Ancient Pap and Munchaktepa: Silk Graves in Namangan

Twenty-seven pieces of fabric came out of a single burial vault on the right bank of the Syr Darya, near the town of Pap in Namangan Region. Much of it was silk. Some were plain Chinese weaves, some were patterned cloth almost certainly made in Sogdiana, and one face veil kept remnants of its silk ties. That vault, number 5 at the Munchaktepa necropolis, produced most of the cloth found at a cemetery whose preserved organic finds are the core of its case for Uzbekistan's UNESCO Tentative List.

Below is what the documents say: the UNESCO submission, a 2009 study of the vault 5 clothing, and reports on the Uzbek-Chinese dig that began in September 2024. Where they disagree, we say so. There's very little to see on site.

Balandtepa: the town before the necropolis

The settlement itself is called Balandtepa in the scientific literature, and the UNESCO file names the whole property "Ancient Pap". According to the Tentative List entry, the ruins cover more than 9 hectares and have been badly eroded, especially on the river side. Finds collected there span the 1st to the 8th centuries AD.

The submission describes a classic Central Asian town plan in three parts:

The citadel, the raised and fortified south-eastern corner.
The inner town, lower ground around the citadel, with the remains of a ditch between the two still traceable.
The rabad (suburb) to the north. The file itself calls this label conditional, because nothing found there predates the 9th century, so it's probably the medieval town rather than the early one.

West of the suburb lies the city's cemetery, Munchaktepa, split into two parts and separated from the inner town by a deep ravine. China Daily translates the name as "the plateau of strings of beads", after the bead strings that turned up when the tombs were first dug in the 1980s. Fang Wan's paper places the burial ground 2 to 3 km south of Pap.

The same document argues that medieval Pap (written Bab in the old sources) grew out of Balandtepa and gradually shifted south toward the modern district centre. It points to two pieces of local memory: a road still called Ulug' yol ("Great Road"), and traces of the old ferry crossing over the Syr Darya to Kokand, near Balandtepa. Those are the State Party's own claims, not independent findings.

Munchaktepa I and II: two ways of burying the dead

Munchaktepa I: single graves

Excavators opened 14 individual burials here: nine in simple earth pits and five in niche graves, the type Fang Wan's paper lists for this part of the cemetery (the UNESCO English garbles the term as "tamping pick"). The niche graves held more varied goods. One or two pots were placed by the head or feet. Spindles and leather remains turned up only with women; iron knives and knife-daggers were found with both men and women.

Munchaktepa II: communal crypts

The second part is a row of underground crypts cut into sand-loess deposits, strung west to east along a natural oblong hill. Eight were opened. The UNESCO text sorts them by size. Small crypts of about 5 square metres (numbers 2, 3 and 4) held one to four people, while large crypts of 6 square metres or more (numbers 1, 5, 7 and 9) held about 50 burials. Each has three parts: entrance platform, corridor (dromos) and chamber.

Dating differs a little between sources. The UNESCO file puts the necropolis in the 5th to 8th centuries. Fang Wan's 2009 paper gives the cemetery overall as 4th to 7th century, with an early phase in the 5th and 6th centuries represented by vaults 1 and 5. The new radiocarbon dates (below), roughly 400 and 750 AD, sit closer to the UNESCO range, since 750 falls after Fang's 7th-century end point.

Why the silk survived

Organic material rarely lasts in Central Asian graves. Here it did, and the UNESCO submission calls the opened crypts an underground "museum" with more than 5,000 ethnographic finds. Textiles were recorded in 25 cases, a few of them almost complete silk garments. Beads are the most numerous ornaments, about 10,000 of them. The file also lists woven baskets, fruit remains, wooden vessels and musical instruments.

One plausible factor is the setting: chambers cut into sand-loess inside a natural hill, rather than filled earth graves. That's our inference from the site description, not a finding; the UNESCO text only credits the "good safety" of the materials, and none of the sources we read tests why.

One oddity if you read the entry yourself: its "Comparison with other similar properties" paragraph talks about relict tertiary forests and has nothing to do with Pap. It looks like a copy-paste slip that has sat uncorrected since 2008.

Vault 5: Chinese plain silk, Sogdian samite

The most detailed English-language study of the textiles is Fang Wan's "Costumes Unearthed from Vault 5 of Munchaktepa in the North of Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan", published in Asian Social Science (vol. 5, no. 11, November 2009). Fang, from the Fashion Institute of Design at Donghua University in Shanghai, re-measured the pieces in September 2008. The excavations she draws on were led by B. Kh. Matbabaev from 1987; the work she summarises covers 1987 to 1993.

Her headline numbers: fabric came from vaults 1, 3, 5 and 9, but vault 5 alone yielded 27 pieces, the vast majority. Cotton and silk dominate. Within the vault 5 silks she separates three groups:

Silk tabby and damask, technically simple and present in quantity, which she concludes were imported from China.
Taquete in flat silk and silk samite, patterned weft-faced cloth, which she says was produced in the Sogdian area of Uzbekistan.
Taquete in spun silk, which she places somewhere between north-west China and the Fergana Valley.

So one Fergana grave held cloth from both ends of the route. For the Sogdian side, our piece on the merchants who ran the middle of the Silk Road sets out who they were.

What people were wearing

The clothing wasn't made for burial. Stains, a patch on a skirt and wear on multi-coloured garments led earlier researchers to conclude the dead were buried in everyday dress. Fang reconstructs pull-over tunics with no front opening, cut from cloth 50 to 52 cm wide (she measured intact selvages). A 55 cm tunic from coffin D-6 is small enough that Fang thinks it may have been made for a youngster; a wider one, L-2, reconstructs at 110 cm long, with trapezoid side panels added to beat the loom width. Some faces were covered with fine silk veils; one, B-5-1, has a brown silk panel 31 by 47 cm. Most cloth was dyed greyish black, and indigo was also used.

For working looms today, the Margilan silk workshops are the closest living link, though their ikat is a much later tradition.

The 2024–25 Uzbek-Chinese excavation

Work restarted with a joint team from the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Uzbek partners. China Daily's May 2025 report says digging began in September 2024 under Liu Tao, who leads the Chinese side. It reported:

Six new tombs: five small ones with one or two bodies each, and one large one with the remains of at least 24 people, buried in reed coffins.
A nearly square house foundation, labelled F1, about 8 metres a side, south of the tombs. Its single east entrance, hearth facing the door and burn traces led the team to suggest a link with Zoroastrian practice.
Preliminary radiocarbon dates of about 400 AD for the large tombs and F1, and about 750 AD for the small ones.
More than 20 patterned silk fragments stuck to bones, square-holed coins (one apparently worn as a pendant), handle-less bronze mirrors of Chinese type and many bead strings.

The team floated a link with the Hephthalites, nomads who reached Central Asia at the end of the 4th century, but said more research is needed.

Reports differ. The Times of Central Asia (2 December 2024) spells the site "Mengchaktepa", gives seven tombs and two buildings, says the first silk turned up in 1986 rather than 1987, says CASS and Uzbekistan's Institute of Archaeology have studied the site since 2012, and quotes Abdulhamidjon Anarbayev of Uzbekistan's National Center for Archaeology. Those figures may reflect different stages of the same season. We use China Daily's more specific numbers and give the first-silk year as 1986–87.

Not the Bekabad side

China Daily describes the site as "on a plateau east of the town of Bekabad". That can suggest a separate Munchaktepa near Bekabad, a Tashkent Region town on the Syr Darya close to the Tajik border. We found no source for a second site there. The same article places the cemetery about 30 metres from Balandtepa and dates the first digs to the 1980s, which is the Pap necropolis. "East of Bekabad" is true only in the loosest compass sense; the site is in Namangan Region, beside Pap.

Status, access and where to see the finds

Ancient Pap has been on the Tentative List since 18 January 2008, submitted by Uzbekistan's National Commission for UNESCO under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv). Tentative status is only a statement of intent; don't expect World Heritage signage or facilities.

Conservation has been patchy. In December 2020 Anhor.uz, citing Gazeta.uz, reported that 22 monuments in Kasansai District of Namangan Region were at risk and that the Department of Cultural Heritage had put "Munchoqtepa" and the Guzapoya mosque into its 2021 restoration programme. Kasansai isn't Pap, so the report may refer to a different hill with a similar name; we can't confirm it covers this site.

Getting near is easy. Pap is a stop on the Tashkent to Andijan express; train 730 leaves Tashkent at 09:20 and reaches Pop station at 12:00, with a fare of 195,090 som (Zamin.uz, September 2026; last checked: October 2026). The route through the Kamchik tunnel is covered in our Tashkent to Fergana Valley transport notes. Seeing anything is harder. We found no visitor centre, and the crypts aren't open displays. Casual visitors will see mounds and a riverbank, so go with a local guide or pair it with the city sights in our Namangan travel guide.

A January 2024 note from the WOSCU heritage society says the State Museum of History in Tashkent received four fabric samples (clothing fragments) of the 5th–6th centuries from Munchaktepa in 2011, through Sh. R. Pidaev. That confirms they're in the collection, not that they're on show after the 2026 reopening, so ask first; our State Museum of History guide has the current hours and ticket picture.