Who ruled Merv?

Merv was a great oasis city of Central Asia on the Silk Road, standing near the modern town of Mary in what is now Turkmenistan. People lived on the site from the third millennium BCE until the late eighteenth century CE, and at its height in the Seljuk period it was one of the largest cities in the world. Today it is a field of ruined walled cities, protected as an archaeological park and listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1999.

Archaeologists have found traces of village life in the Merv oasis going back to the third millennium BCE, linked to the Bronze Age culture known as the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Zoroastrian scripture counts Mouru among sixteen perfect lands made by the god Ahura Mazda. The first true city was founded in the sixth century BCE as the Achaemenid Empire pushed east, and Darius the Great's Behistun inscription of around 515 BCE names Margu as part of one of his provinces.

After Alexander's conquests the region passed to the Seleucid Empire. King Antiochus I, who reigned from 281 to 261 BCE, rebuilt and enlarged the city on the site now called Gyaur Gala and gave it the name Antiochia Margiana. Later the Parthians held it, and some 10,000 Roman soldiers captured at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE appear to have been deported there.

The Sasanian king Ardashir I took Merv in the third century CE, and an unbroken series of coins minted there points to nearly four hundred years of stable Sasanian rule, interrupted only by a Hephthalite occupation from the late fifth century to 565. Zoroastrians lived beside Buddhists, Manichaeans and Christians, whose bishops sat at Merv from the fifth to the eleventh century.

After the Arab conquest Merv became the chief city of the province of Khurasan. In 748 the general Abu Muslim proclaimed the new Abbasid dynasty there, and the city served as the base of the revolution that overthrew the Umayyads. The caliph al-Ma'mun lived at Merv from 813 to 818, making it for a few years the effective capital of the Islamic world. Power then passed to a series of regional dynasties: the Tahirids from 821, followed by the Saffarids, the Samanids and the Ghaznavids.

In 1037 the Seljuk Turks under Tughril took over Merv without a fight, and it became a favourite city of the Seljuk Empire. From 1118 it was the capital of the whole empire under Sultan Ahmad Sanjar, whose great domed mausoleum is still the best-preserved building on the site. Libraries, madrasas and an observatory, where the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam worked for some years, made it a leading centre of learning. Estimates of its size vary: one historian put it at about 200,000 people by 1150, and it may have reached as many as 500,000 by 1210.

Turkmen nomads pillaged the city in 1153. The Ghurids took it in 1192 and the Khwarazmians in 1204.

During the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, Merv opened its gates in 1221 to Tolui, a son of Genghis Khan. Most of the inhabitants, along with refugees, are said to have been massacred; Ibn al-Athir gave a toll of around 700,000 and Juvayni more than 1.3 million. The walls were later rebuilt, but the city never recovered. It passed to the Ilkhanate and by 1380 to Timur, whose successors built a smaller town to the south.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Uzbeks, Safavid Persians and the khans of Khiva and Bukhara contested the oasis, and from 1608 a line of Qajar governors ruled it, later as an independent principality. In 1785 the Manghit emir of Bukhara, Shah Murad, attacked and killed its ruler, and in 1788 and 1789 he razed the city, broke its dams and deported the population of about 100,000 to the Bukhara and Samarkand regions.

Turkmen tribes held the oasis in the nineteenth century until the Russian Empire occupied it in 1884, and by 1888 the old city was empty. Russian officers made the first digs in 1885, and professional excavation began in 1890. Since 1992 joint Turkmen and British teams, later led by University College London, have studied the site. The ruins of its successive walled cities, from the Achaemenid citadel of Erk Gala to the Seljuk Sultan Gala, lie within a state park created in 1987.