{"id":1188,"date":"2024-07-02T09:53:52","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T08:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orchontal.de\/wordpress\/?page_id=735"},"modified":"2025-04-10T15:44:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T13:44:41","slug":"research-history","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/orchontal.de\/en\/monuments\/karabalgasun\/research-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Research History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Depiction of Karabalgasun in Wilhelm Radloff’s “Atlas der Alterth\u00fcmer” \u00a9 DAI<\/span><\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n
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Who explored Karabalgasun?<\/h1>\n

The exploration of Karabalgasun, the ancient Uyghur capital, began in the early years of the 19th century and has steadily gained in importance since then. Archaeologists have worked intensively on deciphering the city, especially in the last 20 years, and have gained numerous new insights into the architecture and function of the city.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Initial Research at the Beginning of the 19th Century<\/h2>\n
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As early as the beginning of the 19th century, the first modern-day researchers began to investigate the Karabalgasun site, even though at that time it was not yet clear whether this city ruin was Karabalgasun or Karakorum. Research expeditions to China and Mongolia, and thus also to the Mongolian Orkhon Valley, began in the second half of the 19th century and were generally of a universal scientific nature. In 1873, for example, the Russian Paderin described for the first time the highly walled area of the city complex of Karabalgasun, which is still visible today. The first expedition with a clearly archaeological focus was undertaken by a group of researchers led by N. M. Jadrincev in the Orkhon Valley in 1889. As with the journey of the Finnish ethnologist Axel Heikel, the focus was on examining the surviving inscription stones of the trilingual inscription, which recounts important events in Chinese, Sogdian and Turkish runic script.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n

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Expedition of Wilhelm Radloff<\/h2>\n

The most important investigation of this period must be considered to be the preparation of a city map and a detailed description of the city complex, which was produced as part of an expedition led by the Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff in 1891 and published in the Atlas der Alterth\u00fcmer in 1892.The interdisciplinary expedition spent 12 days on the site of Karabalgasun and clearly identified parts of the area as the remains of the old Uyghur city, while the district known today as the temple or palace city had to be considered Mongolian at the time. Overall, this expedition was also limited to descriptive investigations and did not undertake any further archaeological research. However, the plan of the city drawn up at the time was extremely detailed and correct in essential points and was drawn with good powers of observation.<\/p>\n \n <\/div>\n