Forty thousand years of rock art and bubbling mud volcanoes on the Caspian steppe — Azerbaijan's most otherworldly day trip
Gobustan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site 60km south of Baku encompassing over 6,000 rock engravings (petroglyphs) created between 40,000 and 5,000 years ago — hunting scenes, boat figures, ritual dances, and human forms cut into sandstone outcrops across a barren steppe landscape. The site also preserves a Roman legionary inscription from the 1st century CE, confirming that the Caspian steppe was the outer edge of the Roman Empire's reach. A few kilometers further south, the Gobustan mud volcanoes — Azerbaijan hosts around 350 of the world's estimated 700 mud volcanoes, the highest concentrat…
Gobustan's petroglyphs document the full arc of prehistoric life on the western Caspian shore — from Ice Age hunters and Mesolithic fishing communities to Bronze Age herders. The Roman inscription, carved by soldiers of the XII Fulminata Legion stationed here around 84–96 CE under Emperor Domitian, was discovered in 1948 and confirms that Rome's easternmost military presence reached the Caspian. The region was part of the ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania before falling under Sassanid Persian and later Arab, Seljuk, and Safavid control. Azerbaijan's mud volcanoes are the result of undergro…