City of the Seven Ravines: Rethinking Urban Life on the Bronze Age Steppe

A Landscape That Was Never Empty

The Kazakh steppe is often imagined as a wide, restless plain, swept by winds and migrations, more suited to herders on the move than to settled life. But the discovery of Semiyarka complicates that familiar picture. Perched above a narrowing stretch of the Irtysh River, the site sprawls across an area large enough to rival some early cities of the ancient Near East.

Drone photograph of the archaeological site of Semiyarka, looking from the south-east to the north-west, taken in July 2018. Credit: Peter J. Brown

At first glance, Semiyarka looks nothing like the dense urban centers celebrated in world history textbooks. It is stitched together from rectilinear earthworks and low walls that barely rise from the soil. Yet these faint traces signal something remarkable: a deliberate, planned settlement built by communities usually assumed to live lightly on the land.

Credit: Peter J. Brown

An international team from Toraighyrov University, University College London, and Durham University has now shown¹ that this settlement was active around 1600 BC, during a period when Bronze Age lifeways were diverse, experimental, and far more settled than once believed. Their work suggests that Semiyarka was not an anomaly. Instead, it may have been one of the region’s earliest attempts at a sustained, organized urban landscape.

“The steppe has often been treated as a corridor rather than a destination,” notes Dr. Helena Vostrikov, an archaeologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Semiyarka demonstrates that these communities were not simply passing through but were architecturally and politically invested in place.”