Arkaim (Russian: Аркаим) is an archaeological site situated in the Southern Urals steppe, 8.2 kilometres (5.1 mi) north-to-northwest of Amurskiy, and 2.3 km (1.4 mi) south-to-southeast of Alexandronvskiy, two villages in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, just to the north from the Kazakhstani border.
The site is generally dated to the 17th century BC. Earlier dates, up to the 20th century BC, have been proposed. It was a settlement of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture.
The site was discovered in 1987 by a team of Chelyabinsk scientists who were preparing the area to be flooded in order to create a reservoir, and examined in rescue excavations led by Gennadii Zdanovich.
Although the settlement was burned and abandoned, much detail is preserved. Arkaim is similar in form but much better preserved than neighbouring Sintashta, where the earliest chariot was unearthed. The site was protected by two circular walls. There was a central square, surrounded by two circles of dwellings separated by a street. The settlement covered ca. 20,000 m2 (220,000 sq ft). The diameter of the enclosing wall was 160 m (520 ft). It was built from earth packed into timber frames, and reinforced with unburned clay brick, with a thickness of 4–5 m (13–16 ft). and a height of 5.5 m (18 ft). The settlement was surrounded with a 2 m (6 ft 7 in)-deep moat.
There are 4 entrances into the settlement through the outer and inner wall with the main entrance to the west. The dwellings were between 110–180 m2 (1,200–1,900 sq ft) in area. The outer ring of dwellings number 39 or 40, with entrances to a circular street in the middle of the settlement. The inner ring of dwellings number 27, arranged along the inner wall, with doors to the central square of 25 by 27 m (82 by 89 ft). The central street was drained by a covered channel. Zdanovich estimates that approximately 1500 to 2500 people could have lived in the settlement.
Surrounding Arkaim's walls, were arable fields, 130–140 m by 45 m (430–460 ft by 150 ft), irrigated by a system of canals and ditches. Remains of millet and barley seeds were found.
Since its discovery, Arkaim has attracted public and media attention in Russia, from a broad range of the population, including esoteric, New Age and pseudoscientific organizations. It is said to be the most enigmatic archaeological site within the territory of Russia.
Observatory
The similarity of latitude, date, and size led some archaeoastronomists (Bystrushkin 2003) to compare Arkaim with Stonehenge in England. According to their claims, the Neolithic observatory at Stonehenge allowed for observation of 15 astronomical phenomena using 22 elements, whereas the contemporaneous observatory at Arkaim allowed for observation of 18 astronomical phenomena using 30 elements. The precision of measurements in Stonehenge is estimated at 10 arc-minutes to a degree, that in Arkaim being put at 1 arc-minute. Such a precision of astronomical observations was not repeated until the compilation of Almagest about 2 millennia later. The interpretation as an observatory for either Stonehenge or Arkaim is not universally accepted.
The ancient Ural fortress Arkaim located in the Chelyabinsk region is called “Russian Stonehenge.” In addition to streets and buildings ruins scientists found remnants of the water system, metallurgic furnaces, and mines. It is also believed to be one of the strongest anomaly zones in Russia.
It is worth mentioning that Arkaim, a fortified settlement of the Bronze Age was built with four entrances to the city strictly oriented at cardinal points. It was built according to a previously designed plan, with a high level of precision. All circumferences have one center where all radial feeders meet together. This circular structure is star-oriented, and the design itself looks like a model of the Universe.
According to the research conducted by archeologist Konstantin Bystrushkin, Arkaim tracks 18 astronomical events. They include sunsets and sunrises on the days of equinox and solstice, as well as sunsets and sunrises during low and high Moon.
The famous Stonehenge, a mysterious circle of upright stones, has fewer astronomically traceable events. Interestingly enough, both architectural structures are located at the same geographical latitude.
Arkaim is interesting not only as a historic monument. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that it is one of the strongest anomaly zones in Russia. UFOs were observed in the area on several occasions shaped as light flashes, moving circles and fog clusters.
Locals believe it to be a sacred place. Pilgrims come here all year round to get some healing water from the Bolshaya Karaganka River, and in the summer they coat themselves with clay. They say it helps treating skin diseases
The mountains surrounding the fortress are also unusual. The most famous one is Shamanka (or Bold Mountain). People climb to its top to get some positive energy, pray or meditate. People in serious medical condition are brought there for healing.
Visitors come to the top of Repentance Mountain to ask for forgiveness. Love Mountain is believed to bring personal luck. The nearby Male Forest is visited by women who have relationship problems. The rumor has it, a walk in this forest will make a woman popular with men.
The growth near Grachinaya Mountain (also called Blessed) is infamous. Birch trunks there are abnormally crooked at the bottom. They say people cannot stay there for too long, otherwise they risk losing their mind.
Once during archeological excavations a female student heard a voice that called her to the center of the structure. She went there alone, and cried for a long time when she came back. She said she met ghosts of ancient Arkaim residents. She had to be sent to a psychiatric facility.
There are at least two places that should be called Arkaim. The first, conventional Arkaim, is the ruins that are shown to tourists today.
The second Arkaim is located a little further, in a place where excavations are still going on and where visitors are not allowed. And finally, the third Arkaim, where for some unknown reasons even locals do not go to.
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile, paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:
The entire surface of the earth is marked with the traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy. Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths. All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural forces across the entire earth.2
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists, this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject, especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.
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Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious centre.
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about 3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled. Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.
Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilisation in southern Russia, confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.
Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual are inseparable
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard, the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as we shall see.
In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again become the centre of the world.
Note: Please find below our recognition of and great gratitude to only a few of the scientists who have brought this information to public attention.
G.B.Zdanovich – Gennady Borisovich Zdanovich, Doctor of Historical Sciences, chairman of History and Ethnography of Chelyabinsk State University, director of Arkaim reserve, the person who discovered Arkaim.
K.K.Bystrushkin – Konstantin Konstantinovich Bystrushkin, Astro-archeologist.
Ludmila Koryakova – Ural State University; Institute of History and Archeology
Source website;
http://bialczynski.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... nych-osob/This format on Arkaim, by Paulo Riven, Tribes of Atlantis.