Merv

In southern Turkmenistan, on the edge of the Karakum, a cubic building stands by itself on flat ground. A dome on top, walls of mud brick and fired brick, nothing around it. This is the mausoleum of the Seljuk sultan Sanjar, and it once stood in the middle of one of the most populous cities in the world.

The city was Merv. What is left of it now is walls standing apart from one another in the desert, the stumps of towers, and this tomb.

A City Where The Water Runs Out

Merv existed because of one thing: the Murghab river. The river runs north and disappears into the desert; Merv was founded on the last fertile ground before it vanishes. The city sat on an oasis watered by canals taken off the river.

That position put it on the main line of the Silk Road. The roads to China in the east, to Iran and the Mediterranean in the west, to India in the south, crossed here. The city grew because it was a junction — the one point where caravans had to find water.

Cities Built Side By Side

The most unusual thing about Merv is that it is not one city. On the site there are several urban areas, adjoining but each ringed by its own walls.

The oldest is Erk Kala, then Gyaur Kala which encloses it, then Sultan Kala of the Seljuk period, then Abdullah Khan Kala of the Timurid period. Rather than pulling down the old city and building on top of it, each new dynasty founded a new city beside it and left the old one.

That makes Merv different from most ancient cities, which are read by digging through stacked layers. Here the periods sit next to one another. To see the street plan of one period you do not have to dig through another; you walk a few hundred metres.

Libraries And An Observatory

In the twelfth century, under the Seljuks, Merv was at its height. By some estimates it was then the most populous city in the world. The sources speak of a large number of libraries; geographers of the period single out its book collections.

Sultan Sanjar's mausoleum belongs to this period. Its dome is double-shelled: an inner dome, and a second dome standing clear of it outside. The technique gives an imposing height from outside without wrecking the proportions of the room within, and in later centuries it becomes standard in the architecture of the region.

A traveller who saw the building is said to have written that the blue tile of its dome could be made out from a day's journey away.

1221

In 1221 a Mongol army took the city. The casualty figures in the sources are very high and most likely exaggerated; what is certain is that the city never returned to its former size. The irrigation canals were destroyed, and in an arid oasis that is the kind of damage that makes a population impossible to recover.

Smaller settlements were founded on the site in later centuries, but none came near that scale. By the nineteenth century Merv was scattered ruins in the desert.

Today

Merv was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999. The site is very large and largely unexcavated — which is not a shortcoming but, for conservation, an advantage.

The real threat here is the material. Most of the structures are mud brick and fired brick, and both are defenceless against rain, wind and salt. Groundwater altered by irrigation carries salt upward, and the salt crystallises inside the walls and breaks the brick apart from within. The dome of the mausoleum is standing, but parts of the wall lines around it lose visible height from one year to the next.