16 THE FORMING OF THE OASIS OF ANAU. 
The excavation consisted in maintaining a strictly horizontal floor which was sunk 
1 or 2 feet daily. His report shows how the hill was made up of houses, and how, 
in sinking, house-floors were exposed, one immediately underlying the other, and 
all marked by hearths and inserted bake-oven pots, and by the skeletons of children, 
which it was the custom of these people to bury under the dwellings. 
In order of age the North Kurgan is the oldest and the ruined city of Anau 
the youngest. The North Kurgan had been abandoned before the founding of the 
South Kurgan, and this in turn before the city was started; and I shall show that 
there is evidence of several time-gaps of greater or less duration in the sequence 
of the cultures. 

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Fig. 3.—The Two Kurgans. 


Fig. 4.—Ruined City of Anau. 
The city of Anau was abandoned only during the past century. Its gates are 
gone, its walls have crumbled, and of the houses built of burnt bricks only dilapi- 
dated walls are standing. The surface of the interior is irregular, great depressions 
marking the places where were once extensive pools. These water-basins form 
one of the charms of the cities of Turkestan, where they are inclosed in paved steps 
that descend from terraces on which stand widespreading trees and tea-houses— 
the lounging and gossiping centers of daily life. In Anau only the gaping depres- 
sions remain to mark how rapidly desolation may obliterate the traces of busy life. 
