Under the Samanids, Bukhara was said to match Baghdad in glory
For about 180 years, a dynasty descended from a Zoroastrian landowner in Balkh ruled much of Central Asia and northeastern Iran. The Samanids backed poets and scientists, drawing Rudaki, Ferdowsi and Avicenna, and did more than their rivals to revive the Persian language inside the Islamic world, turning Bukhara into a celebrated centre of learning.
The founder, Saman Khuda, came from the village of Saman in Balkh province, in today's northern Afghanistan, and the family's earliest traces lie in Khorasan rather than Transoxiana. He converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam, naming his eldest son Asad after the governor of Khorasan. In 819 another governor rewarded Asad's four sons, Nuh, Ahmad, Yahya and Ilyas, for helping against a rebel, handing them territories under Abbasid overlordship; Nuh received Samarkand.
The family's swift rise may owe something to ancestry. Luke Treadwell suggests a Hephthalite princely background, which would have tied them to the relatives of Caliph al-Ma'mun's mother from nearby Badghis, and a coin issued in 968–969 seems to echo Hephthalite designs, though Ali Anoonshahr cautions that its makers may not have known what they were copying.
Ismail Samani, son of Ahmad, won a quarrel with his brother Nasr over tax money and united the family under his rule in 892, and under him the Samanids became effectively independent of the Abbasids. He moved the capital from Samarkand to Bukhara, captured the Saffarid ruler Amr ibn al-Layth near Balkh in the spring of 900, and campaigned so successfully in the north that the defences of Bukhara and Samarkand fell out of use, a neglect that later hurt the dynasty.
Ismail died in November 907. By 945 effective control of the government had passed out of Samanid hands, and the dynasty ended in 999. Its lasting mark was cultural: historians place it within the Iranian Intermezzo, when a Persianate identity carried Iranian speech and traditions into Islamic civilisation, laying groundwork for the later Turko-Persian culture.
Source: Samanid Empire
