Walking in the tombs and mausoleums of Sayram was a peaceful experience. It is said that this is the “city of countless saints”, and indeed there was a profusion of famous mausoleums. Each was surrounded by a graveyard full of wild flowers. In the mausoleum of Ibrahim Ata, the father of the famous mystic and poet, Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, was this spectacular inflorescence, the flowers opening from the bottom up. There were several of these plants growing in the immediate vicinity of the tomb. What was this plant, I wondered. An inflorescence in the form of a dense spike like this seems to point to some species of the foxtail lilies (genus Eremurus).
That would fit; they are native to central Asia. Could I narrow it down to a single species? If I tried perhaps I would guess Eremerus robustus, a native of the nearby Tien Shan mountains. The tall stem bearing the spike fitted descriptions of the plant (this species is said to be the tallest in the genus), as did its long leaves. Photos of the flowers also matched, but since there is quite a variation in flower colour, a mismatch wouldn’t have told me anything. I think I will tentatively go with this identification.
The most elaborate of the mausoleums of Sayram was also the furthest from the center of the town. Outside the gate was a very modern steel pedestal bearing a QR code which you could scan to get to a web page with information on the structure which you were about to see. It said more than the sign at the gate which merely mentioned by name Ibrahim Ata from the 10th or 11th century CE.
The web page gave more information in the impersonal way of professional archaeological writing. Ata means father, and the word is added to Ibrahim’s name to indicate that he was the father of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the renowned Sufi preacher and poet whose tomb in nearby Turkestan (formerly Yasi) was ordered to be rebuilt by Timur in the 14th century. Ibrahim himself was a cleric and preacher, one of the “countless saints of Sayram”, when the silk route city was the center of Islamic proselytisation. We walked the long path from the gate up a slope to his mausoleum on a little hill. It was lined by remains of columns whose bases were decorated with colourful tiles. Gardeners tended the flowerbeds. One of them stood up to smile at us and asked “Indian?” We nodded and smiled back. Kazakhstan is big on old Bollywood films.
The tomb itself was the plain brick structure which seemed to be common to the town. The first memorial was built between the 12th and 14th centuries, but little of that remains. Another structure was erected sometime between the 16th and 17th centuries. It lasted for a while and then was rebuilt in the 19th century. An earthquake in the mid-20th century damaged it, and it was subsequently repaired. It wasn’t clear to me whether the bricks were the from 16th century, the 19th century, or the 20th. But if the shape of the bricks evolved over time, then one could say that at least the brick facing on the walls are contemporary to the Timur’s memorial to the son. But the bricks at the entrance gate were similar to these, so perhaps the shape of bricks has not changed much over the centuries. I wish now that I had bothered to measure the sizes of the bricks.
Inside was the grave covered by a silk cloth. I looked carefully at the lattice work on the window behind it. It seems to have been cast as a single block of concrete. That would then have to be a piece from the Soviet times, which fits with the record of repairs made in the late 20th century. I would have liked to touch the white-washed beams to see whether they were also cast in concrete. Since they supported the dome, which often is the part most susceptible to earthquakes, it would seem logical. But I was a little shy of walking around the grave. I looked at the walls around the door instead. They were thick, and seemed to be made of hard packed mud. This had to be older than the 19th century. Could it be as old as the 14th century? I have no idea how construction methods in this region developed, so I will have to leave aside speculation as I search for reading material.
The mausoleum has been incorporated into the central Asian religious tourism circuit. The importance of Yasawi’s tomb as a site for religious tourism has grown since the independence of the central Asian republics, and a resurgence in nationalism across the area. Ibrahim Ata’s tomb is not nearly as famous, but it has resonance in the region: tracing family lineages is a strong cultural staple in this part of the world. We sat quietly on a bench and observed a thin but constant stream of people coming in to pray. These tombs seemed to have deeper connections to everyday life than the mosques of the villages. But perhaps, like any tourist, I was not seeing the complete picture. Cultures are hard to pin down in a few words anyway.
Common wood-pigeons (Columba palumbus) range over Eurasia, from Iceland to Mongolia, and northern Finland to Oman. They can be seen in coastal Algeria, and, during winter, in the lower Himalayas. In spite of this, I haven’t seen it in India. I took the photo you see here in Dendropark in Shymkent. My only previous sighting was in the Jardin du Palais Royal twenty years ago. If you don’t notice the patch of white on its neck you could dismiss it for the feral pigeons that you see everywhere. The patch is so distinct, though, that I don’t think I would miss it. Interestingly, these pigeons had a white patch on their necks, although central Asia has a large population of birds with cinnamon coloured patches.
I have a photo of the bird from Paris (they seem to like urban parks) but not much of a memory of its behaviour. This time I saw several fly together and land on trees near me. Some of them hopped on to the ground and began to forage; they are omnivorous, eating insects, leaves, grain, fruit, or flowers. I couldn’t see what they were pecking at. They are still considered fair game for hunters, and their large population is not endangered by this. Among the pigeons and doves whose ages have been recorded, this is the species in which an individual has been seen to live longest: over 17 years.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
Sayram was one of the trading towns on the old silk route which was never completely destroyed. It changed over time until now, when it is an industrial suburb of Shymkent, Kazakhstan’s third largest town. We spent half the morning hopping from one medieval tomb to another, and then we found that it was time for our elevenses. A sign nearby proclaimed a cafe and bakery, so we made our way to it. The busy dusty roads did not promise much, but as soon as we entered we were greeted by wall-to-wall displays of biscuits, cakes, and little pastries. An espresso machine was visible at the bar. “Lovely,” I said and ordered the coffees, leaving the choice of cakes to The Family.
There were only two tables in the cafe, and one was taken by a young mother and her child. The child tried to engage with me when I sat down. When The Family came to the table she was even more excited, and showed us all her toys. The mother finished her coffee, apologized, and left with the girl in tow. We were left to our cakes and coffee. “Rather decent,” The Family said, and chose a couple of biscuits more. It turned out to be a good idea, since we wouldn’t get to lunch till well after two.
The western wall of the tomb of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi is covered with the blue glazed bricks famous from the cities of the silk route. They were made by Persian artisans brought to this region by Timur specially for making the bricks. I took a photo of the wonderful abstract shapes. Later I learnt to read the writing: in each of the squares it says Allah. The angular Khufic script is perfect for architectural calligraphy, something I’d not realized when I saw it on paper.
A disclaimer right at the beginning: just because a plant is common doesn’t mean that I’m able to identify it. Since I’ve been to this arid part of central Asia only once, even the claim that these plants are common is only based on the assumption that I’m not likely to have been lucky enough to see a very rare plant on my quick passage through this part of the world.
The group of flowers that you see in the gallery above (and the featured photo) were all taken at the lip of the Valley of Castles area of the Charyn Canyon. I think the white flowers are a variety of Yarrow, the bushy plant with small yellow flowers which covered large areas is possibly a specie of Artemisia, and the yellow flower on the tall stalk could be a tulip poppy. But I could be wrong, and feel free to give your IDs in the comments.
I saw this second group of three plants at the lip of the Black Canyon, maybe 50 kilometers away. This was an equally arid area, but the outcrop I stood on was windy. As a result all three plants were low spreading herbs. I don’t even have tentative identification for any of these.
Long and winding: that was the best description of the road between Sayram and Shymkent. But it was nothing to sing about, I thought. The Family pointed out that it was a blind road. When you go through a road in a suburb you expect to see gardens and lawns, people going about, some neighbourly activity visible. There was nothing here. Just walls interrupted with gates. “Isn’t it odd?” she asked. I nodded and began to take photos. It was odd because it wasn’t even the kind of high-income area where people would be obsessed with privacy.
When I looked carefully I could see two kinds of houses on the road. There were those with a gate and blank high walls around it, not even a house in sight beyond it. “Are there houses behind the walls? Or are these plots for development?” I mused. Then there were the walls houses which seemed to back into the street. You could see a row of windows piercing the wall, but no door. Only the large gate seemed to give access to the house. Later we were told that these were Kazakh and Uzbek houses. The Kazakh houses are not visible from the street. The Uzbek houses back on to the street, but open into a secret garden accessible through the gate.
We saw a house under construction. A temporary wall seems to be built first, a gate is set into it, and the construction begins behind it. The temporary wall will be raised later to hide the house from the street. We discovered later that neighbours drop by to each others’ houses, and that there is informal socializing. But none of this is visible to passers by. I wonder about the history which led to this style of life.
Sharyn river descends from the Tien Shan mountains and flows for almost 400 kilometers. Of this, a stretch of about 50 kilometers cuts through sedimentary rock. This is one of the main tourist attractions outside Almaty. I’d started with the thought of taking a couple of days’ tour through the area, with a night’s glamping or two thrown in. But The Family developed a back problem before we left, and I dropped the idea altogether. After three days in and around Almaty, The Family declared that her back was fit for a long day’s drive. So we decided to visit the part of the Charyn canyon which is called the Valley of Castles.
As we approached the canyon the flat steppes turned into a rolling landscape covered with the thin vegetation of arid parts of the world: some grass, some low herbs. I learnt later that this is a 80 meter thick layer of sandy soil laid down by the action of rivers and wind during the Cenozoic era. Most of this soil has been laid down in the time after the collision of the Indian and Asian plates, and the raising of the high barrier of Tibet which prevented the Asian monsoon from reaching this part of the world.
The Sharyn river has dug through this mud and then cut through the Paleozoic rocks below, exposing the previous geology of the region. i could see a thin lighter coloured layer of rock between the soil and the red rocks below. Over centuries, the water has carved the wonderful shapes that you see here. The day had been overcast. Weather seemed to be complicated here. The region lies between the tropical and mid-latitude circulations of the atmosphere, and weather is determined by the interactions of these two stable circulations with the Atlantic westerlies.
It never rained, but the light did not improve till sunset, so we never saw the blazing colours that the canyon is famous for. We trudged back to the tourist center for a tea and cake at the cafe. Then it was time to locate our car and drive for two hundred kilometers back to Almaty. It’s this long drive that makes it worthwhile to see the canyon as part of a longer trip from Almaty. After all there are a lot of sights in this part of Kazakhstan, and you can get in pretty long walks.
Eurasian Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) are very hard to find in India. I’m pretty sure that I heard one in the Kashmir valley, but I managed to photograph one only in Kazakhstan. This photo is from the shores of Sorbulak lake outside Almaty. Kashmir is at the southern edge of its range. It is largely a northern bird, found across Europe and into Asia north of Tibet, even as far east as Mongolia. In Mongolia the range of C. monedula overlaps with that of Daurian jackdaws (C. dauuricus). I enjoyed watching this smallest member of the crow family. It is a very social bird, and many of them flew around together, taking off, circling a part of the lake and coming back in a bunch to land. Apparently it pair bonds for many years, perhaps for life. Their behaviour looked as complex as that of the house crows (C. splendens) which I’ve seen. I hope to run into jackdaws again somewhere. I’m slowly working my way through the corvids of the world. Will I get to watch them all?
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
Humankind, all of it, is closely related not only through our common origin about three thousand centuries ago, but through constant remixing as groups migrated over and over again, seeking better living across deserts and seas. All this unwritten history is revealed by the words of our genes, whose alphabet was deciphered less than a century ago. This script is common to all life, and must have developed a few tens of millions of centuries ago. In sharp contrast, less than 35 centuries have passed since humans invented writing. The period immediately preceding this is a great mystery. There are material remains from immediately before written history: cultures, in all senses of the word, except for the existence of books and records. Kazakhstan is part of the region through which the recent past of human history flowed, and it was fun to trace connections as we travelled through this wonderful country.
The most recent layers of history are the easiest to peel away. The expansion of Rus towards the east in the 19th century has left its mark on the draining of the Aral Sea, the radioactive sector called the Polygon where nuclear tests were done, and in the ethnic composition of Kazakhstan. But it also left beautiful churches and a wealth of knowledge of natural history and the deep past of humanity. The layers before that are also easy to discern: the westward movement of nomads out of Xinjiang, bringing with them the Turkic language that replaced the Indo-European tongues previously used across the steppes, and the backward flow of Islam along their route.
Everything before that requires deep study. Fortunately more than a century of scholarship exists, and is easy to find today. Some of it surprised me. The cultural memory of Tengri-ism, the ancient Indo-European belief in the god of the sky and the goddess of the earth is reproduced in the colours of the mosques of Kazakhstan. Very often the domes are blue. Blue domes flourish across modern Almaty and Astana: a revival of the old ways. The original god of the sky, *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, was remembered by the Greeks as Zeus. The Rigvedas remember the old deities as Dyaus, the sky, and the earth mother of Indra.
And horses? Where did this modern ship of the steppes come from? Genetics points to an origin 35 centuries ago, in the Volga-Don region. This points to the spread of this animal along with the horse drawn spoked chariots of war whose remains are found in the burial mounds of the Sintashta culture. The mobility of these horse-drawn chariots was a major advantage in wars against fixed settlements. I wonder whether the later name Purandhara, the destroyer of towns, by which Indra is sometimes known, has something to do with this. One remnant of nomadism in modern Kazakh life were rules of exogamy according to which “original” tribe you belonged to. This resonated with the notion of gotras in the Rigveda, and from which traditional exogamy rules of Indian cultures descend.
Somewhere in the middle of the last forty centuries of cultures ebbing and flowing across the grassy landscape of central Asia came the age of the Sakas. These golden warriors, as modern Kazakhstan calls them, are recorded across the histories of Asia and Europe. They are called Scythians in the west, after the description by Herodotus. Ancient Persians distinguished between different tribes of the Sakas: the warriors of Kazakhstan were described as the tribe wearing peaked caps, but another tribe was described as the people who drank houma. The name of the drink is cognate to the soma which appears a few times in the Rigveda. So the Indian contact with the Sakas is perhaps older than the events of 78 CE which marks the beginning of the Indian national calendar called the Saka calendar. By many accounts, the beginning of the trade routes now called the Silk Route started in the pax mundi imposed by Han China, the Saka dynasty called Kushans of India, the Parthian dynasty of Iran, and the Roman state.
The earliest travellers of these horizon-wide plains that we know of from their material culture are the pastoral nomads now called Yamanayas. Perhaps originating somewhere in the Volga-Caspian region, they and their culture travelled east on solid-wheeled ox-drawn wagons called ger, with tents that they called yurt. As the Yamanayas travelled, their language, now called proto Indo-European, PIE, beame the koine of the steppes, before fragmenting into other languages. The yurt are still visible across Kazakhstan. I sat in one in the ski-resort of Shimbulak and sipped a local aperitif, which I savoured as much as this connection with some of my ancient ancestors. It was interesting to sip a modern decendant of soma, sitting in a modern descdendant of the yurt, talking to The Family in a language which is a modern descendant of PIE.
Don't hold your breath 