Gobekly-depe

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Gobekly-depe is a hill of ruins in what is now Turkmenistan . The ruins are a little north of Merw . During excavations it was possible to examine two fortifications that stood here one after the other. They date to the Parthian and Sassanid times. However, a small fortified mansion stood here as early as the early Iron Age. A fortress was built under the Parthians in the first century AD. The facility was 100 × 100 m in size and consisted of a wall and a central 45 × 37.5 m building in the center of the facility. The outer wall had four towers, each at the corner of the complex. Two more towers were on either side of the gate in the south of the fortress. The wall was about 7 meters wide with an inner corridor, with the outer walls about 3.5 meters wide and the inner wall about 2.6 meters wide. The corridor was once probably arched. Inside the facility was a large building with magazines, an open courtyard and a smaller building in the center.

At the end of the Parthian period, the fortress was abandoned and rebuilt under the Sassanids. A distinction can be made between several construction phases. The building in the center of the complex now formed an irregular, hexagonal platform, of which nothing has been preserved. A corridor led around this building, from which individual chambers led off. Three construction phases can be distinguished. The outer walls of the Sassanid fortress were built exactly on top of those of the Parthian fortress. They did not have an inner, circumferential corridor, but instead had various individual rooms that could be entered from the inside of the facility. Numerous Parthian and Sassanid coins were found. There are also numerous seal impressions from the Parthian period.

The Sassanid complex was abandoned at the end of the fourth century. The last coins found here are struck by Shapur II (309–379 AD).

literature

  • GA Koshelenko: The Fortifications at Gobekly-depe , In: Joe Cribb, Georgina Herrmann: After Alexander, Central Asia before Islam , Oxford 2007, pp. 269–283 ISBN 978-019-726384-6