Ruins

in the ‘Stans: Evidence of a Lost

Civilization in Central Asia
Mark Carlotto (mark@carlotto.us)

Abstract
In the 1950s, Viktor Sarianidi discovered the ruins of an ancient civilization
known as the Bactrian-Margina Archaeological Complex (BMAC) centered in
the Murghab Oasis of Turkmenistan. Sarianidi believed the people who
settled in this region had migrated east from Anatolia by way of
Mesopotamia in search of arable land. Others argue this civilization, which is
also known as the Oxus Civilization, was indigenous to the region preceded
by earlier civilizations dating back to the seventh millennium BCE. An
analysis of archaeological sites in Central Asia reveals that relatively few are
aligned to the cardinal points or in astronomical directions such as solstices
or lunar standstills. Using Charles Hapgood’s theory of crustal displacement
as a working hypothesis, almost two-dozen sites are shown to reference
previous locations of the North Pole. We propose that these sites were first
established tens of thousands of years ago when the climate was less arid
than it is today and that the Oxus and preceding civilizations in this region
were the descendants of an even earlier civilization that existed up until the
time of the last ice age.

1. Introduction
Central Asia corresponds roughly to the geographic region now occupied by the five
former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Turkmenistan. Long overlooked by mainstream archaeologists, the region began to
receive attention following Viktor Sarianidi’s discovery of the ruins of an ancient
civilization that he termed the Bactrian-Margina Archaeological Complex (BMAC),
also known as the Oxus Civilization, centered in the Murghab Oasis, Turkmenistan
and dated to 2200-1700 BCE.1 Sarianidi believed the people who settled in this
region had migrated east from Anatolia by way of Mesopotamia in search of arable
land. Lamberg-Karlovsky (2013) presents arguments that the Oxus Civilization was
indigenous to the region preceded by earlier civilizations dating back to the seventh
millennium BCE.

The present study was undertaken in part to better understand the regional context
of the Torgai steppe geoglyphs in northern Kazakhstan (Matuzeviciute et al 2015).

1 See https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/central-asias-lost-civilization
An examination of two-dozen of the geoglyphs, which include linear arrangements
of earthen mounds, cross figures, squares, and other shapes, suggested the
possibility that they were not the product of a single period or civilization but could
have been produced over a longer period of time (Carlotto 2020c). An analysis of the
cross geoglyphs dated by optically stimulated luminescence and astronomical
alignment indicated that older figures are more precisely aligned and better
executed than more recent ones. Three linear geoglyphs along with an adjacent
settlement are aligned in the direction of the ancient city of Merv over 900 miles
away. Thousands of years before Abu Rayhan al-Biruni’s earliest geodesy algorithms
for calculating Islamic qibla (Nasr 1976), there is no evidence that a Bronze Age
civilization in this or any other part of the world was capable of aligning sites
hundred of miles apart to one another. If the alignment of these geoglyphs to Merv is
not a coincidence, then such knowledge must have been inherited from an even
earlier prehistoric civilization.

In this paper, we explore the possibility that the Oxus and preceding civilizations in
this region were the descendants of an even earlier civilization that existed tens of
thousands of years ago up until the time of the last ice age. Section 2 discusses the
current and past climate in this region. An analysis of archaeological sites reveals
that relatively few sites are aligned to the cardinal points or in astronomical
directions such as solstices or lunar standstills. The majority of sites examined do
however appear to have been aligned relative to previous locations of the North
Pole (Hapgood 1958). Section 3 summarizes key ideas in Hapgood’s theory of
crustal displacement and our application of it to date certain archaeological sites.
Section 4 describes the alignments of four sites: Gonur Tepe, Merv, Samarkand, and
Koi Krylgan Kala. The alignments of these and other sites are analyzed in Section 5.
A new theory regarding the origin of civilization in this part of the world is outlined
in Section 6.

2. Climate Changes
Sarianidi’s discoveries followed the explorations of the American geologist Raphael
Pompelly a half-century earlier who published Explorations in Turkestan – a
compendium of reports describing the geology and archaeology of the region
(Pompelly 1905). Pompelly’s report describes several sites he visited including
Merv, an ancient city mentioned in the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism,
and Samarkand, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia.
Bordered by the Caspian Sea to the west and what’s left of the Aral Sera to the north,
much of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are deserts. Another report in Pompelly’s
book by William Davis describes the geography of the region:

A great part of Turkestan, south and east of the Aral Sea, is a desert plain
connecting southwestward with the lowland bordering the southern Caspian
by the Balkan gateway in the belt of highlands that, farther to the southeast,
forms the boundary of the Russian and Persian dominions. A large part of the
 desert plain is described by some of the Russian geologists as having been
covered by the Pliocene Aral-Caspian Sea, and a smaller southwestern part
by the post-Pliocene sea, whose waters have since then gradually withdrawn
to their present separate basins. It is evident that the varying area of this
great inland sea must have, directly and indirectly, exerted a controlling
influence on the distribution of the contemporary human inhabitants of the
region, if any such there were; hence the importance of gaining as full a
knowledge as possible of Aral-Caspian history in the course of our
explorations.

Davis goes on to say that “there seems to have been comparatively little discussion
of the relation of the Quaternary Aral-Caspian in Turkestan to the climatic changes
of the glacial period.”

Unlike most rivers that drain into oceans, seas, or lakes, the Murghab River, which
originates in the mountains of Afghanistan, flows south into the deserts of
Turkmenistan through the Murghab Oasis. In another report in Pompelly’s book
entitled “The Basin Of Eastern Persia And Sistan,” its author, Ellsworth Huntington,
states:

A study of the distribution and extent of the ruins which cover the oasis
indicates that in antiquity the extent of land under cultivation and the
number of inhabitants were not only greater than at present, but were
greater than would at present be possible, even if all the water of the
Murghab River, which sustains the oasis, were utilized with as much care as
is employed upon the experiment station of the Imperial Domain. It is
difficult to account for this unless the water-supply was formerly greater.

It is generally accepted that the past climate in this part of the world was much less
arid than it is today. Later on, in his report, Huntington references the following
observation by Vredenburg:

In all the valleys round Zara there are to be seen hundreds of stone walls
which are called "gorbland" or " dams of the infidels." Sometimes they stretch
right across the fiat, pebbly floors of the great valleys, which, for want of a
better name, are termed "rivers." They also occur across the entrance to most
of tbe tributory ravines and at various heights above the main valley. The
country is quite uninhabitable for want of water, and yet tbere is no doubt
about the nature of these walls, which are similar to works erected to the
present day in many regions of Baluchistan and Persia, being, in fact, nothing
but terraced fields. In many cases they still hold back the soil, formerly
cultivated, which has been heaped up against them… The absence of any
canals, the great height to which the walls are found up the tributary ravines,
show that the fields were not watered by means of some general scheme of
irrigation with canals deriving their supply from some reservoirs placed at a
greater altitude. Perennial springs, now everywhere where dried up, must
 have existed in all the ravines where these remains are found, which shows
how much greater the rainfall must have been formerly.

At the time of the last glacial maximum, around 20,000 years ago, sea levels were
approximately 120 meters below current levels and the string of basins stretching
from the Black Sea east to the Caspian and Aral seas were cut off from the
Mediterranean Sea. At that time (Figure 1), the glaciers in the Hindu Kush were
significantly larger. Fed by these glaciers, the volume of water in rivers flowing
north into Central Asia was greater than it is today forming a large freshwater lake
in the basin now occupied by the Caspian and Aral seas. A similar freshwater lake in
the Black Sea basin fed by rivers flowing south from Central Europe also existed at
this time.

When the glacial period ended, the climate in Central Asia became increasingly arid,
and these lakes began to shrink in size. Meanwhile, as polar ice sheets melted, global
sea levels began to rise. Ryan et al (1997) proposed that around 7500 years ago the
level of the Mediterranean Sea rose above the Bosporus causing the Black Sea basin
to flood. Chepalyga (2007) argues the flood event created a vast inland sea in what
he calls “a cascade of Eurasian basins” that existed 9,000 to 17,000 years ago (Figure
2). The area of the inland sea was about six times greater than that of the Great
Lakes of North America. According to Chepalyga, the timing and magnitude of the
flood event “would have been an impressive phenomenon to late Paleolithic humans
and could have been reflected in old epic poems and mythology. In particular, a
similar basin was described in the ‘Avesta’ (the Zoroastrian Holy Scriptures) under
the name of Vorukashah Sea.”

After the flood event as the climate in Central Asia became progressively more arid,
the water level of the Caspian and Aral seas decreased. Today, with the Amu Darya
(Oxus) River no longer reaching the Aral Sea, it has all but disappeared.

3. Shifted Pole Alignment Model

In Earth’s Shifting Crust, Charles Hapgood proposed the latest ice age in North
America ended as a result of a displacement of the earth’s crust that shifted the
geographic poles to their current positions in the Arctic/Antarctic (Hapgood 1958).
Hapgood estimated that before 12,000 to 18,000 years ago, the North Pole was
located near Hudson Bay in Canada. Using a shifted geographic pole alignment
model inspired by Hapgood’s theory hundreds of archaeological sites throughout
the world have been found to be aligned to four locations that are correlated with
Hapgood’s hypothesized pole locations suggesting that they may be vastly more
ancient than is currently thought (Carlotto 2020b). In our study of the Torgai
geoglyphs, two are aligned in the direction of the Hudson Bay pole, and two others
face even earlier poles. Could other structures in the region also reference previous
locations of the North Pole?
4. Study Area
Fifty archaeological sites in Central Asia downloaded from an online database2 were
selected for study. Site orientations were derived from azimuth angles (headings) of
rectangular structures and linear features. Only two-dozen of the images contained
structures both suitable and visible for analysis. An archaeoastronomy app known
as Sacred Directions3 that plots equinox, solstice, lunar standstill, and zenith passage
sunrise/sunset directions on aerial imagery was used to determine possible
alignments relative to current and past pole locations.

4.1 Gonur Tepe

Sarianidi spent more than four decades excavating the ruins at Gonur Tepe at the
edge of the Karakum Desert. According to Lamberg-Karlovsky (2013), Sarianidi
found different building levels with as many as four temples built on top of each
other and states “even after more than thirty years of research and excavation, the
chronology and stratigraphy of the BMAC remains deeply problematic.”

As seen from above, the palace complex at the center of the site is closely aligned to
the cardinal directions (Figure 4). Zooming out to see more of the site reveals an
eastern skew in the orientation of structures to the south. These structures are not
aligned in solar or lunar directions or toward any of the Hapgood poles but do
appear to indirectly reference the Hudson Bay pole. Specifically, the southern wall is
aligned in the winter solstice sunrise/summer solstice sunset direction relative to
the former pole. Interestingly, the complementary summer solstice sunrise/winter
solstice sunset direction relative to the Hudson Bay pole lines up along the
northeast-southwest diagonal of the site.

4.2 Ancient Merv

The ancient city of Merv is approximately 38 miles south of Gonur Tepe. In his aerial
archaeological survey, Williams (2011) identifies three walled structures at Merv:
Gyaur Kala (at one time the citadel for the larger Hellenistic city of Antiochia
Marginana), Sultan Kala, and Abdullah Khan Kala. Gyaur Kala is believed to be the
oldest part of the site, and Abdullah Khan Kala the most recent. Like Gonur, Gyaur
Kala, and Sultan Kala appear to reference the Hudson Bay pole. The north and south
walls of Gyaur Kala are aligned to the winter solstice sunrise/summer solstice
sunset relative to the Hudson Bay pole (Figure 5). And like Gonur, the summer
solstice sunrise/winter solstice sunset direction relative to the Hudson Bay pole is
along the northeast-southwest diagonal of the site. Structures within the Shahriyar
Ark section of Sultan Kala are similarly aligned (Figure 6).

Abdullah Khan Kala, which was founded in the 15th century, is aligned along current
solstice directions (Figure 7). Evidently a tendency to align sites in this part of the
world to solstices was established when the North Pole was in Hudson Bay and

2 See http://www.ancientlocations.net
3 See https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sacred-directions/id1454817888?mt=12
continued into the present age. As we shall see in the next section, twelve of the sites
examined are aligned in solstice directions relative to current or previous locations
of the North Pole.

But could these directions have some other explanation? In Zoroastrianism six
seasonal festivals are celebrated during the religious year.4 Two are associated with
equinoxes, two with solstices, and two with the mid-spring and fall. The alignments
of the south walls of Gonur Tepe and Gyaur Kala are 4-5° south of east. Sunrise in
this direction occurs in late winter just before the equinox and in early fall just after
the equinox and so do not appear to correspond to Zorastrian festival dates.

4.3 Samarkand
Gonur Tepe and Merv are located within the Murghab Oasis in southeastern
Turkmenistan. Samarkand is about 300 miles northeast of Merv in southeastern
Uzbekistan on the Zeravshan River. Thought to be one of the oldest cities in Central
Asia, the oldest part of Samarkand is a hill known as Afrosiah. Its alignment is
potentially even more interesting than Gonur and Merv. As shown in Figure 8,
excavated rectilinear ruins near the center of the hill are rotated too far from the
cardinal directions to align to solstices or Zorastrian mid-season sunrise/sunsets.
The ruins appear to be aligned both to the Norwegian Sea pole and in the direction
of Merv. If the alignment were toward Merv, Samarkand, like Merv, could be more
than 12,000 to 18,000 years old. Alternatively, if Samarkand was first established
when the North Pole was in the Norwegian Sea, the site could be 60,000 to 80,000
years old.5

4.4 Koi Krylgan Kala

Koi Krylgan Kala is an ancient temple complex in the Amu Darya (Oxus) Oasis in
Uzbekistan. Archaeological excavations in the 1950s unearthed numerous artifacts
including terracotta figures of gods and goddesses, most notably Anahita – the
divinity of the waters. 6 The six Zorastrian festivals are associated with the six
"primordial creations" of Ahura Mazda: sky, waters, earth, plant life, animal life,
humankind. The festival day honoring the water is May 25. As shown in Figure 9
(bottom left) the site is very closely aligned in the sunrise direction (red line) on
that day. It is also possible, that Koi Krylgan Kala may even be older than Samarkand
or Merv by virtue of its alignment to an even earlier position of the North Pole in
Greenland (Figure 9, bottom right) more than 80,000 years ago.

5. Analysis of Alignments
Of the fifty sites examined, 26 appear to be astronomically aligned relative to the
current or a previous location of the North Pole (Table 1). We found 11 alignments
to equinoxes, 12 to solstices, and 3 to lunar standstills. Surprisingly only 4 of the

4 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrian_festivals
5 https://beforeatlantis.com/2020/03/06/on-the-sequence-and-timing-of-pole-shifts/
6 See https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/05/koi-krylgan-kala/129473
sites are aligned to the current North Pole with the majority referencing previous
poles. Comparing alignment statistics of these sites in Central Asia with those in
other parts of the world reveals several interesting correlations (Table 2). In Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and Greece there are more sites aligned to the current pole than to
the Hudson Bay pole. In contrast, there are more sites in Central Asia and
Mesoamerica aligned to the Hudson Bay pole than to the current pole.

6. Discussion
Let us assume a three-part working hypothesis: 1) Hapgood’s theory of crustal
displacement, 2) human civilizations tend to align places of importance to the
geographic pole/cardinal directions or in astronomical directions relative to the
geographic pole at the time of construction, and 3) the probability that a site
survives depends on its age, i.e., there should be fewer sites aligned to older poles
than to more recent poles. The dramatic decrease in the number of sites in
Mesoamerica and Central Asia aligned to the current pole could be interpreted as a
loss of resources and/or megalithic construction technology following the Hudson
Bay pole shift. Based on the number of sites, both Mesoamerica and Central Asia
civilizations appear to peak during the time of the Hudson Bay pole and then
decline.

An analysis of site alignments in Egypt (Carlotto 2020a) suggests that the lack of
sites aligned to previous poles in Lower Egypt close to the Mediterranean could
have been the result of a flood or some other disaster 12,000-18,000 years ago
caused by the last crustal displacement event that destroyed those sites. In contrast,
there are numerous sites in Upper Egypt aligned to previous poles. Far from large
open bodies of water and geological faults, it is possible that civilization in Upper
Egypt survived the disaster. Civilizations partially destroyed in other parts of the
world could have recovered, perhaps with outside help. Given its proximity to
Egypt, it is possible that Greece and other parts of Europe were rebuilt after the last
pole shift.

The Epic of Gilgamesh describes a catastrophic flood that affected but did not
destroy Mesopotamian civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. It is unlikely that a
widespread Black Sea/Eurasian basin flood event destroyed a preexisting
civilization in Central Asia. It is more likely that subsequent climate changes made it
increasingly more difficult to survive in a place that was gradually becoming desert.
Although Central Asia was probably one of the major centers of civilization in the
early days of Oxus Civilization it later declined as the climate became more arid and
water resources increasingly scarce.

References
Raphael Pumpelly (1905) Explorations In Turkestan, Carnegie Institution of
Washington.

Charles H. Hapgood (1958) Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of
Earth Science, Pantheon Books.

William B.F. Ryan, Water C. Pitman III, Candace O. Major, Kazimieras Shimkus,
Vladimir Moscalenko, Glenn A. Jones, Petko Dimitrov, Naci Gorür, Mehmet Sakinç,
and Hüseyin Yüce Seyir (1997) “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf At 7.5
Kyr BP,” Marine Geology 138: 119–126.

A. L. Chepalyga (2007) "The late glacial great flood in the Ponto-Caspian basin". In
Yanko-Hombach, V.; Gilbert, A. S.; Panin, N.; Dolukhanov, P. M. (eds.). The Black Sea
Flood Question: Changes in Coastline, Climate, and Human Settlement, Springer:
118−148.

Tim Williams (2011-2012) “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photography: Exploring the
Medieval City of Merv, on the Silk Roads of Central Asia,” Archaeology International
15: 54-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ai.1508

C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (2013) “The Oxus Civilization,” CuPAUAM 39, 2013: 21-63
ISSN 0211-1608 22.

G. Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, A.V. Logvin, I. Shevnina, A.M. Seitov, J. Feng, and L. Zhou
(2015) “OSL dates for the ancient geometric earthworks of Kazakhstan,”
Archaeological Research in Asia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2015.12.001.

Mark Carlotto (2020a) “Toward a New Understanding of the Alignment of Ancient
Egyptian Sites,” Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3526820.

Mark Carlotto (2020b) “A New Model to Explain the Alignment of Certain Ancient
Sites,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 34, No. 2.
https://doi.org/10.31275/20201619

Mark J. Carlotto (2020c) “Analyzing the Geometry of the Torgai Steppe Geoglyphs,”
http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.23925.19681

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1976) Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study, World of Islam
Festival Publishing Company Ltd.: 92-93.




Table 1 Alignments of Central Asian archaeological sites to the current Arctic (AR), and
previous Hudson Bay (HB), Norwegian Sea (NS), Greenland (GR), and Bering Sea (BS) poles.
Key to alignments: equinox (E), solstice (S), and major lunar standstill (M).

Site Latitude Longitude AR HB NS GR BS

Alexandria, Kapisa (Merv) 37.663725 62.191077 S
Alexandria, Eucratidia 37.164211 69.412297 M E
Alexandria Caucasia 34.992473 69.309427 S
Alexandria Charax 30.653887 50.274121 S
Annau 37.896414 58.545443 M
Arzhan 52.05974 93.604524 S
Bactra 36.768644 66.900755 E
Bala Hisar 34.168345 71.737313 E
Bamiyan 34.832048 67.826735 E
Bukhara 39.777765 64.410908 S
Drapsaka 36.742837 68.870817 E
Gonur Tepe 38.213451 62.03784 S
Jiaohe 42.951296 89.063638 M
Koi Krylgan Kala 41.755198 61.116948 E
Marakanda ? 39.669061 66.989574 E
Mes Aynak ? 34.264588 69.288681 S
Namazga Tepe 37.389403 59.56457 S
Nautaca 39.056472 66.827802 S
Por-Bazhyn 50.615156 97.384863 S
Samarkand 39.67591 66.985031 E
Subashi 41.855952 83.047043 E
Surkh Kotal 36.036076 68.589181 S
Tilla Bulak 37.710743 66.800703 E
Tilla Tepe North 36.706793 65.786792 S
Ulug Depe ? 37.155373 60.028433 E

Table 2 Regional site alignment distributions and correlation coefficients.

Central Asia Egypt Mesoamerica Mesopotamia Greek Temples

AR 0.15 0.62 0.27 0.42 0.30
HB 0.42 0.10 0.45 0.24 0.24
NS 0.08 0.04 0.13 0.05 0.12
GR 0.23 0.19 0.11 0.13 0.16
BS 0.12 0.04 0.04 0.16 0.18
AR HB NS GR BS
Central Asia 0.15 0.42 0.08 0.23 0.12
Egypt 0.62 0.10 0.04 0.19 0.04 -0.06
Mesoamerica 0.27 0.45 0.13 0.11 0.04 0.81 0.26
Mesopotamia 0.42 0.24 0.05 0.13 0.16 0.24 0.87 0.53
Greek Temples 0.30 0.24 0.12 0.16 0.18 0.38 0.80 0.63 0.99



Figure 1 Landcover in Central Asia at present (top) and at the time of the last glacial maximum
20,000 years ago (bottom). Google Earth and Zürich University of Applied Sciences.7

7 See https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/blue-marble-sea-level-ice-and-vegetation-changes-

19000bc-10000ad/


Figure 2 Central Asia region (top) with color-coded elevation map (bottom) showing
interconnected basins of the Aral, Caspian, and Black Seas. Google Earth.

Figure 3 Locations of geoglyphs (squares) and archaeological sites (circles) distributed
around the Eurasian basin. Google Earth.

Figure 4 Gonur Tepe alignments to the cardinal directions (top) and to solstices relative to the
Hudson Bay pole. Apple Maps.

Figure 5 Gyaur Kala is aligned to the solstices relative to the Hudson Bay pole. Apple Maps.

Figure 6 Structures within the Shahriyar Ark section of Sultan Kala are aligned to the solstices
relative to the Hudson Bay pole. Apple Maps.

Figure 7 Abdullah Khan Kala is aligned in the current summer solstice sunrise/winter solstice
sunset direction. Apple Maps.

Figure 8 Alignments of Samarkand to the Norwegian Sea pole (white dotted lines) and in the
direction of Merv (orange line). Apple Maps.


Figure 9 Aerial photo of Koi Krylgan Kala8 (top) and alignments to mid-season sunrise/sunset
direction (bottom left) and to Greenland pole (bottom right). Apple Maps.

8 See https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/koi-krylgan-kala-atlantis.204682