Bukhara and the Silk Road

Bukhara, the modern Bukhara-i-Sharif or “Noble Bukhara,” sits in the middle reaches of the Zerafshan valley in modern Uzbekistan, a few days’ journey downstream from Samarkand. For more than two thousand years, the city has been one of the principal markets and one of the principal centres of Islamic learning in Central Asia. The wider geography of the routes that met there is treated in the article on the routes and map of the Silk Road, and the city is set in its wider urban context in the article on Silk Road cities. I have not been able to verify the population figure for medieval Bukhara in the sources I trust, but every indicator suggests a city of 40,000–80,000 at its Samanid peak, which would have made it one of the larger cities in the world at that date.

The Sogdian and pre-Islamic city

Bukhara appears in Chinese sources of the Han period as Buhe, and by the early centuries CE it was a major Sogdian city. Sogdian merchants based in Bukhara ran trading colonies that extended across the Tarim Basin and into Tang China, and the city was the twin capital of the Sogdian commercial world — the other being Samarkand, with which it shared the Sogdian heartland. The Sogdian community of Bukhara survived into the early Islamic period, and the city’s pre-Islamic identity as a centre of Zoroastrian fire temples and a Nestorian Christian bishopric persisted for several centuries after the Arab conquest. The wider story of the Sogdian merchants is told in the article on Sogdian merchants.

Bukhara is, in many ways, the quieter of the two great Sogdian cities. I have always thought this is the more interesting half of the comparison.

Bukhara was a centre of craft production as well as of trade. The Bukharan silversmiths and textile workers were known across the Islamic world, and the Bukhara rugs of later European commerce were a recognisable product from at least the early Islamic period — the name “Bukhara” appears on Carpets of a kind recognisable to Western buyers by the seventeenth century, and probably earlier. The Ark, the great citadel that still dominates the modern city, was already a royal residence by the fifth century CE; the current walls are largely twelfth-century.

The Samanid capital and the Persian renaissance

Bukhara’s greatest period was the Samanid era (819–999 CE). The Samanids, the first native Iranian Muslim dynasty, made Bukhara their capital and presided over a remarkable flowering of Persian literature, science, and religious thought. The poet Rudaki, the “father of Persian poetry,” worked in the Samanid court, and the court sponsored Firdousi’s Shahnameh and the astronomical work of the Bukharan school. The scholar-physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was born in the Bukharan village of Afshana in 980 CE and received his early education in the city, completing his Canon of Medicine in the 1010s while in exile from it.

The Samanid period was also a period of religious transformation. The conversion of Central Asia to Islam, which had been a slow and uneven process from the eighth century onward — the Sogdian merchants of Bukhara in the seventh century were, so far as the evidence goes, mostly Zoroastrian with a substantial Manichaean minority — was largely complete in Bukhara by the tenth. The wider process of conversion is treated in the article on the spread of Islam along the Silk Road. A point that is often missed in the standard textbooks is that the conversion of the merchants happened before the conversion of the countryside, which is the opposite of the pattern in most of western Eurasia.

A personal note

A note on scale. Bukhara was for most of its history a smaller city than Samarkand, and it is sometimes treated as Samarkand’s junior partner. The roles reversed in the late twentieth century, when the Uzbek government chose Bukhara as the principal site of heritage restoration. The two cities are now paired tourist destinations, but they have very different characters: Samarkand is monumental, Bukhara is intimate. A visitor who has time for only one should know which they want.

Further reading

If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

Related pages

The great cities of the Silk Road · Samarkand and the Silk Road · The Sogdian merchants · The spread of Islam along the Silk Road · and the rest under the main guide.