Arkaim - Russia's Stonehenge, a true puzzle of the ancient world
Everyone has heard of Stonehenge. If you found yourself on the steppes of the Southern Urals and came into contact with a local tribe, spending months learning their language and gaining their trust, and their leader admitted you to become an honorary member of the clan (against the advice of their shaman) and finally, you asked them if they had ever heard of Stonehenge, well, their answer would probably be yes!
The circular stones of Wiltshire have become famous, earning their place in popular culture around the world. Yet, with great surprise, we are increasingly realizing that Stonehenge is not the only example of a megalithic circle in the world.
Archaeologists calculate that around 5 thousand similar structures exist across the Earth, at the most disparate geographical coordinates, indicating that this construction had a fundamental meaning for our ancestors.
England, therefore, does not have a monopoly on megalithic circles. Some of the most interesting such monuments are found within the borders of the former Soviet Union.
Arkaim, is one of them.
Аркаим (in Russian), is considered by some to be the most important and enigmatic archaeological site in northern Europe. The site is the subject of controversy and is sometimes referred to as Russia's Stonehenge. It is located on the outskirts of the Chelyabinsk region in the Southern Urals, just north of the border with Kazakhstan.
The site is generally dated to the 17th century BC, although earlier dates have been proposed, up to 2000 BC. The settlement belonged to the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, an ancient Bronze Age culture that lived in the northern part of the Eurasian steppe, on the border between Eastern Europe and Central Asia, in the period between 2100 and 1800 BC
The earliest known chariots were found in Sintashta tombs, and this culture is considered the likely origin of this technology, which later expanded throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient battle techniques. The Sintashta settlements are also important for incredible copper mining and bronze working, unusual for a steppe culture.
The site was discovered in 1987 by a team of scientists from Chelyabinsk who were planning to build an artificial lake in that area. The first excavations were directed by Gennadii Zdanovich. Initially the findings were practically ignored by the Soviet authorities but attention on the site grew after further archaeological excavations. In 1991 the site was designated a cultural reserve and in 2005 it was visited by Vladimir Putin.
The Arkaim settlement covers an area of 20 thousand square meters. Around the walls of Arkaim were arable fields irrigated by a system of canals. It consists of two circles of houses separated by a strafa, with a central square.
Early explorers also gave Arkaim another name, 'Swastika City', for at least a couple of reasons. The first is due to the site plan, which (with some imagination) may appear similar to the swastika symbol, albeit with rounded arms connected to a central ring instead of a cross.
The second reason is due to the fact that the site is attributed to the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, the proto-Aryan race, to which all Indo-European peoples belong, in an erroneous transposition of the linguistic families on the biological level. There are many who want to consider Arkaim as the place of origin of the 'superior white race', even if official science gives no value to this reasoning.
Beyond the politically incorrect association, the site is the subject of great interest from archaeoastronomers, and herein lies the reason for its association with Stonehenge. It has long been known that the English site was built for astronomical observation. The site allows the observation of 10 astronomical phenomena thanks to 22 elements, while Arkaim allows the observation of 18 with 30 elements.
From this point of view, it would seem that Arkaim is a better astronomical observatory than its English counterpart. According to Russian archaeologist KK Bystrushkin, Stonehenge offers an observation accuracy of 10 arcminutes, while Arkaim offers an accuracy of 1 arcminute. This is a disconcerting precision considering the antiquity of the site. To obtain the same precision we will have to wait for the work of Almagest of Greece about 2 thousand years later.
It might seem obvious to some, but the fact that these sites were apparently conceived as astronomical observatories, and even as calendars, even before the intuitions of the Egyptians and Greeks, forces us to attribute to these prehistoric cultures an index of complexity and refinement that until now has not still been recognized, to the point of hypothesizing the existence of an unknown or lost civilization in the distant past of human history.
Arkaim is just one example of the rich archaeological collection hidden in Russian territory. Unfortunately, a good part of them have been lost due to industrial progress, such as the site of Sarkel, a stone fortress from 830 BC Destroyed by the Soviet government in 1952 for the construction of the Cimlyansk Reservoir.
Furthermore, due to the secrecy and lack of academic cooperation during the Cold War, numerous sites have yet to be explored and analyzed and, perhaps, many more are yet to be discovered.
