Sarmishsay Petroglyphs
Thousands of rock carvings in a gorge near Navoi, some of them 10,000 years old: what you see, how to find them, and whether the detour is worth it.
Between Samarkand and Bukhara, on the southern slopes of the Karatau hills north of Navoi, a stream has cut a gorge through dark rock. The boulders along it are covered in carvings: bulls with enormous horns, hunters with bows, camels, dancers, goats, dogs, chariots.
There are thousands of them, made over a span of time so long that the earliest and the latest are separated by more than the distance between us and the Roman empire. Almost nobody goes.
What is there
Counts vary with the survey: the figure usually quoted is more than 10,000 individual images, scattered over roughly 20 square kilometres of gorge and side valleys, and lower counts of four or five thousand refer to particular concentrations rather than the whole area.
The dating is equally broad. The oldest images are attributed to the Stone Age, with estimates reaching back to around the 9th millennium BC, and carving continued through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and into the medieval period. You are looking at a surface that people kept adding to for thousands of years.
Subjects repeat across that span. Wild bulls and aurochs, ibex and deer, camels both wild and loaded, predators, dogs, horses, riders, hunting scenes, figures with raised arms that are usually read as ritual, and a smaller number of chariots and caravans.
The technique is pecking: the dark desert varnish on the rock surface is chipped away to expose the lighter stone beneath. Older carvings have re-darkened over time, which is one of the ways researchers sort them chronologically, and it is also why the faint ones are hard to see in flat light.
Finding the carvings
This is the part nobody warns you about. There is no gallery, no boardwalk and very little signage. The petroglyphs are on boulders and cliff faces spread along the valley, and a first-time visitor can walk for twenty minutes past several without noticing any of them.
Three things help enormously.
- A guide from Navoi. The single best investment here. Someone who knows the valley will take you to a dozen panels in an hour that you would not find in a day.
- Low sun. Early morning or late afternoon throws the pecked lines into relief. At midday the rock is a flat grey and half the images disappear.
- Patience with your eyes. Once you have found five, you start seeing them everywhere. The first five are the hard ones.
Do not chalk, wet, trace or touch the carvings, all of which people have done here and all of which damage them. Photograph and leave them alone.
Getting there
The gorge is roughly 30 to 40 kilometres northeast of Navoi, which sits on the main road and railway between Samarkand and Bukhara.
- From Navoi: taxi, about 45 minutes each way. Agree a return fare with waiting time, and expect to pay in the region of 200,000 to 300,000 som for a half day (last checked: July 2026).
- From Samarkand or Bukhara: two to two and a half hours by road each way, so a full day with a driver.
- As a stop: the sensible option is to break the Samarkand to Bukhara drive here, which adds three or four hours to the journey and turns a transfer into a day out.
- Access: the approach passes a recreation area and camp; the final stretch is on foot, and the walking is easy but stony.
Spring, April and May, is the best season: the hills are green, there are poppies and tulips, and the temperature is manageable. Autumn works too. Midsummer is hot and exposed, and winter can be muddy.
Bring water, a hat, sturdy shoes and a picnic. There is no café, no shop and no reliable shade in the gorge itself.
Who made them, and why
The honest answer is that nobody knows in detail, and anyone who tells you confidently what a particular figure means is guessing. What can be said is more general.
The gorge has water in a dry region, which made it a place people returned to with their animals over millennia. Many images clearly relate to hunting and herding, the practical business of life here. Others, the figures with raised arms, the oversized bulls, the repeated compositions, look like something other than reportage, and are usually interpreted as connected to ritual.
The site is on Uzbekistan's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status, and both the national tourism portal and the national heritage bodies treat it as significant. Protection on the ground is thin: there is graffiti on some panels, and quarrying and visitor pressure have been raised as concerns.
Is it worth the detour?
If you like monuments that are handed to you, no. This is a rocky valley where you hunt for marks on stones, and you will not get the Registan's instant payoff.
If you like prehistory, hiking, or the idea of touching the oldest human-made thing in the country, it is one of the most rewarding half days in Uzbekistan, and the contrast with the tiled cities is exactly the point. Our Samarkand to Bukhara transfer guide explains how to work it into the drive, and Uzbekistan's official tourism portal has a page on the gorge.
If you want more of the same landscape, the Nurata mountains to the north hold more rock art and the yurt camps at Aydarkul, which pairs naturally with a Sarmishsay morning.
Featured image: Relisa Granovskaya (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.