Казахстанская правда

The Turkestan archaeological expedition discovered a treasure at the Kultobe settlement, which became an excellent gift for the professional community and history lovers for the Day of the Archaeologist, which is celebrated in our country today.

The famous archaeologist Erbulat Smagulov spoke about the valuable find and its significance for researchers of antiquity.

“Since the spring of this year, the Scientific Research Institute of Culture has been conducting large-scale archaeological excavations in Turkestan,” says Erbulat Smagulov. - When clearing the buildings of the ancient citadel of the settlement of Kultobe, where the medieval city of Yasy is located, a small treasure of ancient jewelry was discovered. It seems that this is exactly the case when "the spool is small, but expensive." The fact is that gold earrings, and there were as many as 5 of them in the treasure, determine and specify the dating of the last stage of the ancient citadel's existence.

- Strictly speaking, this find, as we think, is actually not a treasure at all. Dictionaries interpret the concept of a treasure as a deliberately hidden treasure. In this case, we are dealing with a completely different phenomenon, and this find in the ancient layers of the building of the Yasa citadel on the Kultobe settlement is not such an unexpected event. We were waiting for something like this.

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It can be assumed that the building of the citadel was not intended for “just life”. Here ceremonies and rituals were performed, since it was the sacred center of a certain tribal association. Ases or Yasov? Apparently, some rituals were accompanied by burials of things especially valuable for the participants in the action in the form of gifts to higher powers. This is quite common in ancient temple buildings, sanctuaries. Perhaps this is how a set of attributes of a woman's costume wrapped in a leather purse turned out to be in a small hole in the groin wall of the courtyard: a necklace of various beads, gold earrings inlaid with stones.

“Fortunately, this is not the first and, hopefully, not the last rare find from the ancient layers of Kultobe. In past years, I remember, literally 25 meters from here was found an impressive really treasure of silver and copper coins of the second half of the XIII - early XIV century. It was found in the layer of fire and destruction and thus marked the cultural layer of the end of the active life of this citadel. In the first half of the next century, the city of Yasy moved several hundred meters to the north.

But the current find comes from an ancient cultural layer, more than a millennium older than the layer with the coin hoard! Comparative analysis of the shape of gold earrings confirms our previous dating of the final layer of the ancient citadel of Yasa - II – III centuries AD. By the way, one exactly the same gold earring was found by us last season elsewhere in this layer.

Therefore, we can now quite convincingly date the time of the construction of the ancient citadel, at the latest, to the first centuries of our era. Let's hope that further clearing of even more ancient layers under Kultobe will give us finds that confirm our assumptions.