It is evident from the aerial images that there was a core urban area extending either side of the central spine formed by the north-south running Madjan Canal (Fig. 10 and Fig. 36 - opens GIS). This densely built-up area (Fig. 37 - opens GIS) shows a network of roughly regular streets, alleys and building plots, where streets can run for 200-300m roughly straight, but also where many of the streets are much shorter, with slight deviations in the alignments. Although a number of east-west streets run across a large area of the city, many streets end in T-junctions or staggered crossroads, obstructing long lines of sight through the cityscape.
The street widths are hard to calculate, because of the issues of the exact position of wall lines, but it seems that while many of the more substantial east-west streets were c. 3-4m, with perhaps some as wide as 5m: this broadly accords with our assumptions about street sizes. However, many of the alleys were clearly smaller than this, perhaps ranging between c. 2 and 3.5m, creating a finer network of alleys. What is interesting, however, is that when one of the more substantial east-west streets was excavated (Williams and Kurbansakhatov forthcoming), it proved to be initially some 6m wide, and while this was encroached upon, to both north and south during rebuilding of the adjoining properties, it was still c. 5 m wide at the end. A reading of the aerial photography at the same point before excavation predicted a street width of perhaps a maximum of 4m, so evidently our reading of the aerial photography is slightly flawed. We probably did not take enough account of the formation processes; with a tendency to measure from the edge of the erosion mound, rather than to the very centre of it.
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Last updated: Mon Sept 29 2008