The Foreign Service Journal, April 2003

52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 3 he silence is strange. I have lost sight of the road to the Iranian border. Disoriented, I’m exploring a combined Pompeii and Grozny. Was the city abandoned in the 1920s, the Middle Ages, or the Bronze Age? This happened to me in the fall of 1996 in Turkmenistan, on the Ashgabat- Tejen-Sarax road. I called the place the Mysterious City. The director of the Ashgabat Archaeological Museum said it sounded like Altyn-Tepe, a Bronze Age settlement he had excavated 10 years earlier. My dri- ver said it was the medieval settle- ment Sandyk Gashi, meaning “the place where they dropped the trunk.” He claimed that mer- chants traveling on the Silk Road dropped a trunk at that place, and as the lid flew off a river of gold coins flowed over the sand. My Western European diplomat counterparts were skeptical. They claimed to see distinctive turn-of-the- century building patterns in the ruined walls, and scoffed at finding any relics among the sea of shards lining the deserted streets. But even they were seduced by the Mysterious City’s enigma, and we orga- nized a number of picnics there together. This is Central Asian archaeology in microcosm. While I have traveled to all of the Central Asian coun- tries, Turkmenistan — where I spent two wonderful years of archaeological exploration during my tenure as deputy chief of mission at Embassy Ashgabat — is the one I know best. Turkmen archaeology aptly illus- trates the cultural surprises Central Asia offers. The Most Splendid City Turkmenistan’s jewel is ancient Merv, near Mary, that country’s second most important city. Some histo- rians believe Alexander the Great visited the city during his daring sweep through the area. At Merv, I found the ruins of the Erk-Kala Fortress — a sixth-century B.C. edifice reconstructed extensively during Merv’s Greek period by one of Alexander’s generals, Antiochius. The fortress resembles a huge earthen doughnut, 600 meters across, with walls 50 meters high. In the middle are the ruins of a Buddhist monastery from the sixth century A.D. and a Christian monastery, both destroyed by the Arabs who forced Islam on Merv. Mohammed, my local guide dur- ing the visit, recalled the tale of the beautiful Persian princess who built the Christian monastery. When she converted to Christian- ity, her distraught father, the Sassanian shah of Persia, was told by Zoroastrian priests that he had to sentence her to death. Instead, he sent his only child into exile to provincial Merv, where she married a local tribal prince and founded what is to date Turkmenistan’s only home- grown Christian dynasty. In the middle of the seventh century, the Arabs invaded present-day Turkmenistan, bringing with them forcible conversion to Islam. Merv and its out- lying lands became a part of the Umayyid and Abbasid caliphates, and then subsequently the Tahirid and Samanid states. It was during this period that the Silk Road — a complex network of trade caravan routes from Europe to China, invariably crossing the medieval Turkmen towns of Merv, Amul, Zemm, Gurganj, Sarax, Abiverd, Nissa, Dekhistan, and others — became an important factor in world trade. The F O C U S O N C E N T R A L A S I A T URKMEN A RCHAEOLOGY : A C ENTRAL A SIAN S URPRISE T URKMEN ARCHAEOLOGY AFFORDS A GLIMPSE INTO C ENTRAL A SIA ’ S ANCIENT HISTORY , AND TYPIFIES THE CULTURAL SURPRISES THE REGION OFFERS . B Y T ATIANA C. G FOELLER T