Osh. The Archaeologists' Discovery
Productive Work of Yu.A. Zadneprovsky and E.V. Druzhinina
The city of Osh is undoubtedly the oldest in Kyrgyzstan and one of the ancient urban centers of Central Asia. Its written history spans over a millennium, while archaeological finds date back to three millennia ago. However, the question of the time of the city's founding remains open in scientific literature. There have been no specific excavations of the ancient substratum of modern Osh (including its former old town part) before, although episodic yet fruitful work has been conducted here by Yu.A. Zadneprovsky and E.V. Druzhinina.
There are currently no publications summarizing archaeological and numismatic finds, various historical and cultural monuments in Osh and its surroundings. Preparation for compiling a catalog of monuments in the republic began in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Attempts to date the time of the city's emergence by comparing the terms "Osh" and "Usun" (the name of the ancient tribes that once inhabited this area) or through previously widespread Muslim traditions are still debatable. It is only reliably known that in ancient times, long before Osh functioned as a city, this land was one of the centers of human settlement during the Stone Age.
Following local historians and archaeologists, it can be asserted that the territory of the modern city and its surroundings have been inhabited for at least since the Neolithic era. This is supported not only by various archaeological evidence but also by drawings of cave and rock paintings found directly in Osh — in the "Eagles' Overhang" cave on Suleiman Mountain, at Surret-Tash, as well as in the vicinity of the city. The beginning of relatively long-term habitation and economic development of the current urban territory is associated with the emergence of the first sedentary settlements in the Fergana Valley, where ancient agricultural traditions date back to the turn of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. The bearers of these traditions were representatives of the so-called Chust archaeological culture, named after the initially studied archaeological site near the city of Chuy in the Uzbek SSR. This served as a benchmark in the study of other agricultural settlements—oases of the 13th to 8th centuries BC in Fergana.
The inhabitants of the Chust and neighboring Dalverzin settlements of the Bronze Age, like the settlers of Osh, cultivated grains — wheat, barley, and millet, and raised livestock. They lived in earthen, primitive adobe houses and those made of raw brick. In the Osh settlement, the main type of housing was semi-subterranean dwellings located on the terraces of the southern slope of Suleiman Mountain. Such dwellings were still quite common among the Kyrgyz and other peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in the recent pre-revolutionary past. It can be assumed that "the roots of this tradition of housing construction, therefore, date back to the Bronze Age."
The history of the discovery and initial study of the aforementioned Osh settlement and the evidence of life of Bronze Age people in the southern regions of modern Kyrgyzstan is also quite interesting.
The raised ceramics discovered by E.V. Druzhinina (an employee of the Osh Regional Museum) on the southern slope of Suleiman Mountain (1967) and on the territory of the Osh Pedagogical Institute (1974) included painted pottery and stone artifacts characteristic of the sedentary farmers of the Chust culture, allowing for the assumption of the existence of a terraced settlement on "Osh Mountain" in the distant past.
The remains of this settlement were indicated by the exposure of the cultural layer with characteristic ceramics, recorded in the spring of 1976 by E.V. Druzhinina during the construction of a road to one of the buildings created in the mountain for the museum. The work of the Fergana archaeological expedition (Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the USSR) under the leadership of Yu.A. Zadneprovsky confirmed the correctness of the mentioned hypothesis. The joint excavations of expedition participants and employees of the Osh Museum on the slope of Suleiman Mountain—at the site of a stationary settlement of the Chust period in Osh—were highly productive.
