Ten years on the Silk Road

Published in 2002

After devoting 10 years to one of the world’s major archaeological sites, Rolex Laureate Georgina Herrmann has handed over the directorship of the International Merv Project (IMP) to fellow British archaeologist Tim Williams. "It now needs someone with a different vision," 64-year-old Herrmann insists.

The great Silk Road city of Merv, built over a period of two millennia in a major oasis in Turkmenistan’s Kara Kum desert, was at one time more famous than the historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in the neighbouring Central Asian state of Uzbekistan. It fell into relative obscurity in the 13th century, however, after being sacked by Mongol invaders. And, despite decades of work by Soviet scholars, Merv remained largely unknown to the wider archaeological community until the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Dr Herrmann visited Merv for the first time in 1990. Struck by the huge archaeological potential of a site where successive settlements were built next to, rather than on top of, each other, she returned in 1991, and established an agreement with Russian and Turkmen archaeologists to create the IMP. Since then, she and an international team of experts have spent about eight weeks a year at Merv, making some extraordinary and unexpected findings.

Thanks to that work, it is now clear that, contrary to historical records, Merv continued to be inhabited after the Mongol massacre. Also, the discovery of the earliest known Islamic crucible steel foundry at Merv disproved the widely held theory that this technology had been first developed in Sheffield, in England, in the 19th century.

During this decade the Turkmen Government succeeded in having Merv added to UNESCO’s prestigious World Heritage List, the first archaeological site to be listed in Central Asia. Merv has also twice been selected by the World Monuments Watch "List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites". World Monuments Watch also gave a grant to start the massive task of conserving the outstanding surviving buildings of the oasis, which include mudbrick "castles" of the Early Islamic period and early "icehouses" or medieval refrigerators, details of which are published by Herrmann in her book "Monuments of Merv". A major scanned archive of old and new photographs is being published this year by the British Institute of Persian Studies using new technology, which Herrmann describes as "a crucial aid in recording architecture through time".

"We have achieved very much more than we could have expected when we set out as a small, under-funded expedition to this enormous site about which we knew nothing," says Herrmann. This includes an ongoing programme to produce a detailed site map from satellite images commissioned by the IMP, onto which buildings, artefacts and other features can be accurately recorded.

Herrmann has secured three highly significant accolades for her work at Merv: last year she received an OBE (Order of the British Empire medal), conferred by Queen Elizabeth II; in 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy; and in 1996 she won a Rolex Award for Enterprise. According to Herrmann, the Rolex Award marked a turning point for the project, raising public awareness and helping attract further funding. Before she won the Rolex Award, she says, few people had heard of Merv.

Yet Merv is Central Asia’s biggest archaeological site, representing, in Georgina Herrmann’s words, “work for many lifetimes”. Having relinquished her directorship of the IMP, she insists that she has left it “in excellent hands”.

Herrmann also retires this year from her post as Reader in Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London. She now intends to fulfil a number of publishing commitments, including writing about Merv. Too many archaeologists never finish their research projects, she maintains, “leaving things in a terrible muddle”. This is clearly not Dr Herrmann’s style.

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