A city half as old as time

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 21

A city half as old as time

By

STEVE LANE,

On the western bank of the Caspian Sea, on what used to be the interface between the civilised and barbarian worlds, Soviet archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 5000-year-old city. The discovery shows that the site — in the southern Soviet town of Derbent, at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains — is the longest continuously-inhab-ited urban centre in the ILS.S.R.

Two thousand 700-year-old arrowheads, and other weapons which have been unearthed amid a series of "destruction levels,” Illustrate how the town was put to the sword by successive waves of barbarian nomads. There were early IndoEuropeans in the third millenlum B.C n Cimmerians in the second millenium 8.C., Scyths, Sarmatians and Alans in the first millenium 8.C., and the

Khazars and Mongols in the Christian era. Defence must have been Derbent’s major preoccupation. Indeed, in the first millenium A.D. it became known as the Gate of Iron. Recent excavations have revealed that already in the early third millenium B.C. it had massive defensive town walls, and that Derbent’s population must have been about 3H*. As well as fortifications and arrowheads, archaeologists

under the direction of Alexander Kudryavtsev, of the Dagestan autonomous republic’s Academy of Sciences, have unearthed beautiful bronze jewellery, stone axes, terracotta statues of fertility goddesses, and even storage pots containing the remains of grain. In ancient times, Derbent was one of the world’s most important and strategic cities. Located on the road between the Middle East and the steppes of Russia, it became the tense border between many ancient Middle

Eastern civilisations and the barbarian nomads’ lands to the north.

The earliest nomad destruction of the city seems to have taken place by about 2500 B.C M probably at the hands of IndoEuropean Invaders.

After many destructions later, it became one of the world’s largest cities in the first millenium A.D. By the year 1000, it had a population of 150,000 — bigger than most Aslan capitals and much larger

than any West European cities of the time. In the sixth century A.D M the Persians turned Derbent into one of the most heavily-forti-fied cities in the world by building 112 km of walls 3 metres thick and 15m high. The defences still survive and are being surveyed by archaeologists.

Archaeologists excavating parts of the Persian phase of the city have unearthed Inscriptions and evidence of extensive world trade: porcelain from China, ivory from India and amber from the Baltic.

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