Samarkand

• 1. Introduction

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  Samarkand sits in southeastern Uzbekistan, and for more than two thousand years it has been one of the most coveted cities on earth. When Alexander the Great rode into it in 329 BC, he found a place already old enough to have its own legends. When the Mongols under Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1220, the chronicler Juvayni recorded that thirty thousand young men and thirty thousand craftsmen were conscripted and marched away. When the traveler Ibn Battuta passed through in 1333, he called it "one of the greatest and finest of cities, and most perfect of them in beauty." That a single place could survive conquest after conquest, ruin after ruin, and still emerge as the center of a Renaissance is a story worth examining closely. What was it about this city at the junction of China, Persia, and Europe that made it irreplaceable? How did a conqueror become a patron of the arts here, and how did papermaking reach Europe from this one spot? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A City Born at the Crossroads

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  Archaeological excavations within the city limits at sites called Syob and midtown, as well as suburban areas including Hojamazgil and Sazag'on, have turned up evidence of human activity forty thousand years old, dating back to the Upper Paleolithic. Researchers at the Institute of Archaeology of Samarkand date the city's actual founding to around 700 BC, though no single document certifies the exact moment.

  The Syob and Darg'om canals, which supplied the city and its suburbs with water, appeared around the seventh to fifth centuries BC, in the early Iron Age. By the time the Persian Achaemenid dynasty rose to power, Samarkand had already become the capital of the Sogdian satrapy, a province of the empire whose people spoke an eastern Iranian language from which the city's own name may derive. Some scholars trace the word to the Sogdian samar, meaning stone or rock, and kand, meaning fort or town, making Samarkand a near-twin in meaning to the Uzbek capital Tashkent, where tash is the Turkic word for stone.

  The tenth-century Persian author Istakhri, who traveled through the region he called Smarkandian Sogd, left a description of almost paradisal abundance: eight days of unbroken greenery and gardens along the river, every town with its own fortress, every home with gardens, cisterns, and flowing water. He called it "the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah." That fertility, watered by the canals and the Zerafshan River, explains why so many armies were willing to fight for it.

• 3. Alexander, Mongols, and Survival

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  Alexander the Great conquered the city in 329 BC, when it bore the name Maracanda. Written sources record one Orepius who became its ruler afterward, gaining the position "not from ancestors, but as a gift of Alexander." The city suffered significant damage in the initial assault but recovered quickly, and new construction techniques arrived with the Greek influence: oblong bricks gave way to square ones, and superior methods of masonry and plastering were introduced.

  This capacity to absorb and rebuild recurred across the centuries. The Sasanian Persians took the city around 260 AD, under whose rule it became an essential site for the spread of Manichaeism. Between 457 and 509 it was part of the Kidarite state. The Hephthalites, known as the White Huns, held it until the Göktürks won it at the Battle of Bukhara around 560 AD. Early in the eighth century, the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate under Qutayba ibn Muslim captured it from the Tang dynasty around 710 AD. At that moment, the city hosted followers of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Manichaeism, Judaism, and Nestorian Christianity, with most of the population Zoroastrian.

  The conquest that left the deepest scar was the Mongol assault of 1220. The chronicler Juvayni wrote that Genghis Khan killed all who took refuge in the citadel and the mosque, pillaged the city completely, and conscripted sixty thousand people in total. Yet the city did not die. Marco Polo, recording his journey along the Silk Road in the late thirteenth century, described Samarkand as "a very large and splendid city," evidence that the city had reconstituted itself within decades of its most violent destruction.

• 4. Timur's Capital

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  In 1370, the conqueror Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, made Samarkand his capital and spent the next thirty-five years rebuilding most of it, populating the city with great artisans and craftsmen drawn from across his conquests. Timur used urban planning as a tool of legitimation, and the results were striking: by his orders, Samarkand could be reached only by roads, and deep ditches were dug, while walls five miles in circumference separated the city from its surrounding neighbors. At this time, the city had a population of about 150,000.

  Henry III of Castile's ambassador, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, visited Samarkand between the 8th of September and the 20th of November 1404 and attested to the never-ending construction underway. He recorded his reaction to Timur's mosque directly: "The Mosque which Timur had built seemed to us the noblest of all those we visited in the city of Samarkand." The same ambassador had earlier written that Samarkand was simply a distorted form of the Turkic name meaning "fat city."

  Timur's mausoleum, the Gur-e Amir, stands as the most celebrated product of this era. Its tiled walls showcase mosaic faience, an Iranian technique in which each tile is cut, colored, and fit into place individually. The tiles were arranged to spell out religious words such as "Muhammad" and "Allah." The dominant color of the Gur-e Amir and much of Samarkand's architecture is blue, which in that era was the color of mourning in Central Asia, though it also served to ward off the evil eye and to symbolize water, a rare resource across the region.

  The Bibi-Khanym Mosque, begun after Timur's 1398-1399 campaign in India, originally held about 450 marble columns hauled into place with the help of ninety-five elephants brought back from Hindustan. An 1897 earthquake destroyed those columns, and they were not fully restored in the subsequent reconstruction.

• 5. Science and Scholarship

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  Between 1417 and 1420, Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg built a madrasah in Samarkand that became the first building in what would grow into the architectural ensemble of Registan. Ulugh Beg's interests ran toward science rather than warfare, and he invited a large number of astronomers and mathematicians of the Islamic world to study there. A whole scientific school arose around him in the first half of the fifteenth century, gathering prominent scholars including Jamshid al-Kashi, Qadi Zada al-Rumi, and Ali Qushji.

  In 1428, Ulugh Beg built an observatory whose main instrument was a wall quadrant known as the Fakhri Sextant. Its radius measured forty meters, making it unique in the world. The arc was finely constructed with a staircase on either side so that assistants could access it to perform their measurements.

  This tradition of scholarship extended backward into the Islamic period as well. Legend holds that during Abbasid rule, the secret of papermaking was obtained from two Chinese prisoners captured at the Battle of Talas in 751, which led to the foundation of the first paper mill in the Islamic world at Samarkand. From there the technology spread through the Islamic world and then to Europe. Samarkand also gave the world the Shrine of Imam Bukhari, the Islamic scholar whose hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari is regarded by Sunni Muslims as one of the most authentic in existence. Ulugh Beg's observatory was later followed by the 1040-1068 rule of Ibrahim Tamgach Khan, the founder of the Western Qarakhanid Khaganate, who built the first state-funded madrasa in Samarkand and established a public hospital where medicine was also taught.

• 6. Languages, Peoples, and Identity

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  Samarkand's population of 551,700 people as of 2021 makes it the third-largest city in Uzbekistan, yet its demographic reality is tangled in ways that official figures rarely capture. While Uzbek is the state language, scholars and independent sources indicate that Tajik, a dialect of Persian, is the most common native tongue, spoken by roughly 70 percent of residents according to various estimates.

  The complexity runs deeper than modern language politics. During the 1926 census, as documented by Paul Bergne, a significant portion of the Tajik population was registered as Uzbek. In Samarkand city, the 1920 census had recorded 44,758 Tajiks and only 3,301 Uzbeks. By the 1926 census, the figures had flipped: 43,364 Uzbeks and only 10,716 Tajiks. Similar reversals occurred in other cities and villages across the region during the process of national delimitation in Central Asia.

  Beyond Uzbeks and Tajiks, Samarkand is home to ethnic communities of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Azeris, Tatars, Koreans, Poles, and Germans, most of whom arrived during the Russian imperial or Soviet periods and speak Russian as their common language. In the extreme west and southwest of the city lives a population of Central Asian Arabs, most of whom now speak Uzbek. Benjamin of Tudela reported that Samarkand had 50,000 Jews in 1170; a large Jewish community persisted into the twentieth century, but from the 1970s onward, hundreds of thousands left for Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. In 2022, a quarterly literary magazine in Tajiki called Durdonai Sharq was launched in Samarkand, a small but concrete marker of a culture still asserting itself.

• 7. The City in the Imagination

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  Samarkand appears in One Thousand and One Nights: its frame story involves a Sasanian king who assigns his brother, Shah Zaman, to rule over the city. That literary association spans millennia and extends well beyond Arabic storytelling. The poet James Elroy Flecker published his poem The Golden Journey to Samarkand in 1913, incorporating it into his five-act drama Hassan, which tells of a young man from Baghdad who travels toward the city and encounters bandits, treacherous terrain, and political turmoil along the way.

  The city is also famous for the tale called "The Rendezvous at Samarkand," recounted by the twelfth-century Persian storyteller and mystic Farid Al-Din Attar. In the tale, a vizier flees Baghdad after encountering a skeletal figure he recognizes as death, and begs his caliph for permission to ride to Samarkand on his fastest horse. When the caliph visits the market and finds the same skeletal figure, he asks her what the gesture toward the vizier meant. "It was only a gesture of surprise," death replies, "because I saw him in Baghdad while I must take him tonight in Samarkand." Agatha Christie drew on that tale for her novel Appointment with Death.

  In 1988, the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf published his historical novel Samarkand, centering on the eleventh-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam and his Rubaiyat. In 2001, UNESCO added Samarkand to its World Heritage List under the designation Samarkand - Crossroads of Cultures. On the 15th and the 16th of September 2022, the city hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, connecting this ancient crossroads to twenty-first-century geopolitics.