Ancient Samarkand: a City Read in Layers, from Afrasiyab to the Registan

People lived on Afrasiyab from about 500 BC until 1220. This was Maracanda, the city that Alexander the Great took in 329 BC, and later the capital of Sogdiana, the land of the merchants who carried goods, languages and religions between China, India and Persia.

The finds are in the Afrasiyab Museum on the hill. Its pride is the Ambassadors' Painting, wall paintings made in 648–651 for a palace hall and found in 1965: processions of envoys bringing gifts to a Sogdian king, among them figures that researchers identify as envoys from China and from Korea. It is the one place in Samarkand where you see the faces of the people who lived here before Islam. More on the museum and its halls is in our guide to the museums of Samarkand and Bukhara.

In 1220 the Mongol army of Genghis Khan took Samarkand and destroyed much of it. Life never returned to the hill. When the city recovered, it grew to the south, on the ground where the Registan and Gur-e-Amir stand today, and Afrasiyab was left to the wind.

One place on the edge of the old city kept its life: Shah-i-Zinda, the necropolis on the southern slope of Afrasiyab. Its oldest core goes back to the 11th century and the tomb honoured as that of Kusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. Most of the mausoleums along its narrow street were built in the 14th and 15th centuries, many for women and nobles of Timur's family. It is an active necropolis, so we visit it with covered shoulders and knees and a lowered voice. The details are in our article on Shah-i-Zinda.

In 1370 Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane, made Samarkand his capital. For 35 years the wealth of his campaigns flowed here, and with it craftsmen from the cities he took. He built on a scale meant to impress. The Bibi-Khanym Mosque, begun in 1399 after his Indian campaign, had a portal about 35 metres high; the building was so ambitious that parts of it began to fall within decades, and what you see today owes a great deal to restoration from 1974 onwards.

In 1404 Ruy González de Clavijo, the envoy of the King of Castile, reached Samarkand and described the gardens, the feasts and the building works. A few months later, in February 1405, Timur died on campaign. He lies in Gur-e-Amir, the mausoleum with the ribbed blue dome, completed in 1404 and first built for his grandson Muhammad Sultan. Under the dome a slab of dark green jade marks his grave; his grandson Ulugh Beg is buried nearby. Our article on Gur-e-Amir tells the story of the tomb, including the opening of the crypt in June 1941.

Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg ruled Samarkand from 1409 and turned his grandfather's capital into a city of scholars. In 1417–1420 he built a madrasah on the Registan where astronomy and mathematics were taught alongside theology. In the 1420s he built an observatory on a hill outside the city, with a sextant of about 40 metres radius set in a trench dug into the hill. With it his astronomers measured the length of the year and compiled a catalogue of 1,018 stars.

Ulugh Beg was killed in 1449, and the observatory was later dismantled and forgotten. In 1908 the archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin found the underground arc of the sextant, and you can walk down the steps and see it today. Our article on the Ulugh Beg Observatory covers the instrument and the museum.

The Registan looks like one plan, but it took more than two centuries. Opposite Ulugh Beg's madrasah, the governor Yalangtush Bahadur built the Sher-Dor madrasah in 1619–1636, matching the older building in size, and then Tilla-Kari in 1646–1660, with a gilded mosque inside. Sher-Dor's portal carries the most famous mosaic in the city: two striped beasts chasing deer, with a sun with a human face rising behind each of them. Images of living creatures are rare on religious buildings, and that is why everyone stops here.

The square has its own guide on our site, the Registan in Samarkand, with the best hours for light and the evening illumination.

In 1868 Samarkand became part of the Russian Empire, and a new town of straight, tree-lined streets grew to the west of the old one. In 1888 the railway arrived. From 1925 to 1930 Samarkand was the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, before the capital moved to Tashkent. Walk west from the Registan and in ten minutes tilework gives way to 19th-century brick and shady avenues.

In 2001 UNESCO inscribed the city on the World Heritage List as Samarkand – Crossroads of Cultures, and the name fits: Afrasiyab, the Timurid city and the Russian town are all part of it. The layer that never stopped is the everyday one. Siab Bazaar, beside the Bibi-Khanym Mosque, still sells the dense Samarkand flatbread, dried apricots and nuts, as the city's markets have for centuries.