Tscharkutan
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Charkutan Charkutan |
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| Basic data | |||
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| State : |
 Tajikistan
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| Province : | Sughd | ||
| Coordinates : | 39 ° 45 ' N , 68 ° 47' E | ||
| Height : | 1523 m | ||
| Residents : | 3,800 (2009) | ||
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Dzharkutan ( Tajik Чаркутан ), English transliteration Jarkutan or Dzharkutan , is a village ( kischlak ) near the small town Shahriston in the province of Sughd in the north of Tajikistan with the remains of the Sogdian palace fortress Tschilchudschra (Чильхуджра, Čilchudžra, Chilhujra, Chilkhujra, Chil'khudzhra, Chehel Hujra) in the historical region of Usrushana (Ustruschan) from the 4th to 8th centuries. The state of conservation of Chilchudschra is exceptionally good; Large parts of the two-storey building, built with adobe bricks , are still upright, including a spiral ramp that extends to the roof.
location
Tscharkutan belongs to the sub-district ( jamoat ) Schahriston and has around 3800 inhabitants according to an estimate from 2009. The village is close to the only road connection (M34) between the state capital Dushanbe and Khujand , the capital of Sughd Province. From the Schahriston Tunnel , opened in 2012 , which shortens the journey over the 3,378-meter-high pass of the Turkestan chain, the winding road leads down a stream valley. Shahriston is the first small town north of the mountains. Shahriston bypasses the expressway to the larger city of Istaravshan, 27 kilometers northeast, and on to Khujand in the Fergana Valley in a wide arc on the east side. Coming from the south, an unpaved access road to Schahriston branches off at an acute angle two kilometers before the town center. At the junction, a gravel road begins, which crosses the dry river bed of the Shahristonsai (Shachristan-sai) in a northerly direction and leads up a small hill on the other side until it reaches the center of Tscharkutan after half a kilometer. The surrounding hills are treeless, only sparsely overgrown with grass and almost bare in summer. The agricultural areas in the valley floor are irrigated through canals from the river.
In the early Middle Ages, Chilchudschra belonged to the Ustrushana region, which stretched north from the upper reaches of the Serafshan River to the Syr Darya in the Ferghana Valley. The plains of the then and now agricultural region were praised by contemporary geographers for their fertility and the mountains for their mineral deposits. Above all iron, gold and silver were exploited and processed. Bundschikat , an extensive urban settlement with a citadel and surrounding wall, was located just under three kilometers to the northeast (near today's Schahriston). The Urtakurgan Castle (Urta-kurgan) from the 7th to 9th centuries, also on the west bank of the river, was located a little south of Tschilchudschra. It towered over the plain at the entrance to the valley on a small hill and was used to monitor the trunk road leading down from the Schahriston Pass.
Townscape
The largest part of the place extends along the west bank of the broad, but in the summer in the local area, which has little water, Schahristonsai. The single-storey houses are made of field stones and plastered with clay, some of the enclosing walls and outbuildings are made of rammed earth. The flat gable roofs are covered with sheets of corrugated iron. The farms are some distance from each other in the middle of orchards and vegetable gardens. Long rows of tall poplars, which are indispensable as construction timber, separate the plots and line the paths. Another district extends in the plain of the tributary Kulkutan, which flows in from the west. The village fills the triangle between the two rivers and surrounds the cemetery located a little higher in the center of the village. From the entrance through a gate in the fence on the south side, a path leads past a small Muslim shrine in the middle to the ruins of the Sogdian fortress at the back of the cemetery.
In addition to groceries, a shop at the cemetery also offers basic supplies of household goods and clothing. There is a school and a water pipe with drinking water, which was laid in 2007 with a development program of the International Red Cross and which replaces the previous practice of transporting drinking water to the village with donkeys.
Chilchudschra
Classification of the construction
In the Achaemenid period, the capital of the Ustruschana region known as Kurukada was fortified by a triple ring of walls. Greek authors presumably meant by Cyropolis the same place that Alexander the Great 329 BC. And which was on the site of today's city of Istaravshan. In the centuries that followed, Ustruschana broke away from Sogdian rule and was presumably ruled by its own princes, who were under the rule of the Hephthalites and later Turkic peoples from the 5th to 7th centuries . The ancient cities fell into disrepair and Kurukada was replaced by Bundschikat. During this time Bundschikat developed into a center of power like the other early medieval cities in Central Asia, consisting of a fortified castle on a hill, under the protection of which an urban settlement spread out in the plain below. This two-part city structure reflected the feudal social order, which consisted of the nobility and a simple population. Apart from this general settlement structure, the architecture of the buildings and the type of defenses were very different in the individual fortresses. For example, Urtakurgan is referred to as a castle ( köschk ) or palace, although like Tschilchudschra the building had no external fortifications, while Kalai Kachkacha II in Bundschikat was not a castle, but a three-storey palace of the nobility surrounded by a wall. In any case, the topographical conditions were decisive for the building design.
Most of the Central Asian castles in the early Middle Ages were at least partially two-story with utility rooms on the ground floor and living rooms above. According to the classification of the Russian archaeologist Sergej Khmelnitskij, the starting point of the architectural development was a one-story type of building made up of several rooms of similar size, which completely enclosed an open courtyard in a rectangle. From this the second type of castle developed with a smaller inner courtyard, which was now covered by a dome and served as the central reception hall. In the third type, the main hall was reduced in size and degraded to a passage room, but kept its location in the middle of the building. All pre-Islamic castles that cannot be traced back to this development are combined into a fourth group, the basic plan of which was not aligned symmetrically to a center and which had at least one long rectangular main room on one side. Chilchudschra can be assigned to the fourth type due to its asymmetrical floor plan, but it is a specialty because there was no long rectangular main room on the edge on the upper floor, but rather a large, almost square main hall, which is framed on two sides by smaller ancillary rooms, according to the reconstruction of Khmelnitsky has been. Such a room arrangement, consisting of a large hall with a row of chambers arranged at right angles over two sides, also belonged to some residential buildings in the Sogdian city of Old Punjakent, which was uncovered next to the modern Punjakent . As an aftereffect, it can still be seen in the small mosques in the districts ( mahalla ) from the 18th and 19th centuries . Century, whose prayer room is surrounded on two sides by a lower row of arcades.
Chilchudschra was partially exposed between 1961 and 1966 by Uktam Pulatovič Pulatov under the direction of Numan Negmatov. Pulatov published his excavation report in 1975 in Dushanbe in Russian, together with drawings by Sergei Khmelnitskij, who had surveyed the site. S. Mamadschanowa measured the facility again in 1981. In 2002, Nasiba Baimatowa gave a compilation of previous research results with previously unpublished floor plans of Khmelnitsky.
Building description
The entire facility consisted of an open area on the slope with ancillary buildings and the six-meter-high castle on its northeast corner. A distinction is made between three construction phases: A first building from the 4th to 6th century forms the core and has been preserved on the ground floor. At the end of the 6th or beginning of the 7th century a gallery was added on the ground floor. In the third construction phase in the 7th century or the beginning of the 8th century, an extension to the south and the upper floor were added.
The foundation of the first building was 1 × 1 meter blocks of clay under the outer walls, the area in between was leveled with clay and gravel. Until 75 centimeters height, the walls were made of rammed earth ( pachsa ) and above (mud brick chischt, in western Tajikistan chically-i cham , "raw brick"). In the first construction phase, the ground floor formed a square with a side length of 12.5 meters, in which two narrow rooms of 6.3 × 2.2 meters are side by side, another unexcavated room is also parallel to the two and a room of 9.55 × 2.13 meters across it. This first building was later extended on all sides by a slightly raised walkway with walls over a meter thick, with the inner wall of the walkway strengthening the previous outer wall of the core structure to a total of around three meters. The new outer walls of the gallery were erected on the natural ground without a foundation. The walkway between 1.5 and 1.9 meters wide was divided into several sections by wall projections. The northern corners were circular, in the south there seem to have been built round bastions . Before the further renovation, the vault over the inner rooms had probably collapsed, because the excavators found this area filled with mud bricks, stones and earth.
The upper floor was built on the stabilized substructure, which was accessed via a spiral ramp at the southwest corner. The width of the barrel-vaulted spiral ramp leading up to the roof was 1.1 to 1.3 meters. From its upper exit, a corridor led eight meters to the east to the 12.8 × 10.4 meter main room. It was surrounded on the west and south side by side rooms of different sizes. The exact appearance of the later additions on the south side could not be clearly determined due to the incomplete excavations. The main room on the upper floor was flat covered with wooden beams, which, according to Khmelnitsky's reconstruction, were supported by four central posts. Three of the adjoining rooms were therefore vaulted with domes.
The clay bricks used for the vaults measure approximately 50 × 25/26 × 9/10 centimeters. They were laid with wide joints made of clay mortar and plastered with clay. Different arching techniques were used to cover the individual rooms. Most of them were real vaults that generate shear forces acting on the sides , only in the three parallel rooms on the ground floor, in order to reduce the span, the vault support was placed on two protruding rows of bricks. In several small rooms on the upper floor, there were ring layers (with upright bricks, which, as in the Nubian vault, are made as independent vault rings) that were leaning vertically or diagonally against one another. Domes with radial layers (bricks laid lengthways in a bond) vaulted the northern corner rooms of the ground floor. The transition between the wall and the base circle of the dome was made by trumpeting . The barrel vaults of the core building on the ground floor were roughly parabolic . The barrel vaults of the gallery were single-hipped in order to counterbalance the external forces of the core building, so they had lower transoms on the outer walls.
Most of the vaults in the upper rooms have collapsed. After the uncovering, temporary roofing made of boards over the open-topped rooms collapsed today, so that the entire complex is exposed to the weather without protection.
Finds
The walls were decorated with paintings, remains of which have been preserved. On the north wall of a room destroyed by fire there was a frontal view of a woman's head in ocher and light red against a dark blue background. Riders and horses could be seen below. There were also traces of an ornamental frieze there, which was divided by a string of pearls .
Everyday objects found include the oldest known fragments of musical instruments in Tajikistan, including a poorly preserved pipe flute with at least three finger holes. In addition to jewelry and a golden bracteate , the epigraphic finds were the most important for research. From the end of the 7th or beginning of the 8th century there is a wooden tablet with Sogdian italics. This made it possible to clarify the script used in Usruschana. This writing appears from the 7th century in Buddhist manuscripts, business texts from Mount Mugh (east of Punjakent) from the beginning of the 8th century and also on pot shards from Old Punjakent, inscriptions from Afrasiab and on a stone from Ladakh of the year 841/2 before. The discovery of a wooden head that belonged to an idol testifies to a religious cult practiced in Usruschana, in which wooden figures with precious stones were venerated.
literature
- Nasiba Baimatowa: The Art of Arching in Central Asia. Mud brick vault (4th - 3rd millennium BC - 8th century AD). Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 2002 ( full text , chapter 33. Čilchudžra (Ustrušana) , pp. 114–118)
- Sergej Khmelnitskij: On the classification of the early medieval castles in Central Asia . In: Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli. Volume 45, 1985, pp. 25-48
Web links
- Chil'khudzhra. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1975
- Archeology from Ustrushana: Tshilchudzhra. Institute for Classical Studies, Seminar for Oriental Archeology and Art History, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (photos)
Individual evidence
- ^ Tajikistan. Program update. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, August 31, 2009
- ↑ Clifford Edmund Bosworth: Osrušana . In: Encyclopædia Iranica .
- ↑ Urtakurgan . Seminar for Oriental Archeology and Art History at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
- ↑ Sergej Khmelnitskij, p. 28f
- ↑ Sergej Khmelnitskij, pp. 35, 39, 42, 46f
- ↑ Nasiba Baimatowa's dissertation from 2002 was published under the title 5000 Years of Architecture in Central Asia. Mud brick vault from 4th / 3rd centuries Jt. V. Until the end of the 8th century AD (Archeology in Iran and Turan, Volume 7) Philipp von Zabern, Darmstadt 2008
- ↑ Nasiba Baimatowa, p. 25
- ↑ Nasiba Baimatowa, pp. 114-118
- ↑ Guitty Azarpay: Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art. University of California Press, Berkeley 1981, p. 203
- ↑ FM Karomatov, VA Meškeris, TS Vyzgo: Central Asia . (Werner Bachmann (Hrsg.): Music history in pictures . Volume II: Music of antiquity. Delivery 9) Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1987, p. 154
- ↑ Sergei G. Kljaštorny, Vladimir A. Livsic: The Sogdian Inscription of Bugut Revised. In: Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 26, Fasc. 1 , 1972, pp. 69-102, here p. 81
- ↑ Boris I. Marshak, NN Negmatov: Sogdiana. In: BA Litvinsky (Ed.): History of Civilizations of Central Asia. The crossroads of civilizations: AD 250-750. Volume III. (Multiple History Series) UNESCO Publishing, Paris 1996, p. 268