Saray-Jük

Saray-Jük, "Little Sarai", stood on the right bank of the Ural, then called the Yaik, some 50 km above the river's mouth on the Caspian. It lay on the northern road from the Volga to Khwarazm. Ibn Battuta crossed the river here in 1334 by ferry and compared the crossing to Baghdad. Excavations found ceramic water pipes and drains, potters' and metalworkers' workshops, and inscribed vessels that show an unusually developed town for the steppe. Nobles from all over the Horde came to hunt and fish in the surrounding country.

A later chronicle says the khans Jani Beg and Berdi Beg were enthroned and buried here. Timur destroyed the town in 1395. It was rebuilt in the 1430s–40s and from the 1490s was the only real city and the capital of the Nogai Horde, where Kasym Khan of the Kazakhs was also buried. In 1580 free Cossacks sacked and burned it, and the survivors left for Khiva.