Tour buses stop at the Registan first, the middle of Samarkand’s 2,500 year story, not the start of it. Like many old cities in eastern history, Samarkand has existed in some shape for millennia, but is hardly present on many western classroom maps.
History begin here on a scrubby, eroded mound called Afrasiab - Samarkand before Samarkand. A trading culture that never bothered settling on one religion. Merchant families here did what they could and followed religions of their choosing, moving silk and silver between east (Tang China) and west (Byzantium) long before anyone local had heard the word Islam.
A seventh-century mural dug out of Afrasiab shows a parade of foreign envoys at court - Chinese, Turkic, Persian, and even a delegation from the Korean peninsula. A desert oasis hosting Korean diplomats before Europe had worked out Central Asia existed.
Alexander the Great showed up in the 330s BC, crushed the seemingly impregnable fortress here, then married a noblewoman called Roxana, who bore him a son. Genghis Khan showed up in 1220 and did what he did best - flattened it. What rose from the ashes was Samarkand.
Timur made that new city his capital in the late 1300s. Now Timur is a legendary figure - a cruel and brutal conquerer. In one lifetime he conquered lands from northern India to the Mediterranean in Turkey. Undefeated in the battlefield, skull towers left outside cities that resisted him, tens of thousands massacred in a single day in Baghdad, and death toll estimates for his wars running into the tens of millions. His great-great-great-grandson Babur, following in his footsetps, went on to found the Mughal Empire in India.
But surprisingly, a man with such a thirst for blood was largely outlived by the results of his passionate patronage of scholars and architects, and Samarkand’s whole golden years under his grandson Ulugh Beg only happened because Timur funded the culture around it.
Bibi-Khanym Mosque was Timur’s own project, built 1399–1404 with the spoils of his Indian campaign. A cupola so big and so high, pushing Timurid construction techniques to their absolute limit, built by slave-artisans with ninety-five elephants imported from over the continent in India to haul the marble.
The Spanish ambassador watched it go up in 1404, and reported that Timur judged the entry portal too low and had it torn down and rebuilt in a rush, showing up every morning in his litter to personally oversee the work, having meat cooked and thrown down to the men labouring deep in the foundations “as though one should cast bones to dogs in a pit.”.
His grandson Ulugh Beg preferred stars to conquest. He built the finest observatories on the planet, a stone sextant sunk forty meters into a hillside, precise enough that European astronomers were still copying his star charts a century later. His own madrasa, the oldest building on the Registan, taught astronomy next to theology - some of the golden years of scholarship in the Middle East.
Timur’s own tomb sits a short walk away, under a fluted turquoise dome - “let anyone who doubts our power look at our buildings”. In 1941, Soviet scientists opened it to study his bones. Locals warned them off, citing an old line supposedly carved inside: open this and unleash an invader worse than I was. Two days later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had Timur reburied with full honours the same week the Red Army turned the war at Stalingrad.
