Sarazm
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How it came to be
Sarazm lies on the left bank of the Zeravshan, 15 km west of Panjakent in northwestern Tajikistan; its name means where the land begins. Set between mountain pastures used by herders and a broad valley fit for farming and irrigation, it was lived in from the 4th millennium to the late 3rd millennium BCE.
Finds turned up by farming led Abdullah Isakov of the Tajik Academy of Sciences to begin excavating in 1977. Its people farmed and herded but also worked metal, and the town became a regional centre for making tools and ornaments of tin and copper. Its pottery shows contacts with the Iranian plateau, Baluchistan and Turkmenistan.
Its trade reached the Indus valley and the Indian Ocean and helped lay the ground for the great routes that later crossed Eurasia. A burial known as the tomb of the Sarazm princess yielded a bead necklace from the middle of the 4th millennium BCE. The site was inscribed in 2010.
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