Samarkand is an oasis, but not the kind where human life stops beyond an outer ring of palm trees. Set on the edge of the Kizyl-Kum desert within sight of two mountain ranges, it is watered by the river which runs between them, the Zerafshan. For at least 10,000 years and possibly as many as 40,000, Homo sapiens has found this an amenable spot. If Silk Route trade made it rich in historic times, nature was the provider in prehistoric ones. Everything that Paleolithic man could wish for was here, and his (or rather her, for they were women"s) jaw and thighbones were discovered in a former chil­dren"s park in Samarkand in 1937.

The oldest evidence of urban settlement on the territory of Samarkand is a collection of jewellery from a Bronze-Age burial ground beside the River Siab, which still runs grubbily along the eastern edge of the Afrasiab site. The remains of an outer city wall here have been dated around 1500 BC, but Samarkand proper is generally accepted to be 2500 years old, and Afrasiab was its first name.

By the 4th century BC Afrasiab was the major urban centre of Sogdiana, famous for its size and general magnificence. Marauders were for the most part kept at bay by a city wall 14 km long and, in one surviving section, 13 m high. But in 329 BC the city faced the greatest marauder of his and possibly of all time. Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush in the spring of that year and took Samarkand without a struggle. But Spitamen, the local Sogdian ruler, led a spirited rebellion that delayed the Greek conquest by 18 frus­trating months, and ended only with Spitamen"s assassination by his own followers.

Having finally taken the city Alexander became arrogant. On the feast of Dionysus he made sacrifices to Castor and Pollux, and claimed to be descended, like them, from Zeus. Some courtiers took this as a cue for flattery and likened him to Hercules, but his old friend Cleitus decided to cut him down to size. Emboldened by drink, he told Alexander he was not the equal of his own father Philip, let alone of Hercules. Alexander ran him through with a spear - and was filled with remorse for the remaining five years of his life.

Samarkand and the Silk Route.
With the arrival of the first Chinese Samarkand entered an era of invasion-proof prosperity and semi-mythic international status. It was to last more than a thousand years and it began because the Chinese found that silk, which they alone knew how to make, was worth more than its weight in gold in the empires of the West. Samarkand was at the very centre of the Silk Route system. Considering the volume of through traffic, remarkably little is known about life in ancient Samarkand. Archaeologists are hampered by the wind; before Tamerlane the city was built mostly of mud, so that over the centuries buildings simply dried up and blew away. And Asian caravanners do not seem to have kept diaries. So we have an account by Arrian, Alexander"s chronicler, and then nothing until 1200 years later when the Arabian traveller Abulkasim ibn-Khakal was much taken by Samarkand"s canals. Marco Polo"s Travels kept alive the legend of Samarkand for Europeans, even if he never actually went there. Thereafter Europeans arrived at the rate of about one every hundred years until the 1860s. In the end the rarity of writings about Samarkand is eloquent confirmation of its extreme isolation; until 1868 it was still, in Geoffrey Moorhouse"s words, "a great deal more remote from the rest of civilization than the moon is today.

At least we know that when those first Chinese arrived, Samarkand was part of the (Persian) Achaemenid empire, and that, like the rest of Transoxiana, it passed to Kushans, Hephthalites and Turks before the coming of the Arabs. From bowls and fire-proof altars in Afrasiab"s museum it also seems that the potting wheel arrived on the scene in the 1st century AD and that the prevailing religion was Zoroastrianism, or fire-worship.

The secrets of silk-making reached the West in the 6th century and the flow of Chinese silk through Samarkand gradually diminished as Italy, Spain and southern France began, making their own. But Samarkand was to remain a crossroads of international trade in other commodities until sea routes were established between Europe and the Orient in the 16th century.

The Arabs and the Camel-Saddle.
Islam failed to snuff out Samarkand"s fire-worship at the first attempt. Arabs crossed the Amudarya in 654 but Samarkand, like Bukhara, defied them for half a century. In 712 Qutaiba ibn-Muslim, governor of the province of Khorassan which was then part of the Islamic Umayyad empire, arrived with his soldiers at the gates of Samarkand. Its defenders tried to snub him. "We have found it written," they shouted from the battlements, "that our city can only be captured by a man named Camel-Saddle." Unfortunately, in Arabic "Qutaiba" means precisely that, camel saddle, so in rode Qutaiba (on a horse).

Samarkand"s first mosque was built in the western corner of what is now the Afrasiab site. The city was absorbed into Khorassan (based on Merv) and, in the late 9th century, into the Samanid empire based on Bukhara. Islam, and its pervasive influence on art and architecture, was here to stay. Meanwhile, for all her neighbor’s political pretensions, Samarkand remained the largest, richest city in Transoxiana. When Abulkasim ibn-Khakal visited Samarkand in the mid-10th century he climbed the citadel and saw "one of the most beautiful views that man has ever gazed upon: the fresh greenness of the trees, the glittering castles... All of this is reflected in the canals running with water and the artificial ponds... Samarkand is a city with large market places, blocks of dwellings, bath-houses, caravanserai... The running water flows through canals that are partially made out of lead... With few exceptions there is not a single street or house where there is no running water and very few houses do not have gardens.

Even a new era of nomadic invasions, starting with that of the Karakhanid Turks in the late 10th century, failed at first to destroy this irrigated idyll or the commerce which financed it. Over the next 200 years control of Samarkand alternated between Muslim Turks - the Seljuks, and later the Khorezmshahs from the Amu Darya delta - and another" tribe of pagan nomads, the Kara-Khitai. Then came a terror of a different order.

The Mongols.
When Genghis Khan sacked Samarkand in 1220 he slit its jugular first, damming up the canals which supplied it from the River Zerafshan. He also "slit open the-wombs of pregnant women and killed the foetuses," according to a 13th-century historian called Ibn-ak-Asir. "The flames of the massacre spread far and wide, and evil covered everything like a cloud driven by the wind.

The aftermath may not have matched the initial apocalypse. Some sources say Samarkand surrendered without a fight, that most of its people were spared in return and that fewer buildings were razed than at Bukhara, But according to ak-Asir"s account Genghis Khan was utterly ruthless. He waited outside the city to be joined by his sons Chaghatai and Ogodei, (fresh from the destruction of Otrar), then drove its inhabitants out, butchered the garrison and levelled the buildings, Less than a quarter of the city"s population of 400,000 survived, and it stayed at around 100,000 afterwards because that was all the wrecked irrigation system could support.

Samarkand bounced back. In 1333 the great Arab traveller Ibn-Battuta was able to describe it as "one of the largest and most perfectly beautiful cities in the world." No wonder Tamerlane, born three years later to a minor tribal chieftain, chose it as his capital.

The Timurids.
The history of Samarkand during Tamerlane"s campaigning years (1372-1402) is a reflection of the history of the world. He rampaged to Delhi and Baghdad and to the gates of Moscow and Constantinople, sending back to Samarkand Asia"s finest craftsmen and most precious treasures. He named its districts after far-flung cities and fearful emissaries sought him there from Beijing, Madrid and most points in between.

Like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan he wanted to rule the world. "As there is one God in Heaven there must be one king on earth," he explained early in his career. "The entire world is not worth more than one king." But his fighting was also driven by economics: trade along the classic Silk Route through Samarkand, Merv and northern Persia had fallen sharply since Genghis Khan"s destruction of its oases. Urgench, to the north, was now thriving at Samarkand"s expense, and was Tamerlane"s first victim. Later, in his longest campaign (1391-95), he conquered the lands with which Urgench had traded; those of the Golden Horde on the Volga and in southern Russia. His aim was always to bring trade back to Samarkand, which was now not just an entrepot but a famed manufacturer of velvet and paper.

The best description of Samarkand before the Russian conquest is by Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, ambassador extraordinary from the court of Henry III of Castile. In 1403 he began an epic journey from Spain to Samarkand in the wake of Tamerlane"s victorious army, which by capturing Ankara had given Western Europe a breathing space from Ottoman expansionism. But Europe was still more alarmed by Tamerlane himself. Henry wanted a treaty.

The city itself," he continued, "is rather larger than Seville, but lying outside are great numbers of houses which form extensive suburbs. The township is surrounded by orchards and vineyards and between them pass streets with open squares. These are all densely populated and all kinds of goods are on sale with bread-stuffs and meat. Among these orchards outside Samarkand are found the most noble and beautiful houses and here Timur has his many palaces and pleasure grounds...

It was 1404. Two massive construction projects, the Bibi Khanym mosque and Tamerlane"s own mausoleum, Gur Emir, were in progress in the city centre. On a whim he ordered the construction of a grand bazaar in 20 days - or else his engineers would pay with their lives. A thousand men were imprisoned in the citadel making arms and armour for his planned invasion of China.

The following year, shortly after setting out, he died. The empire quickly shrunk, but as it did, Samarkand enjoyed half a century of peace and prosperity under Tamerlane"s grandson Ulug Bek (1407-1449). To him we awe the Ulug Bek madrasa and the remains of an observatory - the most intriguing relic of medieval Samarkand.

Ulug Bek was murdered by his son in 1449 for perceived heresy Tamerlane"s great-great-great-grandson Babur was hounded out of the city in 1512 by the Uzbek Turks, having taken possession of it at the turn of the century aged 14. He was the last of the Timurid dynasty and the first of another, the Mongol, at Delhi.

© Material is belonged to «Central Asia Travel».
Copying and using all presented information and material is possible ONLY by authority of the originator.

to the top