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About 225 a long way west of Ulaanbaatar, the present-day capital city of Mongolia, are the ruins of Karakorum, the old capital of the Mongol Empire. Situated in the Orkhon River Valley, at the foot of the Khangai Hill range, the town was founded by Genghis Khan in 1220 CE. Under his boy and successor, Ögedei Khan, Karakorum grew into a flourishing city, with high wall surfaces enclosing an urban landscaping of brick-built set ups and paved streets, split into different districts with a palace, build workshops, and marketplaces. Under Ögedei and his successors, Karakorum became a cosmopolitan hub of crafts and exchange along the great Silk Highway trading network. Genghis Khan followed the custom of his nomadic predecessors when he founded Karakorum in the Orkhon Valley. The landscaping had previously been resolved by many different nomads and empires, like the Huns, Turks, and Uyghurs. These different civilizations - despite existing over vastly different periods of time - found common surface in the Orkhon Valley. There they demarcated sites of significance with structures that contain survived for this day, a rarity in the archaeology of nomadic individuals. Archaeological material going out with to the Paleolithic period through the Bronze and Iron Ages has been within the Orkhon Valley, and later monuments are the memorial sites of the Turks, who retained an intensive funerary area around the Bilge Khagan and Kul Tigin memorials in the 6th and seventh generations CE, and the Uyghur capital city of Ordu-Baliq from the eighth and ninth generations. Each one of these people still left their symbol on the landscaping, and in the mythologies of the old conquerors of the Eurasian steppe, so that it is no surprise that the far-flung Mongol Empire considered Karakorum in the Orkhon Valley to be their capital. The storyline of Karakorum did not end with the drop of the Mongol Empire either. Through the 16th hundred years onwards the area became the center of Mongolian Buddhism, a fact underscored by the existence of Erdene Zuu, the earliest Buddhist monastery of the Mongols. Erdene Zuuh was built after the ruins of the Khan's palace in Karakorum. There is also the local Buddhist monastery of Tövkhön. Archaeologists have been looking into the ruined city of Karakorum and other sites in the Orkhon Valley since the 19th century, also to this day it remains an active heritage landscaping, where ancient customs are preserved by modern nomadic communities. Karakorum: THE ANNALS and Legacy of the Mongol Empire's Capital talks about the varied and storied record of the site. Become familiar with about the Karakorum like never before.
