雅思阅读 139: The Iron City in the Clouds（云端上的铁都——丝绸之路考古新发现）

改编由 Smithsonian Magazine（2025年12月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeologists-may-have-found-the-lost-city-of-the-silk-road-180987637/

Reading Passage

A. The Silk Road is usually imagined as a lowland affair: caravans picking their way through oasis cities, desert passes and river valleys, carrying silk, silver and spices between China and the Mediterranean. That picture is now being rewritten from a surprising altitude. High in the Tian Shan foothills of Uzbekistan, at around seven thousand feet, an international team has uncovered a walled settlement of some three hundred acres — twice the size of Pompeii — where miners, smelters and blacksmiths lived and worked for half a millennium. The site, called Tugunbulak, was occupied from roughly the sixth to the eleventh centuries, in a landscape so harsh that a June snowstorm is still unremarkable and the snowpack can last more than half the year. Its existence makes no obvious sense on the old map of Central Asian trade. Its discovery suggests that the Silk Road did not bypass the highlands but ran, in some sense, through them. The name Silk Road itself was coined only in the nineteenth century by a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, but the network it describes had already been carrying goods, technologies and faiths for well over a thousand years.

B. The find was accidental. A team led by Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St Louis and Farhod Maksudov of Uzbekistan's National Center of Archaeology had been excavating a nearby site called Tashbulak when, in 2015, a local forestry inspector wandered past the trench. Seeing the potsherds being sorted, he remarked, in effect, that he had much the same things in his own garden on the next hill. A visit confirmed the remark. The researchers climbed the ridge and found faint traces of walls extending, as they put it, for what seemed like miles. Surveying such a vast site by hand was impractical, and ground-penetrating radar was never designed for open grassland. The solution arrived with drone-borne lidar, which had become cheap enough for academic use by the early 2020s. In 2022 the team flew at least twenty-two missions over the ridge. The resulting map showed four distinct sectors, including one of more than fifty acres containing three fortified structures and hundreds of terraced buildings. Traditional ground survey, which had worked so well on lowland sites, was never going to cover three hundred acres in a lifetime.

C. What the excavations revealed beneath that map was an industrial town. In one large rammed-earth building the team found the remains of furnaces lined with kaolin, the soft mineral used in porcelain, alongside juniper charcoal and heaps of smelting slag. A metallurgical specialist on the team remarked that the volume of slag and furnace remains was, for a nomadic Central Asian society, "quite astounding". Radiocarbon dating placed the oldest occupation around AD 550, the very moment when the Turkic khanate began its expansion. In a pit dug into an abandoned building a century later, the diggers found a Turkic warrior buried with a horse, three Sogdian coins still wrapped in cloth, a bone dagger and a bone pipe that may have held cannabis. The burial is one of only a handful of its kind ever found in that part of Asia. Iron arrowheads designed to pierce armour, and a larger bone arrowhead intended to whistle in flight, filled out the picture of a martial, technical society. The Sogdian coin, minted in the seventh century, bore an inscription hailing the king as "the bearer of divine blessing" — evidence that the mountain settlement was plugged into the wider currency of the Silk Road world.

D. The researchers are fairly sure they know which ancient city Tugunbulak is. Tenth-century Arab geographers, notably Ibn Hawqal, described a mountainous city called Marsmanda, famous for iron and notable for having neither gardens nor vineyards because of the cold. The description fits the site to a remarkable degree. What is less certain is who actually ruled it. The lowlands nearby were dominated by the Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking people who grew wealthy around Bukhara and Samarkand, staffed Turkic administrations and built merchant colonies as far east as the Chinese capital. Frachetti argues that Tugunbulak was run by a Turkic elite: there are no Sogdian fire temples on the ridge, but plenty of Turkic clan symbols. Other scholars, including an archaeologist who has spent decades in Uzbekistan, counter that Sogdians probably controlled the metalworks and hired Turkic warriors to guard it. The debate matters because it touches on a deeper question: whether nomads were passive raiders on settled civilisation, or active partners in it. The nearby Sogdian city of Zaamin lay less than three days' ride away, and Samarkand itself only six, so the two groups were never far apart.

E. Whatever the answer, the city's prosperity ended around AD 1050. The team suspects a combination of causes: a severe drought, deforestation of the juniper needed for charcoal, and competition from new sources of iron. Frachetti half-jokingly calls it the medieval equivalent of an American rust-belt city. The broader significance, though, is harder to miss. The discovery undercuts the old image of pastoralists as barbaric outsiders preying on town life. Instead, it suggests a hybrid society of farmers, herders, miners and smiths whose technical expertise — in iron, in cavalry, in long-distance organisation — underpinned the Silk Road's expansion. As one historian on the project puts it, nomadic urbanism sounds like a contradiction, but there need have been no sharp divide between lowland and highland. The road that carried silk westwards, it now appears, was built not only in the cities but also in the mountains, by people who once had no voice in how the story was written. Even sceptical colleagues now agree that the identification with Marsmanda is essentially settled; what remains open is the longer story of how nomadic skill and lowland commerce combined to make the Silk Road possible.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. How a chance remark led to a drone survey ii. Why horses were domesticated in Central Asia iii. An industrial town revealed by furnaces and a warrior's grave iv. The debate over who ruled the city v. The decline of Tugunbulak and its larger meaning vi. How silk reached Rome vii. Why the Sogdians converted to Islam

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why was Tugunbulak unexpected? A. It lies at high altitude in a harsh landscape where a city-sized settlement was not expected. B. It was built entirely of marble. C. It is located under a modern Uzbek city. D. It contains no human bones.

6. How was the site mapped? A. By traditional ground-penetrating radar alone. B. By lidar mounted on drones in multiple flights. C. By satellite images only. D. By walking the entire wall on foot.

7. What did the furnaces and slag indicate? A. The site was a religious centre. B. The site was an iron-producing industrial complex. C. The site was a grain storage depot. D. The site was a royal palace.

8. Why does the discovery matter for how we understand nomads? A. It proves nomads were illiterate. B. It suggests nomadic groups were technically capable partners in trade, not mere raiders. C. It shows nomads lived only in yurts. D. It confirms that nomads never traded with China.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Tugunbulak covers about three hundred acres, roughly twice the size of Pompeii.
10. The site was first discovered by a team of professional archaeologists in 1950.
11. Ibn Hawqal described Marsmanda as a mountainous city lacking gardens and vineyards.
12. All archaeologists agree that Sogdians ruled Tugunbulak.
13. Tugunbulak was abandoned shortly after its founding.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The site's furnaces were lined with (14) __________, and analysis of the heaps of smelting (15) __________ revealed that iron production was on an industrial scale.

答案与解析

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