Audio tour Historico - archeological site - Sarazm

Hello, dear guests! Welcome to Sarasm. This audio guide will introduce you to the history of this ancient settlement and will tell you about the undertaken excavations and the results of the research. We hope that information we provide will be interesting and useful for you. Let's start our fascinating travel through Sarazm. 

In the 70s of the XX century, when this area was under development for ploughing the new lands, farmers and the local population often was lucky to find antique things such as whole jugs, bronze tools, jewelry, etc., but because of their ignorance, they had never reported about it to the local history museums. Only in 1976 one of the residents decided to tell about the bronze axe, which he had kept for more than 6 years, to the researcher of the Penjikent archaeological base Isakov. Experienced archeologist, who had been exploring many monuments of the Penjikent region for several years, without wasting time immediately organized exploration activities. Next year the first excavation was established, where the building remains, fragments of pottery and stucco ceramics with paintings, grain-coats and other items related to the Neolithic and Bronze Age were found. Thus, one of the most important monuments of the proto-urban period was discovered, it was Sarazm.

The name Sarazm comes from Tajik "sari zamin", which stands for "beginning of the earth". The settlement is a plateau length of one and a half kilometers and at width of 400 meters.  Based on the found artifacts it had been established that people lived in that area were in the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age.

In ancient times Sarazm had an important strategic location in the Central Asia serving as a contact zone between nomadic tribes and the first agricultural settlers between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya. By establishing trade relationships between these two groups Sarasm contributed a lot to the improvement of the relations and became more significant in the region. Sarazm gradually became the main trading center in the Central Asia and established relations with settlements in the Eurasian Steppe Zone and the Aral Sea in the north, Turkmenistan and the Iranian Plateau in the west and the Indus Valley in the south. Much of this was facilitated by the availability of minerals in the vicinity of Sarazm making it the first large center for the mining of copper, tin and lead and other metals in the Central Asian interstream area in the 4th-3rd millennia BC.

 Thanks to decades of archeological researches four periods of habitation in the settlement have been revealed. Many palaces, public and residential buildings were found on the territory of the settlement. The settlement developed the production of pottery, mining and processing of metallurgical ores, manufacturing of jewelry made of precious stones. A total of 65 construction complexes were fully or partially explored at the Sarazm settlement.

Sarasm is a unique monument, which embodied the cultural ties of different peoples of the Central Asia. It was enlisted the World Heritage List based on two factors. First, Sarasm was a place of outstanding cultural exchange at a certain time. Four thousand years B.C. it had been considered as one of the trade centers of that period in the region.  The second factor - it is one of the civilizations that was an early urban civilization.

Now Sarazm has become a unique and very attractive tourist destination. Every year the destination receives many domestic and foreign tourists, who have an opportunity to get acquainted with the achievements of Tajik archaeologists.

We suggest you take a walk to the excavations under the roofs and learn more about each of them.