Samma dynasty

The Samma dynasty was a Muslim Sindhi dynasty that ruled Sindh, in the lower Indus valley of today's Pakistan, from the fourteenth century until about 1520. Its rulers bore the title jam, used much like sultan, and governed from Thatta, then called Samanagar. Under them Thatta became a wealthy trading city, and the vast cemetery on nearby Makli Hill is the dynasty's best-known monument.

The early history of the Sammas is poorly recorded. When Muslims first reached Sindh, the Samma were regarded as a tribe related to or on a par with the Jats; the historian Sarah Ansari describes both the Sammas and their predecessors, the Soomras, as Rajput tribes who had converted to Islam. Their chiefs followed Suhrawardi Sufi masters based at Uch and Multan. The Jadeja rulers of western Gujarat later traced their descent to the Samma, while the related Chudasama of Gujarat remained Hindu. The jams themselves claimed descent from the legendary Persian king Jamshid, which they linked to their title.

The traveller Ibn Battuta found the Sammas in revolt when he passed through Sindh in 1333. Soon after 1335 they overthrew the Soomra dynasty, whose last ruler fled to the protection of the Delhi Sultanate. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq marched against Sindh but died there in 1351, and the Sammas then made themselves independent; many accounts date the dynasty's foundation, under Jam Unar, to that year. Firuz Shah Tughlaq attacked in 1365 and 1367, at first without success, and later forced a Samma ruler to submit, but as Delhi's power declined the jams again became fully independent.

The main sources for the dynasty, the later historians Nizamuddin Ahmad, Abu'l-Fazl, Firishta and Mir Ma'sum, give few details and often contradict one another, so the sequence and dates of the rulers are uncertain. Their accounts tell of palace conspiracies, short reigns and campaigns against rebels at Sehwan and Bakhar. During the reign of Jam Fateh Khan, the Timurid prince Pir Muhammad seized Multan and Uch, but Sindh stayed in Samma hands. For most of the period Sindh was tied politically and economically to the Gujarat Sultanate, with occasional friction. Besides jam, Samma coins bear the titles sultan and shah.

The dynasty reached its height under Jam Nizamuddin II, known as Jam Nindo, who reigned from about 1461 to 1508 and is still remembered in Sindh as a hero of a golden age. After a year spent clearing bandits from the Bakhar region, he ruled from Thatta for over four decades. Late in his reign, after 1490, a force of the Arghun ruler Shah Beg advanced from Kandahar; Nindo's minister Darya Khan defeated it near Sibi, and Shah Beg's brother was killed.

Nindo's death led to a succession struggle. His young son Jam Feroz relied on his guardians and, to balance the powerful Darya Khan, took into service Mughal soldiers who had left Shah Beg. Some of these men encouraged Shah Beg Arghun to invade, and in 1519 or 1520 he conquered Sindh after a battle at Fatehpur, ending Samma rule; later accounts date the final end of the line as late as 1524.

Thatta's rise as a centre of commerce and culture owed much to Jam Nindo's patronage. When the Portuguese took Hormuz in 1514, trade from Sindh is said to have supplied nearly a tenth of the customs revenue there, and Portuguese observers counted Thatta among the world's richest cities, prospering on its cotton and silk textiles and on goods from the Punjab and northern India. The Makli necropolis, covering some 10 square kilometres, became a place of pilgrimage in Nindo's time, and its tombs mark the Sammas' contribution to Indo-Islamic architecture.

Our 1492 map labels Samma territory "Sind", covering the lower Indus valley and the delta around Thatta.