What's Behind the Mysterious Ancient Wall in the Gobi Desert?

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-hunt-gobi-wall-mongolia-2674588

by derbOac • 9 months ago

87 39 9 months ago

news.artnet.com

Aspos3• 9 months ago

Does it exist? I could not find a wikipedia article about it. This Gobi Wall can not be a part of what is known as the Great Wall of China as it was built 5 centuries later, no? Can someone explain?

slwvx• 9 months ago

Ontology in the 21st century: no wikipedia page means non-existence :-)

LeoPanthera• 9 months ago

It is at least a good warning that you might be reading an AI hallucination, and should do further research.

AlotOfReading6• 9 months ago

The Great Wall is just part of a larger series of fortifications in eastern Central Asia. One of the others is the less studied Medieval Wall System (MWS). The gobi wall here is a few hundred kilometers of one of the individual walls within the MWS, which as the name suggests is within the gobi desert in the modern country of Mongolia.

And just to preclude the usual follow-up, these walls probably weren't major defensive fortifications intended to keep out armies of nomadic raiders. Their primary function was closer to airport customs, visible outposts that reinforce the boundaries and laws of the state.

mmooss• 9 months ago

From a/the related paper:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087

The Medieval (10th to 13th century CE) Wall System (MWS) stretches approximately 4000 km across extensive regions in northern China and Mongolia, as well as shorter sections in Russia (Figure 1). It represents one of the most extensive yet enigmatic architectural features in East Asia. In recent years The Wall Project, funded by the European Research Council, as well as other projects, has extensively studied and published on different sections of this wall line. Such research demonstrated that this extensive system of earthen walls was built by different empires from c. the 10th to the 13th centuries CE [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Among the different sections of the MWS, the wall section located in the southern Mongolia’s Gobi Desert is the least explored and still poorly understood. This study focuses on a 321 km-long segment of this wall line, located in Ömnögovi province of Mongolia, that we refer to as the Gobi Wall (Figure 2).

Aspos3• 9 months ago

I don't know, looks like hunting walls to me. When chased, animals naturally follow such walls, however insignificant they are (sometimes they follow even a line drawn on the grass), and get onto predictable trajectory leading them into ambush.

mattmaroon4• 9 months ago

That article ends so abruptly and lacking anything you want to know (how was it used for non-defensive purposes?) that I almost wonder if it was written by AI. Hard to tell bad writers from computers anymore.

jazzyjackson• 9 months ago

Computers were, after all, trained on bad writing

Cthulhu_• 9 months ago

Adblock on Chrome isn't working anymore, given the huge luxury watch ads every three paragraph I can't read it as anything but content slop to get ad impressions. Doesn't need to be AI, slop has existed for decades.

mattmaroon4• 9 months ago

That was honestly what made me finally switch back to Firefox after what must have been close to two decades.

ungreased0675• 9 months ago

So, what was it for? The article sparked my interest then just ended.

gnatman• 9 months ago

I’m guessing this is the source paper?

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087
> This study challenges the perception of such structures as being purely defensive, revealing the Gobi Wall’s multifunctional role as an imperial tool for demarcating boundaries, managing populations and resources, and consolidating territorial control

jpollock• 9 months ago

I seem to remember reading somewhere that low walls like this weren't really about defense, they were about funneling travelers (with carts) to the tax collectors.

thaumasiotes5• 9 months ago

What would the point be, in the Gobi desert?

The structure of traveling through that is that you follow the silk road between a bunch of major cities built around oases. It's not necessary to divert anyone with walls - the fact that they need to drink, and that they won't be willing to wander off into the desert, get lost, and die, is sufficient. You don't move people to the tax collectors. You move the tax collectors to them.

manwe150• 9 months ago

Unless maybe the point of the wall was to provide the road marker itself that guided folks to the nearest survival point? The article mentions there were frequent wells and encampments, but so few other details

AlotOfReading6• 9 months ago

Are you thinking of the Taklamakan? People wander around the Gobi as a way of life. It's not quite as extreme as you're painting it.

In any case, the traditional routes for the northern silk roads passed south of these walls through the Hexi corridor, at least until the Mongol period when many of them rerouted through the Orkhon valley north of the Gobi. Separate from the silk roads, there was a lot of trade/conflict between the northern Chinese states and the various Mongolian polities like the Liao. Managing that was both economically and existentially necessary for the border states like the xixia.

Also, nomads usually moved to the tax collectors instead of the other way around. More practical that way.

smogcutter2• 9 months ago

If only you could go back and tell them what a waste those walls are! I’m sure the Mongolians would value your expertise.

fred_is_fred• 9 months ago

Any time you build a series of forts (for any reason) you end up creating commerce and trading. You also end up many times with towns. Even if it was not the original intent. Although the article seems to just randomly end, I assume that’s where it was headed.

flowerthoughts• 9 months ago

There's a lot of application of methods in this paper.

However, they're mostly saying there wasn't much in terms of artifacts to be discovered. And it's a wall made from unpolished stones, sand and maybe some wood. There' basically nothing here. They find some coins from 160 CE and then go on to attribute the wall to being built in the 10-13 CE centuries, as was already established.

This research supports a broader reconceptualization of medieval frontiers—not merely as static defensive barriers, but as dynamic administrative infrastructures. The Gobi Wall exemplifies a mode of Xi Xia statecraft that used architectural investments to manage re-sources, population movement, and territorial boundaries. This understanding aligns with theoretical models framing frontiers as zones of control and interaction, rather than rigid dividing lines [57], and invites broader comparative analysis across Eurasian contexts.

Yeah, they _maybe_ used a big wall they had built for defensive purposes to charge customs.

There are no answers here. I'm sure it's interesting for other archaeologists to study the methods used, but there are no interesting rigid conclusions to be had from reading it.

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/14/5/1087

decimalenough2• 9 months ago

Well, that was pretty anticlimactic. Suggest you go read about a more interesting abandoned city in the Gobi Desert instead:

Built in 1032, the city thrived under the rule of the Tangut-led Western Xia dynasty. It has been identified as the city of Etzina, which appears in The Travels of Marco Polo. ...
According to a legend of the local Torghut population, in 1372 a Mongol military general named Khara Bator was surrounded with his troops by the armies of the Ming dynasty. Diverting the Ejin River, the city's water source that flowed just outside the fortress, the Ming dynasty denied Khara-Khoto water for its gardens and wells. As time passed and Khara Bator realised his fate, he murdered his family and then himself. After his suicide, Khara Bator's soldiers waited within the fortress until Ming troops finally attacked and killed the remaining inhabitants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khara-Khoto

mikhailfranco• 9 months ago

Khara Khoto appears to be on or near the extension of the 'Gobi Wall' into present day China, presumably as part of the same system.

https://cms.interestingengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

The name 'Gobi Wall' seems to refer to the section of the wall within Mongolia. Its garrisons and forts are numbered from G01 at the western end of the section, where the wall crosses the border.

https://cdn.grid.id/crop/0x0:0x0/700x0/photo/2025/05/31/land...

Khara Khoto is about 100 km WSW of G01.

forshaper• 9 months ago

a Mongol military general named Khara Bator

wait is this dude's name basically 'Black Knight'?

decimalenough2• 9 months ago

Even better, it's Black Hero.

rjknight• 9 months ago

Surely the answer is "the other side of the Gobi Desert".

mattmaroon4• 9 months ago

Why did the chicken cross the Gobi wall?

nilarimogard• 9 months ago

This isn't reddit.

What's Behind the Mysterious Ancient Wall in the Gobi Desert?

Related Stories