Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/559

Rh The Supposed Birthplace of Civilization 501

From. Wm. M. Davis, Carnegie Institution

A Mosque of Mediaeval Samarkand

The ruins of Samarkand are very extensive. Its position must have made it an important center for commerce and wealth probably throughout the whole period of prehistoric occupa- tion, as it has been during historic times. Situated in the heart of the very fertile oasis of the Zerafshan River, it lies also on the most open and easiest caravan routes connecting China and eastern Turkestan with Afghanistan, India, and Persia. Samarkand has, even within the past two thousand years, been sacked, destroyed, and rebuilt many times. L,ike Merv, its rebuild- ings have often been on adjoining sites, and the determining of the whole area covered by these various sites remains to be made. There is evidence that it is very extensive.

As in all Turkestan, so at Samarkand, the older structures still standing are those of the Mohammedan period. The many immense and wonderfully decorated mosques built by Tamerlane, though now falling into ruin, belong among the wonders of the world ; and this not only on account of their great size, but also because of the beauty of their decoration. Seen from Afrosiab, these ruins tower high above the rich foliage of the oasis city — evidence of the wealth of treasure that Tamerlane had accumulated in Turkestan within two centuries after Genghis Khan had sacked the country and massacred much of the population.

test between the Turanian and Aryan stocks ; but its problems, both physical and archeological, arepartsof the greater problem underlying the study of the de- velopment of man and his civilization on the great continent and of the environ- ment conditioning that development.

The many fragmentary peoples sur- viving in the remote corners and in the protected mountain fastnesses of Asia, preserving different languages, arts, and customs, indicate a very remote period

of differentiation, with subsequent long periods for separate development. They point also to the long periods of unrest and battling in which the survivors of the vanquished were forced into their present refuges. And this unrest was probably the remote prototype of that which in the later prehistoric and his- toric time sent out its waves from the Aralo- Caspian basin. It was probably from the beginning a condition in which the slowly progressive change toward