- UZBEKISTAN -- Kampyr-Tepe,
in southern Uzbekistan, was built at the time of Alexander the Great's
empire and occupied for about 500 years until it fell into decline.
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- Since it was discovered, a generation ago, it has been
closed to the public because it stands in a sensitive and tightly guarded
military zone, right on the Afghan border.
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- The city perched on a high shelf of land - cut into clay
walls that dropped sheer into the plains below.
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- Caught in the light of a winter afternoon, an entire
city spread as far as we could see, the dun-coloured dust touched with
gold.
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- It was here that Alexander raised his capital more than
2,000 years ago. This was the furthest conquest, then, of the Greeks in
Asia.
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- >From our vantage point, we could see why. Far below,
beneath a swirl of starlings, we could see the plains melt into those of
Afghanistan, Alexander's route here from Persia.
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- At our feet spread the whole of the south.
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- Relics
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- There was not a sound but the birds flocking and turning
across the precipice, wheeling and turning back.
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- The small houses were in the nearest part of the city.
Square rooms opened on to a grid of narrow passages, criss-crossing to
make streets.
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- Stacks of pots and plates sat outside, as though the
people of Kampyr-Tepe had left the washing up one evening after dinner.
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- Great round platters and bowls, made of the same ochre
dust as the plain.
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- At first we were amazed. Why had they not been taken
off to some museum? Dated, labelled... or stolen even?
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- But the more we looked, we realised there were just so
many, they were ordinary, just part of the land.
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- When two boys - hard and tough as men - drove their handful
of sheep through the city, they did not waste a glance on the pots. Why
would they?
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- Foreigners though, now that was interesting; they spend
the rest of the day following shyly and smiling.
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- Security
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- Kampyr-Tepe was a fortified city in Alexander's time,
and remains a military base to this day for a reason as old as the land
- its special position at this crossing between central and south Asia.
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- It is patrolled by the army of modern Uzbekistan.
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- Special permission to visit can only be granted by the
government in Tashkent.
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- The way in is through a military checkpoint, at the time
specified.
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- Turn up late and the soldiers will bar the way and you
will never see Kampyr-Tepe, just the plain around pitted with pill-boxes
and fenced with barbed wire.
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- The deep south of Central Asia has a feel all its own.
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- It has a special stillness and a scent of new bread from
the intense sun beating on the straw, that, mixed with mud, is the building
material used 1,000 years ago... and now.
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- Buried treasure
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- It wears its past casually. Kampyr-Tepe is just one of
its treasures.
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- There are sights here, in this quiet and private place,
that almost anywhere in the world would have bus-loads of visitors trooping
to and fro, buying souvenirs and cups of tea.
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- "You see that big pit there," said an old farmer,
Hamrah Baba, living on the plains to the north of Kampyr-Tepe.
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- "When I was a boy, we used to lower each other down
there in turns, hanging on a rope. We did not think it was special.
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-
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- "Then, these men came from Tashkent and found all
sorts of things. They found gold and those chessmen."
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- The gold was 35kg of solid gold jewellery, set with turquoises.
The chess pieces may be the oldest on earth.
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- The pit where Hamrah Baba once played is in the citadel
of Dalverzin-Tepe. Capital of the Kushan empire, it was one of the richest
on the planet.
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- There was not a sound but the starlings, wheeling and
flocking, wheeling and turning over the edge of Afghanistan.
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- Unearthed
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- There are secrets buried with the past... long dead secrets,
and recent political secrets.
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- One night in the Soviet time, archaeologists got a call
at their dig at a sunken palace right on the Afghan frontier by the river
Amu, that some people call Oxus.
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- It was an urgent order from Moscow. "Move fast,"
they said. "Get the stuff out, now."
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- They dug as fast as they could, grabbing from the ground
a frieze of marble musicians, and a hoard of daggers - relics of an army
that had once passed that way.
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- They were right to feel that something was up.
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- It was the winter of 1979 and a few days later, Soviet
tanks rolled into Afghanistan, across the palace, crunching what was left.
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- Inhabitants
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- Long before the Arabs came here with their new religion
of Islam, Buddhist monks lived in Central Asia, the conduit through which
Buddhism travelled from India to the East.
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- The giant Buddha statues at Bamian in Afghanistan lay
on the same road.
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- They have been destroyed, but a wonderful sleeping Buddha,
16m long, still lies peacefully in Tajikistan.
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- And near Kampyr-Tepe, we were invited to the site of
a Buddhist lamasery, where the mendicant monks lived underground in a labyrinth,
to protect them from the terrible heat and cold of the plain.
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- One could almost feel their soft steps in their sunken
corridors and imagine them rinsing their begged rice at the stone bowl
that still stands in their kitchen.
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- They left no gardens, no orchards, no grand palaces.
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- What they left was something simpler.
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- "They left some very special papers," said
our guide excitedly. "We found them in sealed jars."
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- "What did they say?" I asked.
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- "Oh they said that we too lived here."
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- - From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday,
17 April, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules
for World Service transmission times.
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- © BBC MMIV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3630167.stm
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