Samarkand: the Crossroads of the Ancient World

"Even more beautiful than I had imagined." Those words, attributed to Alexander the Great upon his arrival at the ancient city of Maracanda in 329 BC, have echoed through the centuries as one of the most succinct tributes ever paid to a city. Alexander was not a man who dealt in easy compliments. He had seen the wonders of the Persian Empire, the opulent palaces of Persepolis, the ancient marvels of Egypt. Yet something about the city on the Zeravshan River — its setting in a fertile, well-watered valley, its legendary markets, its cosmopolitan air — moved even the conqueror of the known world to a kind of reverence.

The city that astonished Alexander is known today as Samarkand, the second-largest city in modern Uzbekistan, and one of the great cultural and architectural treasures of the Islamic world. Over the intervening millennia, it has been sacked by Genghis Khan, raised to imperial glory by Tamerlane, illuminated by one of the greatest astronomer-mathematicians of the medieval period, and recognized in 2001 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the designation "Samarkand — Crossroad of Cultures." Through fire and conquest and resurgence, the city has maintained a continuity of habitation and cultural vitality that makes it one of the most remarkable places on Earth.

Samarkand sits in the Zeravshan Valley in the heart of Central Asia, at a geographic crossroads that made it inevitable that the world's great trade routes would pass through it. The Silk Road — not a single road but a network of overland and maritime routes connecting China with the Mediterranean — passed through Samarkand, and for centuries the city was one of the most important nodes in that network. Silk from China, spices from India, glass from the Mediterranean, horses from the Central Asian steppes, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, silver from Persia — all of these and more flowed through Samarkand's markets, making the city legendarily wealthy and exposing it to the cultural currents of half the world.

Today, Samarkand's Timurid monuments — the azure-domed madrasas of the Registan, the fluted turquoise dome of the Gur-e-Amir, the street of mausoleums at the Shah-i-Zinda, the immense ruins of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque — constitute one of the most magnificent concentrations of Islamic architecture anywhere on Earth. They are the physical legacy of a moment in the fifteenth century when Samarkand stood at the center of the world, the capital of an empire that stretched from Anatolia to India, the stage on which one of the most extraordinary flowerings of art and science in human history took place.

Ancient Origins: Afrasiab and the Sogdian World

The history of human habitation at Samarkand reaches back at least to the seventh century BC, perhaps earlier. The ancient city occupied a natural acropolis known today as Afrasiab — a plateau rising above the surrounding plain that offered both defensible high ground and proximity to the Zeravshan River. Archaeological excavations at Afrasiab have revealed evidence of continuous settlement stretching back more than two and a half millennia, making Samarkand one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia.

In the ancient world, Samarkand was the capital of the region of Sogdiana, and the Sogdians were among the most remarkable merchant peoples of the ancient and medieval world. The Sogdian language — an Iranian language written in a distinctive script — served as the principal lingua franca of trade along the Silk Road for centuries, from roughly the fourth century to the tenth century of the common era. Sogdian merchants established trading colonies across Central Asia, in China, in India, and throughout the Middle East, creating the first truly international commercial network in history. The Sogdian merchants of Samarkand were the intermediaries through whom silk moved from China's imperial workshops to the courts of Byzantium, through whom Chinese porcelain and lacquerware reached the Persian Empire, through whom lapis lazuli mined in the mountains of Afghanistan reached the artists of the Mediterranean world.