Traces of Nineteenth-Century Buildings Found in Turkestan

TURKESTAN, KAZAKHSTAN—The Astana Times reports that excavations in southern Kazakhstan’s city of Old Turkestan, an ancient center of caravan trade, have uncovered inns known as caravanserai, bathhouses, and schools dated to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Archaeologist Marat Tuyakbayev of the Azret Sultan Museum said that caravanserai had been built near each of the city’s four gates. The newly unearthed inn featured niches to store documents, storage space, restrooms, reception rooms, a courtyard, a prayer room, and a one-room bathhouse called a muricha. The school was divided into two sections, perhaps to separate young boys and girls. “Children were studying literacy in this school and upon completion, they went to the medrese [an Islamic school],” Tuyakbayev said. Eight kilns and a pottery workshop were also found close to the Khoja Ahmed Yassawi mausoleum, a late fourteenth-century structure dedicated to the twelfth-century Turkic poet and Sufi mystic, he added. To read about a site in Kazakhstan where the earliest known evidence for modern apple domestication has been found, go to "On the Origin of Apples," one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2019.