Uzbekistan: Historical Context   

The first historical reference to Maracanda relates to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Central Asia, a campaign that led him to the walls of the Maracanda citadel. After a siege in the spring of 327 B.C.E., Alexander took the fortress and placated the populace by marrying the daughter (Roxana) of a local ruler. Hellenic control continued under Seleucus I (358-281 B.C.E.), a general who had accompanied Alexander on his conquest of Bactria and Sogdiana; but the Seleucids were unable to maintain their power in the area. Soon after the death of Seleucus, a revolt by Bactrian Greeks established a Bactrian kingdom, which flourished until the first century B.C.E., when the area was taken by the Chinese. The eventual formation of the Kushan kingdom, about the beginning of the Christian ear, led to a period of considerable prosperity, as the trade route from India and China–the “Silk Road”–passed through Samarkand on the way to Byzantium. The Kushan kingdom fell in its turn to the Turks, who established a khanate in Sogdiana during the fifth century.

Each of these eras left its imprint on the culture of Samarkand and the surrounding area: in coins, pottery, and statuary; but none had so profound an effect as the introduction of Islam by Arab conquest at the beginning of the eighth century. Arab incursions into Transoxiana (the area beyond the Oxus River, including Sogdiana) began at the end of the seventh century, but Samarkand was not occupied by the Arabs until 712–the year they took Cordova. The conquest was undoubtedly motivated more by greed than by a desire to spread the word of the Prophet, and bitter resistance to the Arabs’ harsh rule flared in Central Asia for several decades.

In fact, Arab caliphates in the area lasted only until the ninth century. But the conquest established Islam as the dominant religion–although others were tolerated–and in so doing defined the cultural basis from which the arts in Central Asia subsequently derived. Within this framework, Arab, Persian, Mongol, and Uzbek would create in Samarkand and Bukhara an architectural legacy that is one of the major accomplishments of Islamic civilization.

With the assumption of power by local Central Asian dynasties–the Tahirids and the Samanids–Samarkand and Bukhara continued to flourish as centers of trade and culture. Bukhara, an ancient settlement whose oasis is first mentioned in the seventh century, was particularly noted for its achievements in the sciences during the reign of the Samanids. Having chosen the city as their capital, the Samanids not only supported extensive construction but also put into practice a singularly fine architectural sense. The earliest extant monument in the area–the mausoleum of Ismail Samani–dates from this period, and it displays so sure a command of form that one wonders what else must have existed in the city at that time.

The fall of the Samanids, in 999, introduced a period of rapidly changing dynasties and fragmentation, but the commercial significance of both cities continued to support their prosperity–until the thirteenth century. It was then that Samarkand and Bukhara were inundated by the first wave of a Mongol invasion that would eventually reach Vladimir, Kiev, and the Adriatic.

“They had pity on one, for the slew women, men, infants, tore open the wombs of those with child and slaughtered the unborn. The flames of this destruction swept in all directions, and evil spread over the land, like a cloud driven by the wind.” In Central Asia, as in central Russia a few years later, the havoc caused by the invasion of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his immediate successors seemed beyond the power of human comprehension or expression. Chroniclers, whether the Muslim author of the above passage (Ibn Al-Asr) or a Russian monk from Novgorod, record essentially the same details of slaughter and pillage, the same sequence of siege, resistance, and destruction.

Both Samarkand and Bukhara attempted resistance, both were taken in 1220, with the predictable consequences and given over to pillage. Futile rebellions occurred during the decades following the conquest, but no effective challenge was offered to the Mongols, who occasionally returned to sack the cities in their domain. As in Russia, the nomadic Mongols in Central Asia preferred to establish their own large encampments–some of which became thriving, if short-lived, trading centers–rather than occupy the cities they had conquered.)

Bukhara, although sacked again in 1273 and 1316, apparently suffered less than Samarkand, for in his book Il Milione (also known as The Travels; late thirteenth century) Marco Polo described it as a large city. (His father and uncle had been merchants there at the beginning of the 1260s, and he himself traveled in the area between 1271 and 1295.) As late as the mid-fourteenth century, Samarkand, beset by internal dissension and prey to the exactions of the Mongols, stood largely in ruin, while Timur, the man who would eventually make it the capital of an empire, was still engaged in petty brigandage. By the end of the century, however, the entire civilized world, from China to England, from Cairo to Moscow, would know his name–Timur i Lenk, or Tamerlane, “Scourge of God and terror of the world.”

From the time of his first major victory, near Samarkand in 1370, until his death during a march against China in 1405, Timur directed a series of campaigns as brilliant as they were destructive. No force–Ottoman, Crusader, Egyptian, Indian, or rival Mongol horde–could withstand the might of his armies, whose organization and tactics were based on principles inherited from the Great Khan, and whose mobility overwhelmed attempts at resistance. No fortress, however massive or remote, was impregnable to his siege equipment, his artillery, his engineers, and his shock troops. Minarets built of severed heads attested to his victories in Afghanistan, Isfahan, Aleppo, Baghdad, Damascus, Delhi, and Armenia, while trains of booty and slaves, scholars and craftsmen converged on Samarkand and his palaces, situated on the surrounding plain.

Born in 1336 near the town of Shakhrisabz (forty miles south of Samarkand), Timur was raised in the Chagatai ulus, least stable of the four Mongol empires distributed among the sons of Genghis Khan. The Chagatai lands suffered from a continuing tension between semi-nomadic Mongols and the settled Muslim population, as well as border warfare with the Il-Khanate, or Mongol state in Persia. By the fourteenth century this vast area had disintegrated into a collection of smaller, often hostile, dynasties and Mongol clans (such as the one to which Timur’s father owed allegiance), and their feuds were very much a part of Timur’s youth. During one early skirmish he received the wounds that crippled both his right arm and right leg, giving rise to the Persian epithet “Timur i Lenk” (Timur the Lame)–whence our Tamerlane, or Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.

Through a combination of military skill and diplomatic cunning, Timur proved eminently capable of exploiting the weaknesses of those he opposed in the struggle for domination of Samarkand–most notably, Hussein, whom he defeated in 1370. At the same time he appeased the settled population, weary of disorder, and rendered homage to Muslim religious leaders as well as to the ineffectual descendants of Chagatai (to whom he was related by one of his marriages). Above all, he was generous with the men who followed him, a well-organized horde of warriors that embarked from Central Asia with families, tradesmen, craftsmen, and camp followers in campaigns of conquest and pillage lasting several years.

Despite his mobile existence, Timur intended to establish a stable political and dynastic order based in Samarkand, and to this end he spared no expense in the adornment of the city. Remnants of two of his greatest projects–the Bibi Khanym mosque and Gur Emir, the mausoleum built in 1404 for Timur’s descendants–allow one to grasp something of the capital’s splendor, the combination of heroic scale with the exquisite detail of ceramic ornamentation. But Timur, characteristically, spent little time in the city whose monuments served as a record of his conquests and a repository for loot from three continents. Even during his return to Samarkand, he preferred to remain in grand encampment on the outskirts of the city.

After his death, in 1405, the ephemeral order Timur had imposed gave way to another period of internal struggle and invasion, culminating in the Uzbek expulsion of his dynasty early in the sixteenth century. In 1504 Babur, the last of Samarkand’s Timurid rulers, was driven from the area by the Uzbek Shaibani Khan after a four-year struggle that saw the city change hands several times.The young Babur, twenty-one years old at the time of his exodus, subsequently founded the Moghul dynasty in India, and his account of defeat, treachery, and poverty, as well as the great victories in Hindustan, is vividly told in his remarkable autobiography, the Bubur-nama.

But the Ferghana Valley, heartland of Timur’s empire, remained in the hands of the Shaibanid dynasty who shifted their capital from Samarkand to Bukhara in the middle of the sixteenth century. Samarkand’s brief revival in the middle of the seventeenth century resulted in the completion of the imposing Registan complex, but thereafter the city entered another period of decline, which left it virtually depopulated by the eighteenth century. Although Bukhara continued to serve as the capital of various Uzbek dynasties (the Shaibanids and, after 1599, the Astrakhanids) as well as an important center of Islamic studies, it too steadily declined in power and vitality. By the 1860s the Russian Empire had perceived its manifest destiny in Central Asia.

The conquest was swift, and by local standards painless. By 1868 Russian troops under the redoubtable General Konstantin Kaufmann had conquered most of Turkestan (including Tashkent and Samarkand), and reduced the emirate of Bukhara to a state of dependency. Samarkand became an administrative center, a new Russian town arose, and the trans-Caspian Railway reached the city in 1888. Colonial expansion not only revived commerce in Samarkand (cotton was among its most valuable commodities) but also stimulated interest in Central Asia among Russian scholars–and American travelers, such as Eugene Schuyler–who began to study the monuments of Samarkand. Bukhara, however, maintained its fictive autonomy under a series of despotic emirs, until their overthrow in an uprising supported by the Red Army in 1920.

In 1924 the Turkestan and Bukhara Soviet Republics merged to form the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, whose capital, until 1929, was Samarkand (thereafter, it was Tashkent). The Soviet government suppressed Islam but attempted to establish a sense of cultural identity among the Uzbeks: their vernacular language was given an alphabet (initially Latin, and then, from 1940, Cyrillic) and a national theater and several education institutes were established. Emphasis has been placed on the restoration of architectural monuments, most of which had fallen into considerable neglect. In both Samarkand and Bukhara numerous mosques, mausolea, and madrasa (religious schools) were restored or rebuilt, while special workshops preserved the skills necessary for the restoration of the ceramic ornamentation that covers so many of the city’s remarkable structures. Through the efforts of the contemporary master (usto in Uzbek), the achievement of artists and craftsmen who lived centuries ago is gradually being regained.