The Tamgaly tract is located 170 km northwest of Almaty, in the southeastern part of the Chu-Ili Mountains, which stretch from south to north from the Trans-Ili Alatau to Lake Balkhash and the Betpak-Dala desert. The location and nature of Chu-Ili have from ancient times determined the direction of the seasonal migrations of large herds of animals (saigas, kulans), and later the routes of many of the peoples settling across the expanses of Asia. At this peculiar crossroads of ancient roads, as early as the Bronze Age, more than 3000 years ago, there arose a mountain sanctuary with thousands of petroglyphs which, by the design of their creators, adorned the rock surfaces of the small Tamgaly Canyon.

The Chu-Ili Mountains lie in a desert zone with an arid, sharply continental climate; today this is one of the sparsely populated areas of Semirechye. There are few rivers here, and many of them dry up in summer; during the hot period only the brackish water of springs and pools provides people and animals with moisture. There are no forests here, and single trees are rare, but the mountain slopes are covered with dense shrubs. The sparse grassy vegetation becomes brighter and richer in spring, clothing the mountains and plains in the variegated colors of flowers. With the onset of the summer heat the vegetation quickly turns yellow, and until late autumn only the floodplain of the Tamgaly River retains the greenery and freshness of an oasis. Tamgaly is home to rare plant species found only in the Chu-Ili Mountains and listed in the Red Book of Kazakhstan — Regel’s tulip, Kuschakewicz’s juno iris and others in need of special protection. Among the wild animals here live wolves, foxes, hares, tortoises, snakes, and also numerous birds, including birds of prey — the steppe eagle, the red-footed falcon and the saker falcon. The deserted and seemingly uninhabited world of the desert is filled with life and a special beauty. The picturesque relief of the Tamgaly tract took shape over the long geological history of the Chu-Ili Mountains. The main role in this process was played by neotectonic movements, the youngest of which are about 1 million years old. The boundary between the mountains and the broad plain stretching north of Tamgaly marks the line of an ancient fault, as a result of which the earth’s surface once rose and a high escarpment was formed; water and wind erosion completed the formation of the river valleys that made their way through a chain of low mountains with dome-shaped and flat summits (low-hill terrain).

The most striking attraction of Tamgaly is a small canyon formed at the mouth of the gorge. Here, on the fanciful bends of the valley, the rocky slopes at times come right up to one another, forming an almost enclosed space. Over many millennia the wide, smooth rock surfaces became covered with “desert varnish”, becoming the ideal backdrop for this gallery created by no human hand, in which more than one generation of ancient masters — the creators of rock art — did their work. For centuries, for the different peoples who left their mark on the history of Kazakhstan, the rocks of the canyon and the narrow Tamgaly valley retained the significance of a sanctuary — a place where ritual ceremonies were held, magic rites were performed, and worship was paid to gods and ancestral spirits. The tradition of worship at Tamgaly lives on to this day: it is visibly attested by the colorful scraps of cloth tied to the branches of shrubs and by other simple “offerings” of modern pilgrims.

About a hundred different monuments are known in Tamgaly — settlements, burial grounds, altars and petroglyphs belonging to the Bronze Age, the Early Iron Age, the Middle Ages and the Modern period. Concentrated within a comparatively small territory, together they form an archaeological complex embodying the history of many ancient and modern peoples of Kazakhstan over the course of three millennia.

The most ancient inhabitants of Tamgaly were the Bronze Age tribes of the Andronovo culture, who inhabited the lands of Kazakhstan in the 2nd millennium BC. The origin of these tribes remains a matter of debate, but their connection with the Indo-Iranians — herders and farmers, skilled metallurgists and masters of swift battle chariots — is the most likely. Having chosen this picturesque place, the first inhabitants of Tamgaly transformed the world of nature around them: creating petroglyphs, setting up dwellings or stone tombs, they brought into the landscape their own understanding of the order of the world. For the succeeding generations of peoples that replaced one another — the Sakas and the Usuns, the ancient Turks and their descendants the Kazakhs — this inner orderliness of Tamgaly was perceived as a heritage of the ancestors and was preserved, hallowed by tradition.

Throughout all ages the heart of the complex remained the canyon, on whose rocks, conventionally designated as Groups I-V, about 3000 petroglyphs have survived. Nearby, at the foot of a solitary mountain, lies an extensive necropolis where the most ancient burials were made in the 14th-13th centuries BC; on the foothill plain, the kurgans of the nomads of the 1st millennium BC – 1st millennium AD stand out in separate groups, including a kurgan with stone ridges called “whiskers”. This entire territory, including the canyon with its petroglyphs, was from the most ancient times a cult zone, within which people did not live and which they visited for ceremonial purposes.