The round wall
On the hilltop.
Bruce Allardice — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Raf24~commonswiki — CC BY 4.0 · Umid Khakimov — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Janabaevazizbek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Janabaevazizbek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Janabaevazizbek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Janabaevazizbek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Umid Khakimov — CC BY-SA 4.0
A round mudbrick enclosure crowning a natural cone-shaped hill about 35 m high on the right bank of the Amu Darya, known as a «tower of silence», or dakhma. It was built between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, more than two thousand years ago. Zoroastrians laid their dead here for birds of prey to clean the bones, believing a corpse should not pollute the earth; the bones were then gathered into special vessels. Its wall stands about 15 m high and some 5 m thick at the base, narrowing towards the top. The archaeologist Sergey Tolstov's expedition studied it in 1940, and it is now on UNESCO's World Heritage tentative list. A stepped path climbs to the top, where views open over the Amu Darya, green fields and desert. Go in the morning before the heat; it is easy to spot from the road between Nukus and Beruni.
On the hilltop.
And its fields.
A stepped path.
On the Nukus-Beruni road, about 43 km southeast of Nukus
A Zoroastrian mudbrick dakhma on a hill above the Amu Darya, where bodies were left for birds to clean the bones; it is over 2,000 years old.