In the southeastern part of the Karakum desert bordered by the Badkhyz Upland on the south, there is almost no sand but only a waterless steppe stretching for a good hundred kilometers between two rivers. The Murghab and Tedzhen rivers flow down from the mountain ranges of Afghanistan and border this part of the desert from the east and west. In the era of antiquity, these rivers were called Marg and Arius. This is at least what is mentioned in “Geography” by Strabo, who lived in the 1st century BC. And in the Middle Ages, two of the most important routes of the Silk Road ran through the Karakum interfluve. They connected the ancient metropolis of Merv with Herat to the south and with Serakhs to the west.
The southern route stretched along the left bank of the Murghab. Camels and horsemen used to travel upstream past the numerous settlements of the Merv oasis, reaching the legendary Sultan-bent dam after a two-day journey. Although this name has long been associated with the name of the Seljuk Sultan Sanjar, who ordered its construction allegedly using mountain resin and lead, it had existed before. The first dam at this nodal point of the entire irrigation system of Merv was built in ancient times, and it was repeatedly destroyed during countless wars and rebuilt again. This was the case before and after the Seljuks, and Sultan-bent has existed in its current form since 1910.
Higher up the river, there was the medieval town of Karineyn, or Barkdiz, with which the archaeological mounds in the Imam-baba tract are associated. Geographers of the 9th–10th centuries described it as a settlement in the desert on the bank of a river, located on a high hill. During the exploration of the settlement, researchers discovered abundant archaeological material from the 6th–7th to 15th–16th centuries inclusive. Situated above the river floodplain, squeezed on both sides by sand, Barkdiz-Karineyn in the Middle Ages occupied an advantageous position on the old route from Merv to Balkh and Herat as a stopping point for caravans. That is why the main occupation of its inhabitants at that time was the rental of pack animals, and there were still ruins of a large caravanserai made of baked bricks in the settlement at the end of the 19th century.
According to medieval Arabic guidebooks of the 9th–10th centuries, the next major point was Asadabad. It was located at a distance of about 40 kilometers from Karineyn, and this distance corresponds to the remains of a fairly significant settlement on the same left bank, 8–10 kilometers south of the modern village of Saryazy.
Beyond Asadabad, there lay Khauzan near the present-day village of Tashkepri on the road that stretched along the left bank of the river, as it does now. Yaqut al-Hamawi, historian of the early 13th century, described it as a settlement “rich in greenery, with vast fields”, which corresponds to the present-day landscape of Tashkepri. A string of cave chambers, once dug into the steep slopes of the right bank of the Murghab at a considerable height is of great interest in this area. Unnoticeable before, they became visible due to the erosion of the front walls in the mid-20th century, after the construction of the Tashkepri reservoir.
Archaeologist Alexander Marushchenko, who was the first to study these caves, marked their location in several tiers, established their residential purpose, the presence of large halls and small rectangular rooms covered with lancet vaults, and also found ceramics from the 12th–13th centuries. Even from the opposite bank of the reservoir, over fifty grottoes are visible along the right bank for ten kilometers. Access to them is possible only by boat, since the bank in this place is extremely steep.
About 25 kilometers beyond Khauzan, medieval geographers mentioned the fortress of Qasr-i-Ahnaf, named after the Arab commander al-Ahnaf ibn Qays, who converted the locals to Islam. What remains of it is still a mystery. Excavations have never been carried out there. Further down the river, one can again see man-made caves, carved into the thickness of the steep right bank of the Murghab, in the area of the Karabil Upland, near the village of Tagtabazar. This is Ekegovak – a two-tiered structure with many underground rooms along a straight corridor that goes 37 meters deep into the coastal thickness. Who, when and why came up with such an ingenious form of dwelling? These are the three main questions to which scientists have long sought an answer.
Since at least the 11th century, this entire area along the middle reaches of the Murghab around Tagtabazar has been referred to as Penjdeh, or in Turkmen pronunciation – Pendi, which literally means “Five villages”. Today, the old toponym is almost forgotten and remains, perhaps, only in the name of carpets with a characteristic pattern that were made by the Turkmens of Saryk and Salyr tribes living there. From Qasr-i-Ahnaf, the medieval route went in two directions: one along the Murghab through Marverud to Balkh, the other went strictly to the south, to Herat, along the Kushka – a low-flow tributary of the Murghab.
The road from Merv westwards towards the Caspian Sea followed two main routes. One went along the northern slopes of the Kopetdag mountain, through Abiverd, Nisa, Dehistan and further to Iran. The other was more direct and went from Serakhs to Nishapur, and further through Persian cities to the lands of the Arabs. This second route has been known at least from the first centuries B.C., i.e. from the Parthian period. It is described in detail in the books of medieval travelers. Leaving Merv, caravans covered this route in five or six days, reaching Serakhs, located on the right bank of the Tedzhen River, which in its upper reaches is called Gerirud.
140 years ago, in the spring of 1884, a young Russian diplomat, chamberlain Nikolai Charykov, travelled with a small detachment on horseback along this route to the Serakhs oasis from Merv, which had just become part of the Russian Empire. “The path initially ran between continuous and arable land, crops and orchards,” Charykov wrote in his report. “Then, there appeared sands, covered with luxurious grass, flowers and a rare saxaul forest… On the third day, the plateau lying behind the Persian fortress of New Serakhs appeared ahead, and in the evening, we made a halt on the right bank of the Tedzhen, at the ford, near the ruins of the fortress of Koushut-Kala.” Today, these ruins are not visible, but the clay walls and round towers of the Iranian fortification called Ruknabad are still standing nearby.
A few years later, Russian travel writer and ethnographer Yevgeny Markov travelled along the same route and wrote equally impressive lines about the Tedzhen oasis. “There are many extremely fertile, wet lowlands flooded by the river, overgrown with purely tropical forests, abundant in all kinds of animals and birds… Tigers are daily guests here and permanent inhabitants of the impassable floodplains.” But both authors, without noticing, passed by the ruins of medieval caravanserais lost in the desert. Meanwhile, information about the existence of a large caravan road from Merv to Serakhs in the 9th–10th centuries and the location of five main stops on its route can be found in the early works of Arab authors.
At the end of the 19th century, nothing was yet known about the location of the town of Dandanakan, near whose walls the historic battle between the Seljuks and the Ghazavids took place in 1040. A fortified town of artisans called Tilsitana stood 30 kilometers from this place. It now lies at the bottom of the Khauzkhan reservoir. The next point, Ushturmagak, was another 35 kilometers away. The ancient settlement of Kala Burun with the ruins of buildings of XI–XII centuries still stands there. Further, at almost the same distance, stood the Najara castle, built in the 6th–7th centuries. Later, a compact town with caravanserais, a bazaar and craft workshops grew around it.
While Dandanakan was accidentally discovered in 1942 and partially excavated by Moscow archaeologists who were evacuated to Ashgabat, all the other monuments were discovered and surveyed in the fifties of the last century by Turkmen archaeologist Kurban Adykov, who defended his thesis on the medieval trade route from Merv to Serakhs.
It is only 14 kilometers from Najar castle to Old Serakhs, the main transport hub on the section between Merv and Nishapur, the largest cities of Khorasan during the Silk Road era. Serakhs, which emerged in the first millennium BC, became a significant city in the 6th–7th centuries, surrounded by powerful walls with round towers and a moat. Nowadays, they form the core of the Old Serakhs archaeological park. There was formed a team of master builders in Serakhs under the Seljuks, who were invited to build the cities of Khorasan and the adjacent regions. Only the mausoleums of Serakhs-baba, Lukman-baba, Meana-baba, Yarty-gumbez have survived of what they built in their small homeland. The mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar in Merv is their most famous creation.
A century after the eastern campaign of Alexander the Great, who crossed the Arius River with his army in the autumn of 330 BC, Serakhs became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Later, the city found itself on the outskirts of the Parthian Empire, and in the early Middle Ages it became a viceroyalty of the Sassanid state. It was from that time that the role of Serakhs in the trade routes through Merv increased due to the aggravation of relations between the Persian power and the nomads of Central Asia – Hephthalites and Turks, who closed the northern branch of the caravan routes. Archaeological excavations, which were started in 1929 by local historian Pavel Arbekov and continued in the fifties by Alexander Marushchenko, Kurban Adykov and later by Ovezgeldy Orazov, helped to clarify many pages of the history of this city. Thanks to these archaeologists, it was possible not only to find out the true history of Serakhs but also to compile the first archaeological map of the entire Serakhs oasis.
After a long pause in the nineties, scientists returned to Serakhs. Now the excavations were carried out by the joint Turkmen-Polish expedition led by Professor Barbara Kaim of the University of Warsaw. At first, the work was carried out on the fortress wall of the former city, and then a small hill Mele-Heyran located 10 kilometers east of Old Serakhs was excavated. Ruins of an unknown sanctuary that functioned in the 3rd–7th centuries were discovered there. The lower parts of the walls of numerous rooms, decorated with panels with vegetal ornamentation in the ganch carving technique, as well as wall paintings, are well preserved. There is no doubt that this was Atash-Behram – this is how the temple of victorious fire was called in the Sassanid era – the most important in Zoroastrianism.
There is the famous stone bridge Pulkhatyn upstream of the Tedzhen, where the mountain river Keshefrud flows into Gerirud. No one knows when it was built, but the location was not chosen by chance. It was strategically convenient for everyone to have a permanent crossing of the river, which partially dries up in summer, but during the spring floods it reaches a depth of three meters. This five-arch bridge received its current appearance in 1896, when it was thoroughly repaired by the joint efforts of the governments of Russia and Persia, and since then it has suffered almost no damage.
Twenty years ago, a few kilometers south of this bridge, a huge artificial lake was formed in the Tedzhen riverbed after the construction of a dam. According to an agreement between Iran and Turkmenistan, its waters are now shared by both countries. Closer to the sources, the Tedzhen-Gerirud meanders through the narrow and picturesque Zulfagar Gorge. There, on one of the peaks of the mountain plateau, there is an impregnable stone fortress of Inzhirli, surrounded on all sides by deep canyons. The only entrance was well protected by watchtowers. Archaeologist Terkesh Khodzaniyazov dated the fortress to the 9th–13th centuries. But even later, right up until the 15th century, judging by the shards found, the fortress was still inhabited. On its territory, occupying an area of over three hectares, the ruins of numerous semi-underground dwellings made of wild stone have been preserved. Between them are narrow streets and courtyards. However, a mosque of the column-dome type, common in medieval Islamic architecture, is the most remarkable building in this town.
And further, along the modern Turkmen-Afghan border, closing the Karakum Desert along the rocks and hills, which in spring are covered with red poppies and tulips, the protected Badkhyz stretches towards Murghab. But even there, in the land of breathtaking natural landscape, despite the complete lack of water, traces of man are found.