernity (“Ethnography and Modernity”, “Soviet School in Ethnography and other works), which not only significantly enriched the volume of scientific information created under his general editorship” Peoples of the World”, but, most importantly, gave impetus to the development of an important new direction in ethnography, which is fruitfully developing today.

NOTES:

1. Soviet ethnography, 1931, No. 3-4. 2. Efimenko P.P. The meaning of women in the Aurignacian era / / Izv. GAIMK, 1931, XI. Issue. 3-4; Borisovsky P.I. On the issue of stages in the development of the Upper Paleolithic / / Ibid., 1932. V. XIV. Issue. 4. 3. Kovalevsky M.M. Primitive Law. M., 1886. Issue. one; Zhakov M.P. To the formulation of genetic problems of the history of pre-class society / / Izv. GAIMK, 1933, no. 100. 4. Kosven M.O. A newly discovered form of marriage//Communication. GAIMK, 1932, No. 3-4. 5. Semenov Yu.I. Origin of marriage and family. M., 1974. 6. Levin M.G., Cheboksarov I.N. Economic and cultural types and historical and ethnographic areas (to the formulation of the question) / / SE, 1965. No. 4. 7. See: Pershits A.I. Some features of class formation and early class relations among nomadic pastoralists // Formation of classes and the state. M., 1976; Markov G.E. Nomads of Asia. The structure of the economy and public organization. M ., 1876; Khazanov A.M. Nowas and the outside world. Cambridge, 1983. 8. For more details, see: Pershits A.I. Initial forms of exploitation and the problem of their genetic typology//Problems of typology in ethnography. M., 1979. 9. Drabkin Ya.S. Unresolved problems in the study of social revolutions//Historical science and some problems of the present. M., 1969; Seleznev M.A. Social revolution (methodological problems). M., 1971; Krapivensky S.E. To the analysis of the category “social revolution”. Volgograd, 1971. 10. Tolstov S.P. Military democracy and the problem of "genetic" revolution//Problems of the history of pre-capitalist societies. M.-L., 1935. No. 7-8. 11. Neusykhin A.I. The emergence of a dependent peasantry in Western Europe VI-VIIIvv. M., 1956; Semenov Yu.I. On periodization of primitive history//SE, 1965, No. 5; Kryukov M.V. Social differentiation in ancient China (the experience of comparative historical characteristics)//Decomposition of the tribal system and the formation of a class society. M., 1968. 12. For details, see .:Persic A.I. Das Problem der militarischen Democracy//Familie, Staat und gesellschaftsformation. Berlin, 1988. 13. Tolstev S.P. To the question of periodization of the history of primitive society//SE. M., 1946. No. 1. 14. For more details, see: History of primitive society. General issues. Problems of anthroposociogenesis. M., 1983, p.17 and eat. 15. Semenov Yu.I. Origin of marriage and family. M., 1974. 16. For more details, see: Bromley Yu.V., Pershits A.I. F. Engels and contemporary issues of primitive history//Questions of Philosophy, 1964, No. 4. 17. For an overview of the work of the expedition, see: Itina M.A. Khorezm expedition: main results and prospects of research//Cultural art of ancient Khorezm. M., 1961; Zhdanko T.A. Ethnographic studies of the Khorezm expedition (peoples, problems, works)//Ibid.; Itina M.A. Security archaeological work in Khorezm: results and prospects // SE, 1984, No. 1; she is. Ancient Khorezm: problems and discoveries - Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1966, No. 2. 18. Tolstev SL. Along the ancient deltas of the Oxus and Jaksart. M., 1962, pp. 215-222; Toprak-kala. Castle. - Proceedings of the Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic expedition, vol. XI, M., 1984, ch. VI. Documents (author V.A. Livshits). 19. See: Weinberg B*I., Kolyakov S.M. Excavations at the Kalala-gyr 2 fortress in Northern Turkmenistan//Archaeological discoveries, 1986, M., 1968, 0.506. 20. Oral communication by V.A. Livshits. 21. Grantovsky E.A. Early history Iranian tribes of Western Asia. M., 1970; Abaev V.I. On the question of the ancestral home and ancient migrations Indo-Iranian peoples//Ancient East and the ancient world. M., 1972; Litvinsky B.A. Problems of the ethnic history of Central Asia in the 2nd millennium BC. (Central Asian aspect of the Aryan problem)//Ethnic problems of the history of Central Asia in antiquity. M., 1981, p. 156 et seq.; Dyakonov I.M. About the ancestral home of the speakers of Indo-European dialects. I and II//VDI, 1982, Nos. 3 and 4; Gamkrelidze T.E., Ivanov Vyach.Vs. Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans. Tbilisi, 1984; Kuzmina E.E. On some archaeological aspects of the problem of the origin of the Indo-Iranians / / Western Asian collection, issue IV. Ancient and medieval history and philosophy. M., 1986, pp. 169-228 and other works. 22. Tolstov S.P. The main theoretical problems of contemporary Soviet ethnography - SE, 1960, No. 6 23. Shnirelman V.A. Ethnoarchaeology. 70s. - SE, 1984, No. 2. Published in the journal Ethnographic Review, 1997, No. 1, p. 14-23.

Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Sergei Pavlovich Tolstov, a great ethnographer, archaeologist, historian and orientalist, turned 60 years old.

For everyone who knows Sergei Pavlovich, who happened to work with him, and especially for us, his students, this date is perceived only as a certain stage, when some results of what has been done are summed up and, most importantly, new creative plans are outlined for the scientific team headed by him.

Sergey Pavlovich's extraordinary enthusiasm for his work, which he surprisingly generously knows how to pass on to others, his scientific and organizational talent, enormous and versatile erudition, great human charm and a constant feeling of searching for a new, unusual, romantically interesting and at the same time difficult - these are his qualities. that attract young people to it.

S. P. Tolstov belongs to the generation of Soviet scientists, whose youth and the formation of their worldview took place in the first post-revolutionary years and the years of the first five-year plans. It was this time that gave us that brilliant galaxy of great scientists and organizers of science, one of whose representatives is Sergei Pavlovich Tolstov.

S. P. Tolstov was born on January 25, 1907 in St. Petersburg in a military family. He received his secondary education in Moscow. In 1930 he graduated from Moscow State University, where he studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and the Faculty of History and Ethnology. These days, the activity of S.P. Tolstov, an ethnographer, began (works on the classification of Russian dwellings, on the ethnography of Mordovians and Teryukhans). He is in charge of the ethnographic department of the Moscow Regional Museum, acts as one of the leaders of the local history movement in the country. In 1934, S.P. Tolstov completed his postgraduate studies at the State Institute of Metallurgy, specializing in the history and archeology of Central Asia. In 1929-1936, he was an employee of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, scientific secretary, and then head of the Moscow branch of the USSR Institute of World Heritage. In the same years began pedagogical activity S. P. Tolstov: for many years he was a professor at Moscow State University, headed the department of ethnography, and in 1943-1945. He was dean of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University. In 1937, he organized the Khorezm archaeological expedition, whose permanent leader S.P. Tolstov is to this day.

When the Great Patriotic War began, S.P. Tolstov joined the ranks of the people's militia, participated in the battles near Yelnya and Mozhaisk and was wounded in the battle for the Shalimovo station. After demobilization, he returned to work at the USSR Academy of Sciences and at the end of 1942 was appointed director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. S. P. Tolstov worked in this post for 25 years, combining (in 1949-1954) this work with his activity as the scientific secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Giving a lot of time and energy to scientific and organizational work, Sergei Pavlovich also works extraordinarily fruitfully as a research scientist.

He owns more than 300 works on various issues of Oriental studies in general, archeology, ethnography, history and related disciplines. S. P. Tolstov was the initiator of the creation, editor and co-author of many important collective works, including the multi-volume work "Peoples of the World".

Since the end of the 1930s, the main scientific interests of S.P. Tolstov have been focused on the history, archeology and ethnography of the peoples of Central Asia. His works on the history and archeology of ancient Khorezm gained world fame. The first ethnographic trip to Khorezm in 1929 determined the main circle of scientific interests of the then young researcher for many decades. This youthful obsession, passion for unraveling the mysteries of the “strange desert” surrounding the oasis of Khorezm, S.P. Tolstov has preserved to this day. Wherever the researcher was distracted by various incoming tasks, the focus remained on the history, archeology and ethnography of this peculiar region of Central Asia.

The results of the pre-war work of the Khorezm archaeological expedition were summed up by S.P. Tolstov in his doctoral dissertation "Ancient Khorezm", defended in 1942 and published in 1948. In this book, perhaps, the creative individuality of S.P. Tolstov the researcher was most clearly manifested. It for the first time gives a clear periodization of the history of Khorezm from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, based on the use of data from all types of historical sources, primarily archaeological. The book discusses the history of Khorezm irrigation - this foundation of the foundations of the economy and life of the population of Central Asia. Finally, for the first time, new data were collected and systematized here, which indisputably testified to the dominance of the slave-owning structure in Central Asia in pre-Muslim times, the thesis that S.P. Tolstov tried to substantiate for the nomadic and sedentary peoples of Central Asia with the meager data of written sources back in the 30s years. However, in addition to this, the book will touch upon a huge range of issues on the history of Khorezm and Central Asia as a whole. In the excursions of this book, and each of them is an independent study, questions about the remnants of tribal organization in ancient and medieval Central Asia, the history of Khorezmian weapons, and the class struggle in Sogdiana in the 6th century BC are considered. n. e., the fall of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and others. The book is written with great passion, bright, sometimes exciting. Despite 20 years separating us from the moment of its publication, it strikes with freshness of thoughts. As in any large study, there are controversial villages in it, but it is they, first of all, that testify to the constant creative search that permeates the entire scientific activity of S. P. Tolstov.

Some conclusions, especially by the standards of the present time, are made on rather limited material, but they have stood the test of time and now give reason to speak of the amazing scientific intuition of S.P. Tolstov.

In the post-war years, work on the archeology of Central Asia reached a large scale. Changes also affected the Khorezm expedition. It turned into the Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic complex expedition, into a large team of researchers - students of S.P. Tolstov. The problems posed in "Ancient Khorezm" have now found their expression in the numerous and diverse areas of the expedition's activity.

In 1945-1950. The main efforts of the expedition were aimed at studying the monuments of Khorezm antiquity, among which, first of all, the palace of the rulers of Khorezm of the 3rd century BC should be mentioned. n. e. Toprak-kala. Magnificent examples of painting and sculpture of the palace, as well as an archive of economic documents, some of which were read and published by S.P. Tolstov, are now widely known.

In the same period, and especially since 1951 and later, S.P. Tolstov and the expedition team began to develop in depth the problems of the formation of the ancient channels of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya and their settlement by humans. Related to this latter is the problem of artificial irrigation. Research on these issues, conducted by S.P. Tolstov, his colleagues and students and published in the monographs “Lower reaches of the Amu-Darya, Sarykamysh, Uzboy. History of Formation and Settlement” (M., 1960) and “On the Ancient Deltas of the Oxus and Yaksart” (M., 1962), are extremely valuable in terms of methodology and outstanding in terms of scientific results.

Finally, one cannot fail to mention the extensive research that has unfolded over the past decade on the problem of the social system and the cultural and everyday way of life of the steppe tribes that surrounded the ancient centers of the ancient and medieval civilization of Central Asia and, in particular, the Khorezm oasis. Excavations of numerous Saka monuments in the lower reaches of the Syr Darya allowed S. P. Tolstov to write about the Central Asian Scythians as a people “not only cattle breeders, but primarily irrigators, artisans and city planners”, about a people who lived a stable settled life, acting in a complex unity with the nomadic life of the shepherds (“Aral Scythians and Khorezm”, M., 1960 and other works). It should be noted that work in all these areas is still ongoing. Such a multifaceted research expedition became possible not only due to the fact that it is headed by such a prominent scientist as S.P. Tolstov, but also due to his great pedagogical talent. Over the years of work in Central Asia, he trained dozens of researchers on different periods history and archeology of Central Asia. And they work (and in recent times these are the students of his students) not only in the Khorezm expedition, but also in many scientific institutions of Central Asia.

S. P. Tolstov played a leading role in the development of many modern methodological techniques in field archaeological research and in the application of the achievements of other disciplines for the needs of archeology. Without complex archaeological and geographical research, it would be impossible to resolve the problem of the old rivers of the Amu Darya - one of the most complex and controversial in the historiography of Central Asia. A continuous archaeological survey of vast territories and the compilation of an exhaustive archaeological map would be difficult without the use of aerial methods. For the first time in world archaeological practice, S.P. Tolstov specially and on a large scale applied aerial methods: visual aerial reconnaissance, perspective and planned aerial photography, aerial photogrammetry, archaeological airborne landings to study monuments lost in the sands.

S. P. Tolstov’s scientific activity is characterized by the constant linking of scientific research with the practice and tasks of national economic development. In his works on the dynamics of the ancient deltas of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya and on the history of irrigation, he repeatedly raised the question of the possibility and prospects of widespread development of vast territories of ancient irrigation lands. Interesting data obtained as a result of complex archaeological and geographical research of the Khorezm expedition are now widely used by design organizations.

The scientific activity of S. P. Tolstov received a deservedly high appraisal in our country and abroad. He has received several government awards. In 1948, for the scientific work "Ancient Khorezm" he was awarded the State Prize of the first degree. S. P. Tolstov was awarded the titles of Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the Uzbek SSR, Honored Worker of Science of the Tajik SSR, Honored Worker of Science of the Karakalpak ASSR. In 1956, he was elected an honorary academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR.

Many of Sergei Pavlovich's works have been translated into Western European and Eastern languages. The recognition of outstanding scientific merits is the election of S. P. Tolstov as vice-president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, honorary member of the Italian Institute of the Middle and Far East. Asian and Anthropological Society of Paris, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Archaeological Department of India, Corresponding Member of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.