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Once the world’s biggest city, the Silk Road metropolis of Merv in modern Turkmenistan destroyed by Genghis Khan’s son and the Mongols in AD1221 with an estimated 700,000 deaths. It never fully recovered
When George Curzon visited the ruined city of Merv in 1888, the vision of its decay overwhelmed him. “In the midst of an absolute wilderness of crumbling brick and clay,” the future viceroy of India wrote, “the spectacle of walls, towers, ramparts and domes, stretching in bewildering confusion to the horizon, reminds us that we are in the centre of bygone greatness.”
Modern-day visitors to the site of Merv in southern Turkmenistan can still tour its dusty, windswept remains. Like Curzon, they might struggle to imagine the true size, density and lushness of one of the world’s greatest vanished cities.
In its 12th-century pomp, Merv straddled the prosperous trade routes of the Silk Road. It was a capital of the Seljuk sultanate that extended from central Asia to the Mediterranean. According to some estimates, Merv was the biggest city in the world in AD1200, with a population of more than half a million people.
But only decades later, the city was effectively razed by the armies of Genghis Khan in a grisly conquest that resulted – if contemporary accounts are to be believed – in 700,000 deaths. The city was source of population for South Asia for few thousand years was destroyed in few days.
“Of all the countries of Iran,” al-Istakhri wrote of Merv, “these people were noted for their talents and education.” Yaqut al-Hamawi counted at least 10 significant libraries in the city, including one attached to a major mosque that contained 12,000 volumes.
In 1888, George Curzon saw only desolation: “Very decrepit and sorrowful looked those wasting walls of sun-dried clay, these broken arches and tottering towers; but there is magnificence in their very extent, and a voice in the sorrowful squalor of their ruin.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...d-turkmenistan by Kanishk Tharoor
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