Sigitmen

Sigitmen (на ПРОЗА.РУ)

The city is known for the materials of archaeological research on the Sigitmin settlement, as well as the legends of local elders and the results of historical analysis. This settlement has not yet been associated with any locality mentioned in fasts and chronicles.

The supposed city was located near the village of Verkhny Chir-Yurt in Dagestan, where archaeologists discovered the remains of another city.

The first fortifications on the site of the city appear here in the middle of the 7th century, during the presence ther of the Western Turkic Khaganate, which at that time disputed the persians control over the trade route, which was a continuation of the Great Silk Road, laid here by the persians in the 2nd century BC.

The persians could not help but include this cape in their plans for the construction of fortresses along the entire Kumyk Tract. Their literati numbered 360 fortresses built by Anushirvan and Kavad in the 6th century from Derbent to the sources of the Terek. Shahinshah Kavad stopped for the night just as many times when he once made a review of his fortresses during the year.

At the beginning of the 8th century, with the arrival of the khazars, the fortress gets a finished look, and the fortress is growing posad, where the workshops of gunsmiths, stonecutters and bone cutters, living quarters and places for caravans who moved along the Great Silk Road from Derbent to the Kumyk Tract and the Lower Volga are located.

Now the military garrison of the fortress is formed mainly from the local population, to whom the khazar fortress was rented out. The khazars needed not so much the income from passing caravans here, but the possibility of using the Kumyk tract for military and strategic purposes. This was not the case in persian times, when the fortresses were only persians or related sarmatians, half-breeds aryan-turkic.

The participation of local tribes in the khazar armies during the campaigns in Transcaucasia, as well as in the Azov and Crimea, enriched the culture of the tribes and peoples of the Terek-Sulak interfluve. Gradually, a new Kumyk ethnic group is being formed in the depths of the Khazarus state on this territory.

The khazars built their cities on trade routes, both land and river, where they built their ports.

At the fortresses, they organized artisan villages, which attracted people of different ethnicities. The task of the artisans was to provide the military garrison in the fortress with weapons, food, horses and fodder. Under the cities, the merchant class was also formed, the most literate part of which was represented by jews. The jews had a written language, they sent letters with caravans to their addressees in the Crimea, Byzantium, China, Persia, Kiev, Europe, in which they reported on the prospects of trade in the territory of their presence. They received letters back with information about what and where they could sell and buy.

We can say that the khazars were able to create in their cities a system of providing their military garrisons at fortresses with everything necessary for service, military weapons, uniforms, which can be called a military-industrial complex, which was also used for civilian production, since this was required to provide trade caravans, as well as for effective work in agriculture and cattle breeding, which also included horse breeding.

The fortress at the city had rather long walls. The northern wall, about 600 meters long, stretched from the cape on the bank of the Sulak river, where the fortress stood, to the slope of the ridge. All this construction blocked access to the city that was once located on the upper Chir-Yurt settlement.

The eastern wall, consisting of two parts with a total length of about 400 meters, ran from the ridge to the opposite ravine. There were several towers in this wall, one of them was a watch tower with a diameter of about 11 meters.

The walls were built of ragged local stone, sometimes bonded with clay. The stones were not placed randomly, the heavier and larger ones came from the edge.

The thickness of the walls at the base was about 4 meters, slightly narrowing in height. On top of the stone, the outer part of the wall was covered with a shell, also made of ragged stone on clay.

The stratigraphy of archaeological cultures shows that the greatest thickness reaches the culture of the khazar period, when the city developed most intensively. This culture is mostly saltov culture. Judging by the time of its formation here, it was one of the earliest centers of the formation of this culture, which then spread throughout Khazaria, becoming its hallmark.

Ceramic dishes in the city were of the gray-clay type, living quarters, farm buildings, and food storage pits belong to the saltov-mayatsk culture by historians.

On one of the rocks there are pictures, which in science called Sigitim graffiti, with images of horsemen. The technique is attributed by historians to the proto-bulgars, who arrived here during the time of the huns, at the end of the 4th century after the birth of Christ.

At the city, a little away from it, on a ledge of rock, there was a tower surrounded by a wall 7 meters thick. The architectural culture of execution of all the structures of this fortress is fully synchronized with the main fortress.

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