In the middle of the Kara Kum desert in the republic of Turkmenistan lies Merv, three ancient cities full of archaeological treasures and knowledge of the past. Dr Georgina Herrmann, a 1996 Rolex Award laureate, is one of the driving forces behind the international effort to reveal and understand the secrets of Merv
I was determined never to direct a dig," says Georgina Herrmann, co-director of the team that is uncovering the history of the three ancient cities of Merv in the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. Ironically, but most fortuitously for the world of archaeology, this sharp and unusually determined lady failed completely in her wish.
In 1991, Herrmann, a reader at University College London (UCL), was presented with the unparalleled opportunity to create the basic archaeological framework for Merv, a series of medieval cities in the Kara Kum desert. "Despite decades of work by Soviet scholars," she explains, "the cities of ancient Merv, once more famous than Samarkand and Bukhara, had been forgotten." It was an opportunity Herrmann could not pass up. She and colleague St John Simpson of the British Museum joined forces with a brilliant, hard-working Turkmen archaeologist named Kakamurad Kurbansakhatov to establish the International Merv Project, and they assembled an international team whose talent and broad experience are uncommon.
Herrmann also applied her considerable dynamism to fund-raising with fine results. Funding came from many sources, including the National Geographic Society in the United States, the British Academy, the British Museum, Coach Replica the British Institute of Persian Studies and the Max van Berchem Foundation based in Geneva. In 1996, Herrmann became a Laureate of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.
The city of Merv lies on the northern route of the famous silk road, the key trade route which once linked east and west. In its earliest period, after the mid-sixth century BC, a city known today as Erk Kala and Gyaur Kala successively became the eastern capital and garrison city of three Iranian empires. "Merv was an essential staging post for those travelling between northeast Iran and eastern Asia and China," says Herrmann. "It was a barometer of power. Whoever controlled Merv, controlled the region."
Herrmann says migration to Merv's second city, Sultan Kala, began when the affluent people left the densely populated, industrial heart of the old city and set up in more pleasant suburbs. This marked the beginning of the high point of this centre, and between the 10th and early 13th centuries Merv flourished.
Silkworms from China created a prosperous fabric industry. Impressive libraries were fabulously endowed, attracting scholars from all over the world, including the famous astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. The huge mausoleum complex of Sultan Sanjar, whose central dome still survives, was built. Merv, along with Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus, rose to become one of the most important cities of Islam.
Then, in 1221 and 1222 AD -- in three terrible sweeps -- the Mongols arrived, unleashing one of the greatest catastrophes of the medieval world. The Mongols looted the city, destroyed the dam on the Murghab river and Replica Burberry laid waste to anything they could not carry away. Two centuries after they left, a much smaller third centre was built, Abdullah Khan Kala, but the site spanned just 40 hectares and underlined Merv's relative decline. From an archaeological point of view, Merv is highly significant. Unlike other great cities of the past, Merv's walled urban centres were not built on top of each other, but next to one other--with each new hub moving a short distance west or south. The three cities of Merv, therefore, provide evidence of three distinct periods of history.
The latest global positioning systems and satellite technology has been used to record precise dimensions of city and monument layouts. In 1994, NASA'S space shuttle flew over Merv to take high-resolution pictures accurate to within ten metres.
Having now completed seven full seasons on site, the Merv Project has come up with extraordinary and unexpected finds, including one that shook the world of archaeometallurgy when the team uncovered the earliest-known Islamic crucible steel foundry. This proved that medieval craftsmen had perfected processes of high temperature co-fusion steel making up to 1200 [degrees] C, centuries before historians presumed it to have been done.
Research by Turkmen colleagues in recent years has caused another upset in established thinking. They have unearthed evidence that Merv continued to be inhabited after the Mongol massacre, a fact confirmed by Herrmann's teams but Replica Miu Miu Handbags one which contradicts written historical records. The wealth of new knowledge being uncovered extends to agriculture. Seed samples found on site have revealed that cotton was grown as early as the fifth century AD, centuries earlier than previously thought. The team has also collected a mass of evidence, such as ceramic fragments and bones, which reveals with extraordinary precision the day-to-day lives of the people, including precise details of what they ate. The sites have yielded thousands of shards, or fragments of pots, sometimes inscribed, and hundreds of coins.