Gonur Depe

Bronze Age city in the Karakum desert, the capital of an unknown civilization

Gonur Depe is a 3,000-year-old city in the middle of the Karakum desert, abandoned around 1500 BC when the Murghab river shifted course and left it dry. It sat undisturbed under sand for the next thirty centuries. Excavation began in the 1970s and exposed the layout of a planned city — a citadel surrounded by walled neighbourhoods, fire temples, royal tombs with chariots, a craftsmen's quarter — at a level of sophistication that no one had expected from this part of central Asia.

The site is roughly 60 km north of Mary and requires a four-wheel drive — the last section is unpaved track through the desert. Allow a full day for the round trip. There is no on-site museum; the best finds are in the Mary Museum and the National Museum in Ashgabat. The site itself is the experience: exposed mud-brick foundations in the middle of nothing, and a sense of how much of human history is still buried in places few people pay attention to.

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The Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi began excavating Gonur Depe in 1972 and continued until his death in 2013. He argued that the city was the capital of a fourth great Bronze Age civilization — alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus — and called it the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Other archaeologists are still arguing about whether he was right.

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