Samarkand and the Silk Road

Samarkand sits in the valley of the Zerafshan River in modern Uzbekistan, and for more than two thousand years it has been one of the great market cities of the central Silk Road. Founded in the seventh century BCE, refounded by Alexander the Great, capital of the Sogdian merchant community, prize of the Arab caliphate, jewel of the Timurid empire, and Soviet city under the name of Samarkand — the place is a textbook example of a Silk Road urban node. In European literature its Islamic-era name became almost a synonym for the Silk Road itself, and that, I think, is no accident. The wider geography of the routes that met there is treated in the article on the routes and map of the Silk Road.

Sogdiana and the Sogdian merchants

For roughly five centuries, from the fifth to the ninth CE, Samarkand was the political and commercial capital of the Sogdian merchant community that dominated the overland trade. The Sogdians were an Iranian people whose homeland lay in the valleys of the Zerafshan and the upper Oxus, and they ran trading colonies that extended from Sogdiana into the Tarim Basin, into Tang China, and into the Indian subcontinent. The full story of the Sogdian community is told in the article on Sogdian merchants.

Sogdian Samarkand was a major centre of population and craft. The Sogdian state issued its own coinage — silver drachms modeled on Sasanian designs, which you can still see in the State Museum of the History of Uzbekistan on Rashidov Street in Tashkent if you ever make the trip — and maintained a sophisticated bureaucracy that handled tax farming, contract enforcement, and the registration of foreign merchants. The city was rich enough, in fact, to attract the attention of the Abbasid revolution of 750, which was substantially financed by Sogdian and other eastern Muslim merchants operating out of cities like Samarkand. What strikes me about the Sogdians is how thoroughly they were integrated into the Tang Chinese economy while remaining politically independent of it; that combination, I suspect, was rarer in the medieval world than we usually admit.

The Arab conquest and the coming of Islam

712 CE. The Arab general Qutayba ibn Muslim captured Samarkand after a siege that the sources describe in considerable, and probably embellished, detail, and the city was incorporated into the Umayyad and then the Abbasid caliphate. The Arab conquest did not interrupt the trade — quite the opposite. The Abbasid empire brought the southern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean into a single political system for the first time, and Samarkand became a principal market on the new Baghdad-to-Cathay axis. Conversion to Islam was largely complete by the tenth century, though Buddhist and Zoroastrian communities survived in the surrounding countryside for several more generations.

Samarkand is, in the modern imagination, almost a synonym for the Silk Road itself. The reality on the ground is a bit more complicated.

Under the Samanid dynasty of the ninth and tenth centuries, Samarkand and its sister city Bukhara became the centre of a Persian literary renaissance that produced some of the major works of classical Persian literature — the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi was begun in Tus, but the court culture that sustained it radiated out from these two cities. The paper industry of Samarkand, established in the wake of the Arab victory at the Battle of Talas in 751 CE, was a key part of this transformation: the details of the transmission of paper-making to the Islamic world are told in the article on paper-making and the Silk Road.

The Registan has been restored in three separate campaigns (1920s, 1960s, and 2000s), and the result is as much a work of post-Soviet heritage as a piece of medieval Timurid architecture. The visitor should look for the layers: the original Timurid brick at the base, the later tilework, the modern concrete where it has had to be replaced. Standard accounts tend to oversell the authenticity of the restoration, in my view, and undersell how much of what you see dates from the Soviet period.

A personal note

Samarkand in 2026 is a UNESCO World Heritage city whose medieval monuments are real but whose atmosphere is partly a Soviet-era and partly a post-Soviet reconstruction. The Registan is magnificent, but the three madrasas that frame it are not exactly the medieval buildings; they have been extensively restored, and the restoration is itself a historical event. A reader who knows what to look for will see the layers; a reader who expects a fully medieval streetscape will be disappointed.

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

See also The routes and geography of the Silk Road, The great cities of the Silk Road, and The Sogdian merchants.