Who ruled Samarkand?

Samarkand lies in the valley of the Zarafshan River in what is now south-eastern Uzbekistan, where irrigated orchards and fields meet the routes that ran between China, India, Iran and the steppe. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia, it was the chief city of the Sogdians, the great merchants of the Silk Road, and later the capital of Tamerlane's empire. Its history alternates between periods of extraordinary wealth and learning and moments of near-total destruction.

The first city stood on the plateau now called Afrasiyab, on the north side of the modern centre, and was founded around the seventh or eighth century BCE. In the sixth century BCE Sogdiana became a province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Alexander the Great took the city, which the Greeks called Marakanda, in 329 BCE and spent two hard years suppressing revolts in the region. Over the following centuries Sogdiana passed under Greco-Bactrian kings, nomadic peoples from the north and the Kushans, and later the Hephthalites and the Turkic khaganates, but the city's Sogdian merchants kept their own princes and built trading colonies all the way to China. Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Manichaeans, Christians and Jews all lived there, and wall paintings excavated at Afrasiyab show envoys arriving at a Sogdian court in the seventh century.

Arab armies of the Umayyad Caliphate under Qutayba ibn Muslim captured Samarkand around 712, installed a garrison and built a mosque, and over time most of the population converted to Islam. According to a well-known tradition, Chinese prisoners taken after the Battle of Talas in 751 taught papermaking to the city's craftsmen, and Samarkand paper became famous across the Islamic world. Under the Samanid Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries the city flourished as a centre of Persian culture, and it later served as a capital of the Turkic Karakhanids. In 1220 the armies of Genghis Khan stormed it, killing or deporting much of the population. The old city on Afrasiyab was never rebuilt; a new one grew up to the south.

In 1370 Tamerlane (Timur) made Samarkand the capital of the Timurid Empire. He filled it with craftsmen and artists carried off from conquered cities from Delhi to Damascus, and built the vast Bibi-Khanym mosque and his own tomb, the Gur-e-Amir. A Castilian envoy, Ruy González de Clavijo, described the endless construction he saw in 1404. Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg, who governed the city from 1409 to 1449, built a madrasa on the Registan square and an observatory where his astronomers compiled a star catalogue of remarkable accuracy.

The Uzbek leader Muhammad Shaybani seized Samarkand at the start of the sixteenth century, and despite brief recaptures by the Timurid prince Babur, it became part of the Uzbek Khanate of Bukhara. In the seventeenth century the governor Yalangtush Bahadur added two more grand madrasas to the Registan, but as overland trade declined and Bukhara became the political centre, Samarkand shrank; by the eighteenth century it was nearly deserted for a time.

Troops of the Russian Empire took the city in 1868, and a new Russian quarter was laid out to the west. The Trans-Caspian railway arrived in 1888. Under Soviet rule Samarkand was briefly the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, from 1925 to 1930, before Tashkent replaced it. Since 1991 it has been one of the main cities of independent Uzbekistan, with roughly 550,000 people, and its historic monuments were listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2001.