The Ark of Bukhara is a spectacular-looking fortress located in Uzbekistan, built 1,500 years ago

Needs to cut down on the baklava.

Was there any advantage to having it lean like that?

You’d think it would lean the other way to make bit harder to climb.

Edit: or this could be a view from the inside. Or maybe the goal is to keep people in rather than out.

Edit again: none of these things seem true according to Wikipedia. It’s curved inwards and it houses the rich, so it seems to just be aesthetics.

Harder to get on the wall would be my guess

Seems to me it’d be a lot easier to scale this incline than a vertical wall

Are we sure they built it like that 1500 years ago? Churches can suck down in the span of only a few hundred years.

Wikipedia says it was built around the 5th century

The whole thing is basically a wall-clad hill. heaping one stone onto another is something they managed even thousands of years ago. And the climate (it is an oasis in the desert) is dry enought to keep it from eroding.

Harder to knock down or undermine?

Is it a lean, or is it wider at the bottom?

This question confuses me geometrically

is it \ or △ shaped ?

In defensive terms, no, not really. They had to build it like this because these aren’t really walls per se, it’s just brick lining on the outside of an earthen mound, and mounds are, well, mound-shaped. https://gomadnomad.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bukharas-Ark-Palace.jpg

You’d think there’d be a reason beyond construction requirements, though—otherwise someone in the past 1,500 years would have replaced it with a more conventional wall.

They did. This is only the oldest, innermost fortification in the city. AFAIK additional layers of walls were build around it later.

It would’ve made siege ladders harder to set up.

Who needs siege ladders when you can just climb up the damn wall?

Not this one, but newer forts were built with angled walls to help protect against canon balls and the like.

But there the walls were still vertical to the ground yeah?

Well clearly it’s because the castle defenders of that era were quite sophisticated, but simply don’t dance they just pull up their pants and do the rockaway.

Prince Siyawush built the Ark of Bukhara and was eventually buried there.

Ok, saying a fortress in Sogdia was built by Siyavash is like saying a fortress in Britain was built by Arthur or a fortress in Greece was built by Hercules—it’s what the locals say when they forgot who really built it.

not to mention the hundreds of slaves/peons/peasants that built it. they also get forgotten!

According to the Wikipedia article on the history of Bukhara:

After the fall of the Kushan Empire, Bukhara passed into the hands of Hua tribes from the Mongolian steppe and entered a steep decline. However, the 5th century saw an unprecedented growth in urban and rural settlements throughout the entire oasis. Around this time the whole oasis territory was surrounded by a more than 400 km long wall.

I assume this structure dates to that period of construction?

I wonder whether this Kushan empire is the inspiration for the name of the protagonist’s tribe in the Homeworld videogame series.

Ark of Rolling Shutter

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The Ark of Bukhara is a spectacular-looking fortress located in Uzbekistan, built 1,500 years ago(lemmy.world)

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