The town of Tugunbulak, which extended beyond the forest inspector's house, had powerful walls enclosing an area of 120 hectares, almost five times larger than Tashbulak's property. With those walls, there was a dense architecture with hundreds of buildings, streets, palaces, squares – even industrial facilities that Frachetti's team suspects were used to produce iron or steel.
To put that into perspective, the medieval walls of Siena, one of the most important cities in Italy at the time, surrounded an area of 105 hectares at the height of its power. Another crown jewel among Italian medieval cities, between the 6th and 11th centuries, Genoa had walls protecting only 20 hectares, an area that had increased to around 50 hectares by the time of Frederic Barbarossa's invasion between 1155 and 1158 CE.
Tugunbulak was a monster of a city. But what did it look like?
A city of iron?
“If you had looked at Tugunbulak from the outside, you would have seen these kinds of rock walls. They appear to be made using a technology called rammed earth. The builders took mud and pressed it into something that almost looked like cement: a very labor-intensive, very dense, very defensive and reinforced material,” says Frachetti. Rammed earth was a dominant construction technique used in the early stages of Tugunbulak's development. “In the later phase of the site we see some stone architectural foundations with mud bricks on top. They used local resources and construction techniques that were popular in the region,” Frachetti explains.
According to the team, iron was the city's main contribution to the Silk Road trade, as the surrounding mountains are particularly rich in iron ore. One of the still unanswered questions was about the way the people of Tugunbulak lived and worked. Were they skilled blacksmiths who forged iron and perhaps even steel in their mountainous city? Did at least some of the inhabitants live the life of nomads, visiting the city only periodically to trade on market days or did they live there permanently? “We would like to know how extensive the industry was there – what level of production were they actually doing?” says Franchetti. He suggested that a shifting, seasonal population that most likely lived in yurts scattered outside the walls was more likely in smaller Tashbulak, as there were no residential suburbs there. “Tugunbulak must have been a much better organized political entity. Their power and influence must have been significant in the wider economy of the Silk Road,” Frachetti claims.
