Place · Sogdian capital · Uzbekistan
Samarkand
The Sogdian capital, whose merchants ran the caravan trade of Central Asia for six centuries — their letters found in a watchtower west of Dunhuang are the oldest surviving documents of the route. Later Timur's capital, and the site of Ulugh Beg's observatory.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 39.650, 66.970
Worth knowing
Sogdian was the working language of the Silk Road, and Sogdian merchants carried Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity east along with the goods. Ulugh Beg's star catalogue of 1437, compiled here, was the most accurate before the telescope and used Indian as well as Greek astronomy.
Connections (4)
- Trade routeDunhuang, China
The Sogdian Ancient Letters, abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang about 313 CE and found by Aurel Stein in 1907, are letters from Sogdian merchants at the Chinese end back to Samarkand — one of them from a woman abandoned by her husband, complaining bitterly. They are the oldest surviving documents of the route and they show what it actually was: a relay run by a single diaspora, in its own language, with its own credit arrangements.
- Trade routeKashgar
Sogdian merchants from Samarkand ran the relay east through Kashgar and around both sides of the Taklamakan, and Sogdian was the working language of the whole route for six centuries. Their letters abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang about 313 CE are the oldest documents of the Silk Road and read like ordinary business correspondence, with one furious letter from a woman left behind by her husband.
- Teaching lineageMaḥmūd Gāwān
Mahmud Gawan's madrasa at Bidar was built on the Central Asian plan — a courtyard with lecture halls, student cells, a library and a minaret, faced in glazed tile — and the model is the Timurid madrasa of Samarkand and Bukhara. He corresponded with Jami and Persian scholars, recruited teachers from Iran and Central Asia, and endowed free board. It is the clearest piece of evidence that the Deccan sultanates were a western edge of the Persianate world rather than a province of India.
- Life routeMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī
Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti is traditionally said to have travelled to Samarkand, one of the Islamic world's great centres of Persianate scholarship, during his early journeys through Central Asia. His time in Samarkand is placed in the 1160s-1170s, part of the Persianate scholarly network that shaped his spiritual formation before his encounters with Khwaja Usman Harvani at Harvan (his eventual Chishti master). The Samarkand of the Qarakhanid-Khwarazmian period was a major hub for Sufi circulation across the Persianate world; later migrations through Afghanistan brought these Central Asian spiritual traditions to the Indian subcontinent.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Samarkand”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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