Merv, Turkmenistan: Oasis Water, Empire and the Archaeology of a Lost City

Why would a great city move? At Merv, in the Karakum Desert of southeastern Turkmenistan, it did so again and again: a walled Achaemenid fortress, a square Hellenistic town beside it, a vast Seljuk capital to the west, and a smaller Timurid city to the south, all laid out across the same oasis over some two thousand years. The answer lies in the water of the Murghab River, which made the oasis, sustained its cities and, when its canals were broken, left them to the desert. Merv, Turkmenistan, is the place to read that story on the ground, and on Day 10 of our small group tour through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the group spends a full day there.

The Murghab oasis: why Merv, Turkmenistan, exists at all

The silt of the Murghab River has laid down an alluvial fan in the Karakum, and on that fan grew an oasis that ICOMOS, the body that evaluated Merv for UNESCO, measures at about 85 by 74 kilometres. Bronze Age villages, dated by ICOMOS to about 2500 to 1200 BC, clustered in the north of the oasis, near where the river then emerged. Over the following centuries, as irrigation improved and canals reached further, the main centres shifted south, and around 500 BC a new city was founded on the eastern side of the oasis. Every later city at Merv stands near it.

This is the logic that ties Merv to the other oases of the route. Further east, our article on the karez irrigation system explains how other Silk Road oases drew water from underground; at Merv the source was a river, managed through canals and cisterns. For broader orientation to the country, our guide to Turkmenistan for curious travellers gives an overview of Merv among the country’s other sites; this article stays with the water and the cities it made.

Erk Kala: the first city

The oldest of Merv’s walled cities is Erk Kala, a fortified enclosure of about 20 hectares founded around 500 BC. ICOMOS describes it as a walled and moated polygon whose ramparts survive to about 30 metres, with an inner citadel. ICOMOS notes that Achaemenid-period sources, including the Bisitun inscription of Darius the Great, already attest Margiana, the region around it.

Gyaur Kala: Antiochia Margiana

After Alexander’s conquests, the Seleucid king Antiochus I refounded the city as an Antioch, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica; it is known as Antiochia Margiana. In a 2003 article on the site, the archaeologist Tim Williams of University College London describes how the Hellenistic city grew far larger around 280 BC, with Erk Kala becoming its citadel. The new square enclosure, now called Gyaur Kala, has walls that ICOMOS gives as about 2 kilometres long, and it remained occupied, in ICOMOS’s estimate, for about 1,500 years, through the Parthian and Sasanian periods and into the early Islamic era.

ICOMOS even raises the possibility that Roman soldiers captured by the Parthians after the battle of Carrhae in 53 BC were settled in the oasis, an echo of how far the Parthian world, whose early royal citadel is described in our article on Nisa further west, reached.

Gyaur Kala also shows how many faiths met at Merv. ICOMOS records a Buddhist stupa and monastery in its southeastern corner, the westernmost excavated Buddhist structure, and the Beni Makhan mosque, whose cistern reveals how water was distributed underground within the walls. The last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, was killed near Merv in 651, and after his death, ICOMOS notes, Islam became the dominant faith.

A capital of the eastern caliphate

Under the Arabs, Merv became a base for expansion further east. According to the Iran Turan project at Leiden University, Abu Muslim took control of Merv in the 740s and launched from there the movement that brought the Abbasid dynasty to power, and Merv became the administrative centre of the eastern caliphate and the capital of Khorasan. Between 813 and 818 the caliph al-Ma’mun lived there, making Merv, for those years, the caliph’s residence. Once he left, Gyaur Kala declined and the city grew westward.

Sultan Kala: the Seljuk capital

The new city to the west became the greatest of Merv’s cities. In Williams’s account, Sultan Kala was founded in the seventh or eighth century, with the Madjan canal as its central waterway. Under the Seljuk Turks it became the capital of an empire. ICOMOS records that the city was walled by Malikshah, who reigned from 1072 to 1092, and that Sanjar, who reigned from 1118 to 1157, later walled its northern and southern suburbs. The Seljuk city spread over more than 600 hectares, and its libraries drew scholars, ICOMOS notes, including Omar Khayyam and the geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi.

The walls of Sultan Kala and its citadel, the Shahriyar Ark, together run for about 12 kilometres, with towers, posterns, stairways, galleries and crenellations from two building phases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Even eroded, they give a sense of the scale of the place; the Iran Turan project, drawing on the book Silk Road Cities, puts the Seljuk city, estimates of which vary with how much of its suburbs is counted, at about 1,800 hectares, with a population estimated at roughly 150,000, the largest town in Central Asia in its day.

Was Merv really the largest city in the world?

Possibly, but the claim is contested. The historian Tertius Chandler estimated that Merv was the largest city in the world around 1150, with about 200,000 people, but lower estimates have also been proposed, and the figure rests on estimates rather than records. The book Silk Road Cities, as cited by Leiden University’s Iran Turan project, calls it the largest town in Central Asia in its day.

The mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar

At the centre of Sultan Kala stands the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar. Archnet, the architectural archive of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, describes a brick cube about 27 metres square carrying a dome nearly 18 metres across, with arched galleries on the upper storey, two rows of blind arches at the base of the dome and carved brick and terracotta decoration. It credits the building to Muhammad ibn Aziz of Sarakhs. The outer dome was once covered in turquoise tiles; inside, the interlaced ribs of the inner dome form an eight-pointed star at its centre.

The mausoleum originally formed part of a larger religious and palace complex, linked by a grilled window to a mosque on its west, but none of the surrounding buildings survive. It has been restored several times, including the dome in 1911 and the galleries in recent decades, and Archnet notes that some of the twelfth-century terracotta may have been lost in the reconstruction of the 1990s.

Köshks, mausolea and icehouses beyond the walls

Outside the great enclosures the oasis is scattered with smaller buildings that show how its people lived. The most striking are the köshks, mud-brick buildings whose walls rise in deep corrugations from raised platforms. Williams describes the Greater Kyz Kala as having massive corrugated walls about 12 metres high on platforms about 4 metres high, and ICOMOS notes that the Greater and Lesser Kyz Kala each had principal rooms set around an upper courtyard above dimly lit ground floors.

Other monuments mark later layers of devotion. ICOMOS dates the mausoleum of Muhammad ibn Zayd to 1112, a domed chamber with a Kufic inscription and part of its decorated brick facade. Williams records that its early-twentieth-century concrete roof, too heavy for the structure, was replaced with a traditional earthen one. The oasis also preserves icehouses among its mud-brick structures, a reminder of how summer life in the desert was managed.

The later Islamic layers are scattered across the oasis too. ICOMOS lists the twelfth-century Seljuk mosque of Talkhattan Baba, the mausolea of Imam Bakr and Imam Shafi in the Talkhattan cemetery and three Timurid mausolea at Geok Gumbaz, each a small piece of the long Islamic history that followed the Seljuks.

1221 and after: when the water stopped

Merv’s Seljuk greatness ended in the Mongol invasion. ICOMOS records that the city was sacked in 1221 to 1222 and that its water system was destroyed. The medieval chronicler Ibn al-Athir put the dead at about 700,000 and Juvayni at more than 1,300,000; no record survives to confirm either figure. When the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh rebuilt the city in the fifteenth century, it was on a new site to the south, the walled town now called Abdullah Khan Kala; the Iran Turan project attributes the move to a shortage of water. A further suburb, Bairam Ala Khan Kala, was added in the eighteenth century.

The pattern of the whole site is the pattern of its water. Most of its cities stood where the canals of their own age could reach, and were left behind when they could not. Today the ruins lie within the State Historical and Cultural Park Ancient Merv, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1999; UCL’s Ancient Merv project describes the walled cities as enclosing more than 1,000 hectares of urban space.

Modern knowledge of the site comes from more than a century of fieldwork. UCL’s project page records work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a concentrated campaign by the South Turkmenistan Multidisciplinary Archaeological Expedition (YuTAKE) in the mid-twentieth century, the International Merv Project from 1992, and, from 2001, UCL’s Ancient Merv Project working with the park and Turkmen scholars.

What does the tour see at Merv?

Day 10 begins at ancient Merv and continues in the modern city of Mary. The tour page lists Erk Gala, Gyaur Gala with its Buddhist stupa and monastery, the Beni Makhan mosque, Soltan Gala, the köshks of Gyz Gala and Oglan Gala, the Askhab complex and the mausolea of Sultan Sanjar and Ibn Zeid. After lunch in Mary the group visits the local museum of history and ethnography and takes a walking tour of the city centre.

How physically demanding is a day at ancient Merv?

The tour is rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, and the walled cities alone enclose more than 1,000 hectares, with the monuments spread across them. The tour page says participants must be in excellent health, extremely mobile and live an active lifestyle, and that activities may include up to six hours a day of continuous strenuous, moderate to fast-paced activity over varied terrain. Raise any questions about walking and heat with a Tour Specialist, and health matters with your doctor, before you travel.

Why are Merv’s mud-brick walls so fragile?

Because they are made of earth, which wind, rain and groundwater wear away. Williams lists wind, rain and above all rising groundwater as the main threats to Merv’s mud-brick structures, and in 2000 the site was placed on the World Monuments Watch list of 100 endangered sites. Researchers working with the park have since studied soil chemistry to develop earth-based repairs, so that what is mended matches what survives.

Merv on the Stans route

Merv is the last stop in Turkmenistan. Before it, the group has seen two other faces of the country’s past: the Parthian citadel of Nisa below the Kopet Dag, and the medieval Khorezmian capital of Koneurgench. Earlier still, the desert castles of ancient Khorezm show the same dependence on canal water on another river, the Amu Darya. On Day 11 the route continues to Bukhara, and the broader story of the trade routes that linked these oases is told in our article on the history and legacy of the Silk Road. Our four-country journey through the Stans sets Merv within the whole route.

Reading a city that kept moving

Merv is less a single ruin than a sequence of answers to one question: where can a city stand in a desert? The Achaemenids, the Seleucids, the caliphs, the Seljuks and the Timurids each answered it differently, but always with the same river in mind. Move from Erk Kala across Gyaur Kala to the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, and you cross that history step by step.

Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you reach Merv after Nisa and Koneurgench, with the cities of Uzbekistan still ahead. If you would like to study the route’s landscapes and history in that way, our 28-day Stans tour gives Merv a full day of its own.