Yahyo Gulomov

Yahyo Gulomov came from Tashkent, where he was born on 1 May 1908; his father taught at a madrasa. When the father died in 1919, the boy was brought up by his mother, a girls'-school teacher, and from 1921 he lived in a children's boarding home. He then spent three years (1923–1926) at the men's institute of education in Tashkent, followed by the Uzbek State Pedagogical Academy in Samarkand, where he completed the social-economic course and received his diploma in 1930.

For a while he taught in a school, then did postgraduate work at the Uzbek Research Institute, and from 1931 he taught at a pedagogical technical school in Tashkent. He entered scholarship in 1933: for seven years, until 1940, he served in Uzkomstaris, the committee for the protection of ancient monuments and works of art, as both researcher and scientific secretary. There he first joined expeditions and surveys, and he began excavating on his own in 1936.

In 1937 he went to the ancient irrigated lands of southern Karakalpakstan, and from 1938 he worked with S. P. Tolstov's Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic expedition. In 1940 he moved to the Uzbek branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, first as head of the archaeology section of the Institute of History, Language and Literature. From 1943 until his last days he ran the section of ancient and medieval history at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Uzbek SSR Academy, and between 1956 and 1959 he also stood in as the institute's acting director.

His degrees came in this order: a candidate's thesis, "Khiva and Its Monuments", in 1943, and in 1950 a doctoral dissertation on the irrigation of Khorezm from antiquity to the present. He was confirmed as professor in March 1955, elected a corresponding member of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences in October 1956 and a full member in February 1966. Between those dates, on 18 June 1958, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR named him Honored Scientist of the republic.

Gulomov's main theme was how land was watered in Khorezm and in Central Asia generally. His principal book on the subject appeared in Russian in 1957 and in Uzbek in 1959. Beyond irrigation he studied Neolithic, Eneolithic and Bronze Age sites of the lower Zarafshan, began the first excavations of the Zaman-Baba burial ground, and led a team that surveyed the ancient irrigated lands of the Hungry Steppe. After the Tashkent earthquake of 1966 he proposed setting up the Tashkent Archaeological Expedition, whose Tashkent detachment found a Mousterian site in the Obi-Rakhmat grotto.

Gulomov edited a great many scholarly books, and was among the authors and on the chief editorial board of the four-volume History of the Uzbek SSR (1967–1968). More than thirty researchers and university teachers prepared dissertations in the region's history and archaeology under him. In all, 135 monographs and articles are credited to him, and he lectured on Uzbek history and archaeology at the Nizami Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute.

The scholar died on 10 January 1977 in Tashkent, the city where he had started his career. In 2002, after his death, he was given the Order of Outstanding Merit, and in 2008 the post office issued a stamp with his portrait. The "Academician Ya. Gulomov Readings" are held every year; a street in Tashkent and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan are named for him.