Samarkand

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

Samarkand is the city of the Sogdians, who founded it, and the head of Sogdiana. The Wei Shu records that the Xiongnu killed the king of Sute and took the country. It records that in 457 a Xiongnu king named Huni, the third of his line, held the throne.^[1] These Xiongnu may be the Kidarites, whose name Kidara appears on the archer coins of Samarkand. On this identification their seizure of the city falls after 440, when Sogdian embassies to China break off until 457.^[2] A different explanation takes Sute for the country of the Alans north of the Black Sea and these Xiongnu for the Huns.^[3] The Wei Shu has a name of its own for Samarkand, Xiwanjin. It also records the city’s embassies.^[4] Under the rule of these Xiongnu, in the second half of the fifth century, the new citadel was raised on a colossal platform of rammed-earth blocks four metres thick. Ceramics of the same half-century lie beneath it. The platform counts among the great works that only a strong new power could have mobilised the population to build.^[2]

The ancient city

Samarkand stands on the site of Afrasiab. Afrasiab and Kök Tepe were two giant settlements on canals of the Zarafshan, each of more than two hundred hectares. Both were occupied from the eighth or the seventh century BC. Kök Tepe soon declined.^[5] For two thousand years, Samarkand was the greatest city of Sogdiana. Together with Merv and Bactra, it was one of the very great cities of western Central Asia.^[5] Cyrus took Sogdiana around 540 BC. Alexander conquered it at the beginning of 329 BC.^[5]

Under the Hephthalites and the Göktürks

The city passed to the Hephthalites in 509. It passed to the Göktürks around 560. The great painting of Afrasiab, the ancient site, shows Göktürk warriors seated in a circle at the feet of a king or a lost deity. Chinese envoys and Sogdian nobles approach in procession. The painting is a witness to the fusion of Sogdians and Göktürks in the ruling strata of the sixth and seventh centuries.^[2] Sogdian émigrés in China who came from Samarkand took the surname Kang. The wives of the Shi family of Guyuan were Kangs. The long walls of Navaket in Semirech’e enclosed twenty square kilometres, as at Samarkand. North of the city, the Hungry Steppe forced travellers to Chach to go along the piedmont by Zaamin. Cisterns laid across the steppe in the ninth century saved two days.

The Arab conquest

In 712 Qutayba ibn Muslim took Samarkand by a ruse.^[6] The treaty of surrender bound the city to two million dirhams at once, three thousand slaves and a yearly tribute.^[7] Qutayba broke it. He stayed in the town and drove out its inhabitants.^[8] Part of the nobility of Samarkand took refuge with Dēwāštīč at Panjikent. A painting in the citadel there shows the capture of the city.^[9] The lords of Samarkand made Ishtikhan their second capital.^[10]

Under the Samanids

In the ninth and tenth centuries Samarkand was a market for Turkic slaves. Al-Yaqubi records that the future caliph al-Mu’tasim sent an agent to Samarkand, to Nuh ibn Asad, to buy Turks every year. He records that some three thousand pages had been gathered in this way under al-Ma’mun.^[11] This recruitment of slave soldiers was of great consequence for later Muslim history. It began among the slave merchants of Samarkand.^[11] Al-Muqaddasi lists silk brocade from Samarkand among the goods sold to the Turks.^[12]

The city also sheltered a Manichaean community. Ibn al-Nadim reports that about five hundred Manichaeans gathered at Samarkand. The ruler of Khurasan wished to kill them. The king of China then threatened to slaughter the Muslims in his own land and destroy their mosques. Ibn al-Nadim supposes this king to have been the lord of the Tughuzghuz. The Manichaeans were left alone on payment of tribute.^[13] The hinterland of Samarkand in the tenth and eleventh centuries was the western Tarim basin as far as Khotan and the Turkic lands west of the Tianshan.^[14]

Later history

Al-Bīrūnī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna and al-Khwārizmī were educated in Sogdiana or in neighbouring Khorezm. Some manuscripts say that the Mongol great khan Güyük died at a town called Samarkand, seven days north of Beshbalik. This report has been rejected.