Samarkand outlasted Mongol fire to become Timur's showcase
Samarkand in southeastern Uzbekistan counts about 882,000 people as of 2026, second only to Tashkent, with settlement hints from the late Paleolithic and a proposed founding between the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Silk Road wealth made it a Central Asian giant before Genghis Khan's 1220 sack.
Digs inside the city and its suburbs have turned up signs of human activity some 40,000 years old, and Mesolithic sites cluster at Sazag'on, Zamichatosh and Okhalik. The Syob and Darg'om canals that still water the city date to the seventh to fifth centuries BC, and local archaeologists put the founding around 700 BC. After Indo-Iranian migrations it became a heart of Sogdian civilisation and, under the Achaemenids, capital of the Sogdian province.
Where the name comes from is debated. One view reads Sogdian samar, stone, plus kand, town, which would make it a twin of Tashkent, stone city in Turkic, though the name may postdate Sogdian times. The eleventh-century scholar Mahmud al-Kashghari recorded a Turkic form meaning fat city, a version the Mughal emperor Babur also used and the Castilian traveller Ruy González de Clavijo considered the original.
Alexander's capture in 329 BC damaged the city, but it bounced back under Greek influence, adopting square bricks and better masonry and plaster; one Orepius ruled it, the sources say, by Alexander's gift rather than birth. Seleucid, Greco-Bactrian and Kushan rule followed, then decline after the Kushans lost Sogdia in the third century. The Sasanians, who took it around 260, made the region a hub for spreading Manichaeism. Xionite nomads, the Kidarites and the Hephthalites came next, until Göktürks allied with Persia won it at the Battle of Bukhara around 560.
Timur's capital later gave the city the Registan, the Gur-i Amir mausoleum and the Bibi-Khanym mosque. It served as the first capital of Soviet Uzbekistan from 1925 to 1930 and hosted a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in September 2022.
Source: Samarkand
