Afrasiab and the origins of Samarkand

In 1220, Genghis Khan’s army arrived at the gates of Samarkand and found one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Islamic world. He took it in days. What he did not take — because it did not interest him — was its history: the Samarkand his forces destroyed had been inhabited since the seventh century BCE, had been a capital of the Achaemenid Empire, had witnessed Alexander the Great’s passage, had flourished as the heart of Sogdiana for more than a thousand years. Genghis Khan erased it from the map and moved on.

Tamerlane, when he chose Samarkand as his imperial capital a century and a half later, did not rebuild over the ancient city’s ruins. He constructed his capital slightly to the south, on clean ground. The mound of the old city — Afrasiab — was left as a field of earthen ridges and compacted soil, accumulating centuries of forgetting on top of its ruins.

What the mound holds

An archaeological tell is, technically, the accumulation of remains from a city that has been built, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again so many times that the original ground level lies buried under metres of archaeological deposits. Afrasiab is exactly that: a plateau of around two hundred hectares, northeast of modern Samarkand, concealing six to eight metres of historical strata spanning the seventh century BCE to the thirteenth century CE.

What archaeology has extracted from Afrasiab over a century of excavations is a history of Sogdiana that written sources barely mention. Greek and Parthian coins have been found, Chinese ceramics from the Tang dynasty period, ivory objects of Indian origin, Roman glass, papyri in the Sogdian language. Afrasiab was precisely what its geographical position suggested: a node where the threads of Eurasian commerce converged.

But the most extraordinary find at Afrasiab is not the objects. It is the paintings.

The frescoes of the Sogdian palace

In 1965, during emergency excavations ahead of a construction project, Soviet archaeologists discovered the decorated walls of what had been the reception hall of a seventh-century CE Sogdian palace. The paintings covering all four walls of the room were in a state of preservation nobody expected: the colours — reds, blues, golds, ochres — remained vivid after thirteen hundred years.

What these paintings show is a diplomatic scene of extraordinary iconographic complexity. On the north wall: a procession of ambassadors arriving before the king of Samarkand, bringing gifts including geese, deer and two figures in Chinese dress carrying silk. On the west wall: a river scene with boats, possibly on the Amu Darya, with rowers and passengers dressed in clothing of diverse origins. On the south wall: a hunting or processional scene involving elephants and camels.

The Afrasiab frescoes are the most direct window available into the world of Sogdiana before the Arab conquest and eighth-century Islamisation. They show a multicultural, cosmopolitan society in permanent contact with China, India, the Iranian world and the Mediterranean, with a visual culture of a sophistication that surprises anyone who arrives expecting to find simply “a Silk Road city.”

The Afrasiab Museum

The small museum built beside the archaeological site holds the original frescoes — or what could be recovered of them — in controlled conditions. Entry costs around four dollars and the visit can be made without a guide, though a local guide adds a layer of context that the museum’s panels, in Russian and Uzbek, do not provide to the non-specialist visitor.

The museum also displays a hypothetical reconstruction model of the Sogdian city, which helps convey the scale of the original settlement: a city with distinct neighbourhoods, an irrigation canal network, a defensive wall circuit several kilometres long, regularly laid-out streets. It was not a small city. In the seventh century, it was one of Asia’s principal urban centres.

The significance of the Sogdians

The Sogdian people — Iranian in language, Central Asian in geography — were for more than a thousand years the great commercial and cultural intermediaries of the Silk Road. Sogdian merchants did not merely transport goods between China and Persia: they carried ideas, technologies, religions and languages. The Sogdian language was for centuries the lingua franca of Asian commerce, the language that merchants of different origins used to understand one another.

Sogdian merchant colonies reached as far as China (documented Sogdian communities existed in Chang’an, the Tang capital), into the Eurasian steppe and to the eastern Mediterranean. The Afrasiab frescoes show exactly this: a Sogdian king surrounded by ambassadors from every major power in the known world, receiving tribute and establishing relationships. This is not the propaganda of a minor city: it is the representation of a geopolitical reality in which Samarkand was genuinely central.

Visiting Afrasiab — the empty mound, the museum with its frescoes, the outline of the walls still visible in the landscape — before seeing the Timurid Registan shifts your perspective on Samarkand. The Registan is spectacular, but it is the last layer of a story that began two thousand years earlier. Understanding that makes every fifteenth-century tile more interesting, not less.

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