Samarkand and the Silk Road: Timurid Ambition, Learning and Monumental Space

When the Castilian ambassador Ruy González de Clavijo reached Samarkand in September 1404, he found a city still being built. Timur had pulled down the gate of his new congregational mosque because it was not grand enough, was cutting a market street straight through the town, and had filled the city with craftsmen carried off from the cities he had conquered. That is the Samarkand Silk Road story in miniature: an oasis that had grown rich on long-distance trade for more than a thousand years, remade within a single lifetime as the showpiece of an empire and then, under Timur’s grandson, as a centre of astronomy and learning. On Days 24 to 27 of our 29-day small group Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group reads that story in the city’s tombs, madrasas, excavations and squares.

The Samarkand Silk Road before Timur

Samarkand was already old when the Silk Road was young. UNESCO, which inscribed the city on the World Heritage List in 2001 as “Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures”, describes a history of more than 2,500 years and three distinct layers: the ancient city on the mound of Afrasiab, the medieval Timurid city, and the European-style quarter built under Russian rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Maracanda, the capital of Sogdiana, the city was captured by Alexander the Great in 329 BC. On our history-led Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, Samarkand comes near the end, after more than three weeks of the oases and passes that its merchants once travelled.

Those merchants were Sogdians, and for centuries they were among the leading traders of the overland routes, with merchant communities stretching from Samarkand to the cities of Tang China. A vivid picture of their world was found by chance in 1965, when road building across Afrasiab uncovered the painted walls of a seventh-century residence. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the main wall shows envoys arriving with gifts, Chinese bearing silk, Iranians with necklaces and embroidered cloth, mountain peoples with yak tails and Koreans with feathers in their headgear, while fragmentary inscriptions name the local ruler Varkhuman, whom the Tang emperor Gaozong recognised as governor of Samarkand and Sogdiana in the 650s. The paintings, probably made around 648 to 651, are displayed today in the Afrasiab Museum on the mound itself.

The city that the paintings celebrate did not survive its later conquerors intact. Arab armies took Samarkand in the early eighth century, and under the Samanids of the ninth and tenth centuries it shared in the flowering of Persian and Islamic learning centred on Bukhara, the Samanid capital and a city of scholars in its own right. Tradition credits Samarkand with learning to make paper from Chinese prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas in 751, a story historians treat with caution. Turkic dynasties and then the Khwarazm-Shahs followed, until Genghis Khan’s armies destroyed the city in 1220. Afrasiab was never rebuilt. When Samarkand rose again, it rose beside the old mound, not on it.

Timur’s capital: an empire’s showpiece

Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane, was born near Kesh, the town now called Shakhrisabz; later dynastic histories give 1336, though earlier sources point to the late 1320s. A Turkic commander of Mongol descent, he took power in Transoxiana in 1370 and spent the next 35 years on campaign, from Anatolia and Syria to the Delhi Sultanate. Samarkand was the place where the proceeds of those campaigns were spent. Clavijo’s account records what Timur brought back besides plunder: the silk weavers of Damascus, the bow-makers, the craftsmen in glass and porcelain, gunsmiths from Turkey, and engineers and artillerymen, so that the people settled in and around the city were said to number 150,000.

The buildings were meant to overwhelm. Timur’s congregational mosque, begun in 1399 after his Indian campaign and finished by 1404, is generally identified with the just-completed mosque Clavijo describes, whose gate Timur ordered rebuilt; its story is told in our article on the Bibi Khanum Mosque and the scale of Timur’s ambitions. Around the city, Clavijo walked through a ring of garden palaces, laid out with pavilions, orchards and water channels, where Timur received ambassadors and held his feasts. Very little of the gardens survives, but the idea behind them, monumental building as a statement of power to visitors from every direction of the trade routes, shaped Samarkand for the next two centuries.

Gur-e Amir: a dynastic tomb

The tomb that shows how Timur’s family saw itself began as a grandson’s grave. When Muhammad Sultan, Timur’s chosen heir, died suddenly in 1403, construction started on a mausoleum for him in Samarkand. Timur himself died in February 1405, on the march towards a campaign against Ming China, and with snow blocking the passes to his intended tomb at Shakhrisabz, he was buried in the unfinished building instead. The Gur-e Amir, the “Tomb of the Commander”, became the dynasty’s burial place. Timur’s sons Shah Rukh and Miran Shah, his grandson Ulugh Beg and his spiritual teacher Mir Said Baraka all lie here.

The exterior is a tall drum carrying a ribbed turquoise dome, and inside the walls are richly gilded and painted. Ulugh Beg completed the work and added a doorway into the mausoleum, and over his grandfather’s grave he placed a single block of dark green jade. In June 1941 the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened the tomb, days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the skeleton showed the old injuries to the right leg and arm that had given “Timur the Lame” his name. On Day 25 the group visits the Gur-e Amir Mausoleum after the Registan.

Shah-i-Zinda: a necropolis of the Timurid court

Beside the Afrasiab mound, the Shah-i-Zinda ensemble grew up around a much older shrine. It commemorates Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, who is said to have died at Samarkand in the seventh century; a legend popular in Timurid times held that he had not died at all but descended into a well, where he lives on as the “Living King” whose name the site bears. The earliest buildings date from the eleventh century, and after the Mongol sack the hillside became a necropolis.

What visitors see today is overwhelmingly Timurid. According to Archnet, most of the mausoleums were built between 1370 and 1405, chiefly for the women of Timur’s family, among them the tombs of Shad-i Mulk Aqa (1371–83), Shirin Beg Agha (1385–86) and Tuman Aqa (1404–05). They stand shoulder to shoulder along a narrow lane, each a single domed chamber behind a portal faced in glazed and carved tilework in deep blues and turquoise. Ulugh Beg gave the complex its final form in 1434–35 with a monumental gateway at the southern end, followed by a flight of steep steps up the hill.

How much walking is involved in Samarkand?

Enough to need sturdy shoes and steady legs. The Silk Road tour is rated Level 2, Moderate, which the tour page defines as being able to carry your own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. In Samarkand the main climb is the steep staircase beyond the Shah-i-Zinda gateway, and the observatory and the Afrasiab sites stand on raised ground at the edge of the city, so expect slopes as well as steps.

Ulugh Beg: the astronomer who ruled Samarkand

Timur’s empire fractured soon after his death, but his son Shah Rukh held most of it together from Herat and, in 1409, gave Samarkand to his own son Ulugh Beg, still in his teens. Ulugh Beg governed the city for four decades, and he is remembered less as a ruler than as an astronomer and patron of science. In 1417 he founded a madrasa in Samarkand where mathematics and astronomy were among the main subjects, and in the 1420s he began an observatory on a rocky hill outside the city.

The observatory’s central instrument was a meridian arc, known as the Fakhri sextant, with a radius of about 40 metres, cut into the hill so that observers could measure the positions of the sun, moon and stars as they crossed the meridian. Ulugh Beg brought together a team that included the mathematician Jamshid al-Kashi, who directed the observations until his death in 1429, Qadizada al-Rumi and Ali Qushji. The result was the Zij-i Sultani, a set of astronomical tables with a catalogue of about a thousand stars, dated 1437, and a measurement of the sidereal year as 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds.

Learning did not protect him. Ulugh Beg became sultan on his father’s death in 1447, and two years later he was killed on the orders of his own son, Abd al-Latif. The observatory was abandoned and eventually destroyed, and by the sixteenth century it had disappeared under the earth. In 1908 the archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin located it and uncovered the underground section of the great arc, which is what visitors see today on Day 25, when the morning tour includes Ulugbek’s Observatory, the Afrosiab Museum and archaeological sites, and the Shahi Zinda Necropolis.

The Registan: monumental public space

Ulugh Beg’s madrasa of 1417–20 was the first of the three great buildings that now frame the Registan, the “sandy place” that served as the city’s main square. Two centuries later, under the Ashtarkhanid governor Yalangtush Bahadur, the Sher-Dor Madrasa (1619–1635/36) was built opposite it as a near mirror image, and the Tilla-Kari, combining a madrasa with the city’s congregational mosque, followed in the mid-seventeenth century to close the third side. Our guide to Registan Square and its three madrasas walks through each building; what matters to the Samarkand story is the idea the ensemble expresses. Three facades of matching scale face one another across an open square, so that the space itself becomes the monument, a stage for proclamations, markets and gatherings.

UNESCO counts the influence of Samarkand’s Timurid architecture across a wide region among the reasons for the city’s World Heritage listing. The Silk Road tour visits the Registan after lunch on Day 25, when the tour page lists the three madrasas, Shirdor, Ulugbek and Tilla Kari. By the time the Sher-Dor was rising, however, Samarkand was no longer a capital. The Uzbek leader Muhammad Shaybani took the city in 1500, and the Shaybanid khans and their successors governed increasingly from Bukhara. The decline of the overland routes, as maritime trade grew, left Samarkand a provincial city until the Russian Empire took it in the nineteenth century and made it a provincial capital in 1887.

Shakhrisabz: Timur’s birthplace

On Day 26 the group leaves Samarkand for the day to visit Shakhrisabz, Timur’s home town, whose historic centre UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2000. UNESCO dates the start of work on his Ak-Saray, the “White Palace”, to 1380, the year after his conquest of Khorezm, and the surviving fragments of its entrance arch, faced in blue, white and gold tilework, still give a sense of the palace’s ambition. Nearby, the Dorus Saodat was planned, in UNESCO’s words, as a place of burial for the ruling family. It also holds the tomb of Timur’s eldest son Jahangir. Close by, the Kok Gumbaz, the “Blue Dome”, is a Friday mosque that Ulugh Beg built in 1437 in honour of his father Shah Rukh.

The tour page lists the ruins of the Ak Saray Palace, Dorus Tilavat Seminary, Kok Gumbaz Mosque and Dorus Saidat, with lunch at a local restaurant before the group returns to Samarkand in the afternoon and dines at the hotel. Seeing Shakhrisabz after Samarkand reverses the usual order of discovery: it shows where Timur’s idea of building as power began, in the town he came from.

How long is the drive to Shakhrisabz?

The tour page gives the drive as about 3 hours, noted with the afternoon return to Samarkand. Lunch is at a local restaurant and dinner is back at the hotel, so there is no change of hotel. The page does not give a separate figure for the outward drive.

How many days does the tour spend in Samarkand?

On the Silk Road tour, three nights and most of four days. The group travels by coach from Bukhara on Day 24, visiting Sitora-i-Mokhikhosa, the summer palace of the former Emir of Bukhara, and the traditional pottery works of Alisher at Gijduvan on the way, and arrives at the Registan Plaza Hotel or similar in the early evening. Day 25 is spent touring the city’s monuments, with dinner at a local Uzbek family home, and Day 26 is the Shakhrisabz excursion. On Day 27 the group catches the high-speed train to Tashkent in the late afternoon.

Is there any free time in Samarkand?

Yes, on the final morning. The tour page describes Day 27 as a free morning for personal sightseeing or resting, with check-out at noon and lunch at a local restaurant, followed by visits to the Bibi Khanum Mosque and Siab Bazaar before the transfer to the train station. A free morning after two full days of touring is a chance to return to the Registan at your own pace or simply rest before the journey on.

What Samarkand reveals about the Silk Road

Samarkand’s monuments make a point that the trade routes alone cannot: wealth from long-distance exchange became, in Timurid hands, a programme of building, burial and learning designed to be seen. The Sogdian paintings on Afrasiab show a city that looked outward to China, Iran and the steppe; the Gur-e Amir and Shah-i-Zinda show a dynasty memorialising itself; Ulugh Beg’s observatory shows the same patronage turned to measuring the sky; and the Registan shows a square made into a monument. For readers planning a visit to Uzbekistan, our answers to common questions about travelling in Uzbekistan cover the country-level practicalities.

On the Silk Road tour, Samarkand follows Khiva, in the lower Amu Darya oasis of Khorezm, and Bukhara, and sends the group on to Tashkent for the last days of the journey. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you reach the city after crossing China, Kyrgyzstan and the deserts of Uzbekistan, much as the caravans once did, with a clearer sense of what they and the conquerors were coming for.