The world believes it knows history. But it is mistaken.
Behind the cold dogmatism of textbooks about the vast and
wild Siberia, a different truth is hidden - the truth about
megacities pulsating with life, about powerful ancient
empires and rulers whose names have been erased from the
memory of generations, like writings on sand washed away by
a sudden downpour. This was not a wild desert before the
arrival of Moscow's first explorers-colonists. In fact, it
is the world's largest cemetery of unknown ancient forgotten
civilizations and cultures, whose tombstones - gigantic
megalithic ruins and pyramids, overgrown with taiga and
oblivion - impress the few revisionist researchers.
Renaissance European cartographers, titans of geography like
Mercator and Ortelius, with reverent awe inscribed on
parchment a name that inspired fear and respect in all of
Europe at that time: Great Tartaria. This was not an
abstraction, but a concrete, immense empire whose domains
covered Siberia and the Far East in the Middle Ages. Its
heart, the ancient capital city of Tartar, they placed at
the Tartar River and Lake Koros. It was called the City of
Kings, like ancient Egyptian Thebes or Persepolis.
Geographers described the area as a ridge crowned with
tombs, a valley of pyramids on the Kolyma. They wrote of the
noise of bazaars where iron and precious black sables were
traded, of the interweaving of languages and religions -
Nestorian Christians, Muslims, idolaters, Zoroastrians, and
Scandinavians. Today, not a stone, chronicle, or even an
artifact remains of this place. Modern science is silent.
Perhaps this city, like Atlantis, was swallowed by the
changing riverbeds; perhaps it fell victim to some
mysterious catastrophe we will never know about. Tartaria is
the first and greatest ghost in the annals of history, a
shadow rejected by science. But on the path to this ghost
lay other, no less real and equally mysterious cities. In
the wilds of Western Siberia, where Tomsk now stands, Arab
merchants and Persian geographers, centuries before Yermak's
invasion, mentioned Grustina - the stone capital of one of
the "Slavic kingdoms." They spoke not of wooden huts, but of
a labyrinth of dungeons stretching beneath the streets and
even under the riverbed, of underground rooms and corridors
holding the breath of an ancient, highly developed
mysterious civilization, whose presence is betrayed by finds
of exquisite gold artifacts in the Scytho-Sarmatian "animal"
style. Was this Tomsk under a different name? Or was Tomsk
built on the bones of this vanished culture? No one will
give a precise answer. But nearby, on ancient maps, another
name flickers. The satellite city of Serponov, an important
hub for the fur and gem trade on the Ob, a city of "Great
Rus," which Moscow chronicles modestly omit, but which was
always present on European maps. We delve even deeper into
the thickness of centuries. Near modern Novosibirsk, the
archaeologist's knife cuts open the earth and reveals
Chichaburg - a city with streets, authority, and social
division, which flourished 700 years before the founding of
Rome! This is not a legend. It is a historical fact that
overturns all notions of the North. The stone fortresses of
southern Siberia, the giant megalithic kurgans - all these
are mute witnesses not of a primitive tribal system, but of
a highly developed civilization. On the western slope of the
Urals, a legend wanders about Great Perm - a phantom city
that, they say, could migrate from one disaster to another,
leaving behind only the gleam of gold in the earth and
evidence of the incredible skill of ancient metallurgists
and architects. And in the south, in the regal mountains, on
the ancient Moscow maps of Remezov, near the mirror-like
waters of Lake Teletskoye, stands the city of Altyri like a
guardian - a stone fortress with towers, the center of the
mysterious Altyr kingdom, perhaps the very sacred Altai of
myths, a crossroads of ancient trade routes and cultures.
What happened? Moscow's Cossacks and explorers of the
17th-18th centuries came to these lands and found not
wildness, but majestic mysterious ruins. They stepped on
slabs hewn by unknown peoples, peered into the empty eye
sockets of towers and majestic foundations whose purpose was
lost. They found mountains of gold, weapons, and other
strange artifacts. Throughout the 17th-19th centuries, St.
Petersburg academics wrote volumes about what might have
actually happened. Flooding? War? Epidemic? Climate change?
Rivers that changed course and swallowed the banks? The
reasons seemed only guesses. But the result was always the
same - a complete, total disappearance. The disappearance
not just of cities, but of entire layers of human cultures,
states, languages, and beliefs. The world of ancient Siberia
and the North was not wild. It was full of civilized life.
And now it is filled with silence. And only the wind in the
ruins of underground brick tunnels under Tomsk, and the
strange gleam of shards near Novosibirsk, and the mysterious
signs on Mercator's yellowed maps remind us: our
civilization is not the first. And its end, like the end of
those who came before us, can be swift, merciless, and
utterly traceless. When only the taiga will remember that
the cold waters of Siberian rivers carried the last secrets
of the City of Kings into the icy depths of the Arctic
Ocean...

Source: gopher://shibboleths.org/0/phlog/306.txt

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* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)