Arkaim - Part I: Pearl of "The Land of Cities"

The archeological site Arkaim, in the Russian Chelyabinsk territory, was discovered in the summer of 1987 and declared a national archeological reserve in 1991. In 2005, Vladimir Putin himself visited the site which had become a national treasure. At the time of this writing, over twenty years later, one might assume that the excitement about this discovery and its significance would be waning, but instead, the interest this amazing, ancient site has attracted continues to increase.

Why all this excitement?

Many of the three to four thousand visitors to Arkaim every summer witness what some have called a veritable miracle: The remnants of this "Land of Cities" are thought to bear testimony to one of the most ancient civilizations known to man.

Walking among these ruins, people discover original designs, massive walls, complicated defensive structures, furnaces, craft workshops, especially early bronze forgeries and carefully designed infrastructures, as well as many other signs of a culture so ancient that their discovery has definitely disturbed many traditional archeologists. Here, it is believed, the first horses were domesticated and the first two-wheel chariots were built.

There are still scientists who insist upon placing “man’s origin” within certain rigid time-frames, even though they have long been dis-proven by many archeological discoveries. Nevertheless, for various reasons too complex to mention in this introductory article, these are still not added into our children’s history-books.

After the archaeologists, historians and ethnographers, the psychics arrived, along with prophets, pilgrims and members of various religious sects, all people thirsting for spiritual healing or enlightenment and each wanting to personally see “The Place”.

Arkaim has been featured in articles, both scientific and general, movies, presentations at scientific conferences and many carefully researched books and monographs which have since been published.

Many historians and archeologists agree that visitors to this area are viewing the ancestral homes of ancient Aryans, for which many scientists have searched diligently. Covering the vast territory of the Bolshaya Karaganskaya river valley, they believe that this is the place where at the turn of the third to second millennium BC a historical split occurred, namely that of Aryans dividing into two branches, the Indo-Iranian and Iranian, a scientific fact that had already been documented by linguists much earlier. Even some of the most conservative scientists are prepared to acknowledge that these places were the native lands of Zarathustra, the author of the sacred hymns of "Avesta", a sage as legendary as the Buddha or Mahomet.

Understandably, many individuals who had been searching for the tap-roots of their ancestral origins had difficulties calming their excitement and imagination. After all, this discovery by South Ural archaeologists did represent somewhat of a miracle even to those observers unaffected by such longings. It was one of those discoveries that would force any diligent scientist to reconsider the paradigms they had developed over decades if not centuries. The implications of the findings as well as the ensuing research were as important to the field of archeology as they were for the - too frequently minimized - “spirito-philosophical” needs of many of the pilgrims.

Arkaim's age represents a predicament which has forced historians to change their concepts of the Bronze Age on the territories of the Ural-Kazakhstan steppes. It now appears that the latter was not the era which was to define a world about to enter into its first experience of civilization. The discovery and signs of high levels of metallurgical development puts this region into another most significant position culturally, extending, as it does now, from the Mediterranean to present-day Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Very unique metal objects of amazing workmanship had been found at the coasts of the Aegean sea as well as in the Southern Ural Mountains, attesting to extensive cultural contacts. It now appears that these in fact had “migrated” by caravan - or wandered, as it were - not "from there to here", but "from here to there", namely from Russia to Greece rather than the reverse, as had been assumed.

The importance of such detailed clarifications of historical travel and whether it happened from hither to thither or vice-versa might be brushed aside. But their importance is not lost on people who consider them essential to their regional patriotic ambitions, not a comfortable arena to enter into in modern-day Russia, nor anywhere else in the world. After all, it is still a world bleeding from ideological conflicts based upon misused patriotic identifications. But discoveries of such importance are extremely rare, occurring maybe once in a century. So we must not be shy nor hide behind the memories of our deepest wounds from the most perverse of perpetrations, nor beneath newly created hysterias. Some of these fears are very understandable. Yet neither our ever-living wounds of World II nor of other ancient or recent regional wars should distract us from this noble goal of finding something so possibly uniting for feuding nations as a common gene-pool to much of humankind. Many sciences already do point to such a possibility, notably gene-samples from all races. Must such innocent curiosities and claims really continue to be so heavily burdened with memories of political abuses by truly deranged leaders whose names we need not mention here?

Arkaim Valley. Pilgrim’s camp - large and expansive.But reasonable reactions notwithstanding, why have people who are looking for their roots in the direction of Vedic ancestry been more suspect than any other indigenous people curious about their heritage? After all, it would appear to be an uncommonly large area upon which such ancestors would have enjoyed their apparently advanced culture. Such a culture would seem to have "fed" much of what we now call Western civilization and parts of Asia, including migrated tribes, such as American Indians and even Europeans settling America.

Moreover, as we also explore elsewhere regarding linguistic research efforts around the so-called Nostratic or Proto-Language question, some linguists are struggling with the possibility of linguistic ancestral roots for possibly ALL humankind, of all colors, so that the suspect idea of any "superiority" should be supported as an excitement for all of humanity maybe re-discovering its true origin and common spiritual heritage.

But even if we just return to the simple idea of a very ancient highly evolved Vedic culture, as many scientists such as archeologist Michael Cremo are discovering and support. Again: Why was this essential piece of possible human history and origins so completely "lost" to a searching world for millennia? After all, we had not lost all their ancient remains. (Cremo coined the term Human Devolution and used it as the title of one of his books to describe that hypothesis of our human race having de-volved from a high civilization, rather than evolved from cavemen.)

And why did someone as powerful as Anastasia, the recluse of the Siberian Taiga who many of our readers admire for what seem to be super-human powers and a deep, spiritual integrity, pause and then say out loud and with very conscious caution and deliberation, “I am Ved-Russ“, seemingly prepared to inherit a great cosmic rain of wrath upon such a claim? She explained to author Vladimir Megre that she was a member of an unbroken ancestral lineage hailing from the Vedic culture which used to extend from her native boreal forest lands to large parts of Europe. Cremo has inherited, maybe not cosmic, but “establishment” wrath and professional ridicule, along with many others who have even lost their University positions because of unusual discoveries and related publications they dared to disseminate. WHY must anything disappear that is not in keeping with the “prevailing paradigm” of the short-lived human fairy-tale constructed for and bottle-fed to us modern folk? What could be so dangerous about discovering a bit of missing - though admittedly quite fabulous and empowering - human history?

Some people claim that such discoveries as Arkaim do not happen by chance, that Time itself works upon them - as if a critical mass of expectation might bring them to consciousness. (Ed. note: Your editor could not miss the fact that the discovery of this site happened exactly 21 years ago, in the year when many other “earth-moving” events happened, all in keeping with what people with transpersonal leanings called the Harmonic Convergence. Even our completion day for this special Magazine - perchance - had fallen upon the anniversary date of that event, which was considered a turning-point in the evolution of the planet’s quality of consciousness).

Maybe there are other explanations yet for the strange events leading to the discovery and last-minute preservation of Arkaim - which was slated to be flooded to create a reservoir - only to be found in the eleventh hour by some schoolboys who received a can of condensed milk for their literally ground-breaking discovery. Actually, the ruins had been perfectly visible on aerial photographs taken prior to the year of the ancient city’s discovery. Experts had been confused, was the speculation offered, by the excellent preservation of the ancient monuments: everybody assumed that these kinds of accurate geometrical forms must have been of purely modern origin. Why was no-one asking about these strange-looking arrangements? In the Russia of the past, a "top-secret" country full of restrictions, it was not encouraged to ask possibly unwelcome questions, and yet, one might assume that the government itself may have wanted to explore these unusual, presumably "modern" arrangements.

The "miracle-rescue" of Arkaim, namely the fact that this precious site had practically been doomed, did not escape the attention of the mass media, who spoke about this aspect as the second miraculous fact about Arkaim, the first being its very existence. With Its location as a construction zone for a huge water reservoir, orders had already been signed on the highest governmental levels. At the time that archaeologists were called in, blueprints had been confirmed, large investments had been made and construction was already under way. The estimated time frame for job completion was only a few months, if not weeks away, and it seemed there was no power in the world capable of stopping such a heavy flywheel of a planned and very profitable economic investment and local necessity. The retaining dam had been erected and all that was left to do was to fill up a short crosspiece - and the spring floods would have left no trace of Arkaim.

This second miracle, however, was not heaven-made but created by Man. Many people still remember how scientists, journalists and intellectuals took a stand for the “Ural’s Troy” (a comparison which, it turned out later, actually flattered the ancient Troy, which is considered to be a millennium younger than this hoary site). The struggle for Arkaim’s rescue was part of a public crusade against the typical arbitrary treatment of the Soviet system of that time, namely a bureaucratic attitude with focus on utilitarian rather than cultural values. It did indeed help the cause that this system was nearly dead and that Ural’s branch of the Academy of Sciences (AS)Arkaim archeological site and a section of reconstructed wall. Ancien logs are sticking up from the ground. threatened to resign from the Academy if Arkaim was not protected.

Below are excerpts from letters received by the editorial office of the newspaper “The Science of Ural” which, at that time, was used as headquarters for the rescue campaign: “For how much longer will bureaucrats decide what is needed for the people and what is not? The Ministry of Water Industry does not need Arkaim. But we do!" And: “If Arkaim is not rescued, the idea of socialism for me will fall once and for all.”

The idea of socialism did fall indeed, but Arkaim remained.

What do scientists say about Arkaim? The man who has the honour of being the pioneer in the discovery of this ancient site, archaeologist Gennady Borisovich Zdanovich, explains: “I see Arkaim as the brightest example of an integration of primitiveness, unity and wholeness which combines very different functions. It is at once a fortress, a temple, a craft centre, and an inhabited settlement”. And astro-archeologist K. K. Bystrushkin adds another important note: “In addition, Arkaim is also a celestial observatory of extreme accuracy, the most complex of those presently known to mankind. In this respect it is compared to Stonehenge, the well-known megalithic structure standing on the Salisbury plain in Southern England. As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, it was believed to represent the most ancient observatory in the world. This hypothesis was confirmed and received wide recognition two hundred years later. However, Arkaim appears to be an observatory of much more sophistication than Stonehenge. Another important fact is its age: archeologists estimate that the age of Arkaim is close to 3800 - 3600 years. K. K. Bystrushkin, according to his methodology, increases this age by one thousand years. What do we do with evidence and a heritage of such a highly evolved culture - with an age of ~ 4800 years?...

Please read Part II (A Culture too Ancient for our History Books?) and Part III (An Ancient Celestial Observatory of Ultimate Accuracy) of the Arkaim article in Space of Love Magazine Issue #2 and #3. http://www.spaceoflovemagazine.com