|
A forgotten section of the Great Wall of China has
been discovered deep in the Gobi Desert—and outside of China—researchers
say. With the help of Google Earth, an international expedition
documented the ancient wall for roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) in a
restricted border zone in southern Mongolia in August 2011. Preserved to
a height of 9 feet (2.75 meters) in places, the desert discovery belongs
to a sequence of remnant walls in Mongolia collectively known as the
Wall of Genghis Khan, said expedition leader and Great Wall researcher
William Lindesay. Named after the founder of the Mongol Empire, the Wall
of Genghis Khan usually survives only as "a faint trace," Lindesay said
in an email. The Great Wall system built by successive Chinese dynasties
to repel Mongol invaders from the north, according to findings published
in the March issue of the Chinese edition of National Geographic
magazine.
Close to China in the border region of Ömnögovi
Province, the ancient structure hadn't been scientifically explored or
studied before, said Lindesay, director of the International Friends of
the Great Wall conservation group, based in Beijing, China. "We're the
first to investigate the ruins," he said. At times seeking out
topographic clues seen in Google Earth—the wall is visible on satellite
images—the team located two well preserved but contrasting stretches of
wall.
Ancient Mongolian texts suggest that the so-called
Wall of Genghis Khan was built as an animal fence by Khan's son Ögedei
to keep wild gazelle on his land. But the recently explored Gobi Desert
wall segment isn't in a region where large herds of gazelle occur.
Chinese researchers, perhaps not surprisingly, have speculated that
China's Han dynasty had erected these little-studied stretches in about
115 B.C. But radiocarbon dating of partly exposed wood and rope remains
extracted from the wall indicates that the saxaul-segment construction
went on for more than a hundred years—and occurred about a thousand
years later than thought, from A.D. 1040 to 1160. Those dates hint that
the Western Xia dynasty built the walls—or at least rebuilt old Han
walls on the sites.
This northwestern Chinese dynasty isn't known to
have contributed to the Great Wall system, but in at least one aspect, a
Western Xia origin makes sense. "If one imagines the wall as a platform,
with some kind of battlement—perhaps of wooden stakes, functioning as a
shield to those manning its top—then it would have been an effective
defense installation," he said. But, mysteriously, the expedition team
found no pottery, no trash, no coins, no weapons—nothing to prove the
wall was ever actually manned. Nor did they find any of the watchtowers
that mark surviving sections of the Great Wall within China.
"I believe the wall here is only half built and
that there was, for some reason, a rethink on locating the wall here,"
Lindesay said. It isn't difficult to imagine how the purported Great
Wall segment's harsh desert location might have led to the remote
frontier defense being abandoned, he added. Weatherford, the
Minnesota-based anthropologist, agrees with Lindesay's conclusion that
the newfound remains were Chinese constructions. There's a good reason,
Weatherford added, that the stretch nevertheless carries Genghis Khan's
name. "By calling it the Genghis Khan Wall, the
name makes the place Mongolian and rejects foreign influence,"
Weatherford said. "I would risk saying that it is the largest human-made
structure or artifact in all of Mongolia," he added. "It is amazing to
me that it is not already much better analyzed."
|
Get the details
of our famous