Urbanism East of the Aral Sea: The Medieval City of Kuik-Mardan, Kazakhstan

Since 2011, the Centre for Applied Archaeology (UCL), together with a local Kazakh archaeological company (Archaeological Expertise) and the Margulan Institute of Archaeology of Kazakhstan, have been undertaking the Silk Road Cities of Kazakhstan Project in the south of the country. For the past two years, attention has been focused on the city of Kuik-Mardan, one of the largest of the seventy or so known cities in the Otrar oasis on the Syr-Darya river (Fig. 1). The oasis can be described as a hydraulic civilisation, in the sense that its existence depended entirely on the use and management of flood waters to irrigate an otherwise arid landscape (Macklin and Lewin 2015). In terms of scale and antiquity, it was akin to the other great river civilisations of the Old World, such as the Nile, Indus and Euphrates. However, unlike these more famous rivers, the history of the Syr-Darya cities is almost completely unknown in the West, and in this respect can be considered a ‘lost civilisation’ (Macklin pers. comm.). The most infamous episode in the long history of Otrar was the 1218 siege and subsequent massacre of its inhabitants by the Mongols. Enflamed by the murder of his trade delegation at Otrar, Chinggis Khan ordered Mongol armies west and in a brutal campaign of retribution, destroyed not only Otrar, but other major cities in the region, including Samarkand and Bukhara. This isolated incident had the profound effect of triggering the change in direction of Mongol expansion from east to west (Schwarz 1998). To this day, the siege of Otrar retains a key place in the Kazakh national consciousness and sense of identity, despite academic disputes about the scale of the actual destruction (for example, see Bustanov 2015). The Otrar oasis occupied a geographical niche: bounded by the Syr-Darya river and the Kyzyl-Kum desert to the south and the Karatau mountains to the north. For much of the medieval period this locale was an Centre for Applied Archaeology UCL Institute of Archaeology London WC1H 0PY, UK Corresponding author: Giles Dawkes (giles.dawkes@ucl.ac.uk) Kuik-Mardan Kazakhstan