A Short History of Uzbekistan in Six Things You Can Still See

The Afrasiyab painting is the main document of pre-Islamic Samarkand. The city was then the capital of Sogd, and Sogdian merchants traded from China to Byzantium. The murals show envoys being received by the ruler of Samarkand. Who exactly is painted there, and how to read the scene, is still debated. But the list of guests says more than any textbook: people came here from every direction.

Something from that world survives outside the museum too. Navruz, the spring festival Uzbekistan celebrates every March, is older than Islam; its roots lie in the pre-Islamic, including Zoroastrian, traditions of the region. And Alexander the Great came this way: in 329 BC his army reached Maracanda, as the Greeks called Samarkand, a city that was already old.

The painting makes far more sense with someone to explain it. We tell its story, and that of the hill around it, in the museums of Samarkand and Bukhara, and build a whole trip around it in the Ambassadors of Afrasiyab tour.

In the far south, near Termez and a few kilometres from the Amu Darya, a clay stupa stands under a protective dome. It belonged to the Buddhist monastery of Fayaz Tepe, which is about two thousand years old. Buddhism came here along the trade roads, and for centuries Termez was one of its centres in Central Asia.

The surprising part is the direction of travel. From these lands Buddhism moved further east, to China. Uzbekistan is usually pictured as a country of minarets, yet in the south you can see what its religious life looked like before Islam: monks' cells, the remains of a courtyard, the stupa itself. Our guide to Termez covers the sites and how to get there.

Arab armies reached the region in the early 8th century. What followed was probably not in the conquerors' plans: scholars from here became stars of the whole Islamic world. Imam al-Bukhari, born in Bukhara, compiled the collection of hadith that Sunni Muslims consider the most authoritative. Al-Khwarizmi, from Khorezm, worked in Baghdad; his name gave us the word «algorithm», and the title of his treatise the word «algebra».

From that age Bukhara keeps the Samanid Mausoleum, a cube of fired brick from the early 10th century. The bricks are laid so that the walls look woven, like a basket. At noon you see one pattern; towards evening the shadows draw another.

In 1220 the Mongols came. Bukhara and Samarkand were sacked; the old city on the Afrasiyab hill was never rebuilt, and Samarkand grew up again beside it. The Samanid Mausoleum survived. Locals say it was buried in earth and sand by then, and the conquerors simply did not see it. That is a legend, but a good one. See it on foot with our notes on the Samanid Mausoleum and Bolo-Hauz.

The Kalyan minaret in Bukhara was built in 1127. For almost nine hundred years it has been the tallest structure in the old city, and it carries another Mongol story. Genghis Khan, the legend goes, tipped his head back to see the top, his hat fell off, and he ordered the tower spared. Historians treat the tale with caution. The fact remains: the mosque next to it was destroyed, and the minaret still stands.

What came after the invasion is just as interesting. Once the conquest was over, the vast Mongol state for a time made the roads from China to the Mediterranean safer than before. Trade did not stop; in time it flourished again. More on the square at its foot is in our page on Poi Kalyan.

Amir Timur was born in 1336 near Shahrisabz. He built a vast empire, made Samarkand his capital and filled it with domes that still define the city's skyline. Yet the most intriguing monument of the age was built by his grandson.

Ulugh Beg is remembered for astronomy rather than battles. In the 1420s he built an observatory on a hill outside Samarkand, and its star tables were among the most accurate of their time. After his death the observatory fell into ruin and its site was forgotten. In 1908 the archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin found it again.

Today you walk down steps into a narrow underground passage. Part of the giant instrument survives there: a marble-faced arc running down into the rock. Almost nothing else is left, but from that arc it is easy to imagine the scale of the rest. Read more in our page on the Ulugh Beg Observatory.

In Khiva, near the west gate of Itchan Kala, stands the wide turquoise Kalta-Minor minaret. It is short because it was never finished. Khan Muhammad Amin planned a very tall tower, but he died in 1855 and the work was abandoned.

The tower sums up the last centuries before Russia. The Timurid state broke apart. In the 16th century the Bukhara and Khiva khanates appeared, and in the 18th century the Kokand khanate joined them. They competed with each other, which is one reason Khiva looks so different from Samarkand or Bukhara. In the second half of the 19th century the Kokand khanate became part of the Russian Empire, while Bukhara and Khiva remained its protectorates until 1920. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was formed in 1924, and in 1991 Uzbekistan became independent. The story of the tower is in our page on Kalta-Minor and Islam Khoja.

The Soviet chapter is easiest to see in Tashkent. On 26 April 1966 an earthquake badly damaged the city, and its centre was rebuilt. In July 2026 ten buildings of that era, from Chorsu Bazaar to Kosmonavtlar metro station, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. History here is still being added to. Walk the route with our guide to Tashkent modernism.