Earlier I posted about the Old Silk Road City of Otrār, located on the north bank of the middle stretches of the Syr Darya River (the Jaxartes of Classical Antiquity) near its confluence with the Arys River, about 105 miles northwest of the current-day city of Shymkent in Kazakhstan. Now it appears that archaeologists in Kazakhstan Have Unearthed An Ancient City near Shymkent:
The skulls of the people here are distinctly and artificially deformed; they are elongated, Seitkaliyev said. “These ‘distinctive markings’ are most famous with the Aztecs, but this was also a very common way for Sarmatian nobles to distinguish themselves from the commoners.” This evidence raises the possibility that the find could be a Sarmatian settlement. The Sarmatians were an Iron Age nomadic people of Caucasian appearance. In ancient times, the Sarmatians from Western Kazakhstan migrated in large numbers to Europe, but the majority of them went in an unknown direction,” Seitkaliyev said. “Our findings suggest that they settled in the territory of modern-day South Kazakhstan Oblast.
Evidences of deformed skulls have been found all over the steppes of North Central Asia as well as in the Tarrim bassin.It has been practiced at least since the Bronze Age up to the much more recent time of the Huns and Alan invasion of Europe.
ReplyDeleteNobody really knows for sure if the Samartians could be linked to the broader culture of the Scythians and themselves linked to the earlier Indo-Iranian or proto Indo-European Afanasevo and Andronovo cultures.
Jean-Emmanuel
Thanks for the comment. I am afraid I must yield the floor on this issue.
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