Sozak

Sozak stood on the northern side of the Karatau, where roads crossed between the settled towns of Turkestan and the open steppe. Its old site occupies a natural rise beside a small river. Known in medieval sources as Khuzak, the town became an important political and military centre of the early Kazakh Khanate, and its shrines made it a place of pilgrimage.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, control of Sozak was contested in the struggles between Kazakh rulers and the Shaybanids. One account describes a defeat of Mahmud Sultan's forces at the town's ditch, followed by another clash on the road towards Sighnaq. The upper layers of the old settlement belong to the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, showing that life continued there long after these struggles.