Afrasiyab

Listen first. Wind moves across a wide, lumpy plateau of pale earth, and dry grass hisses against your ankles. The ground under your feet is soft and powdery, the colour of milky tea. Somewhere below, the traffic of modern Samarkand hums. Up here, there are no domes and no tiled portals. There are only low hills, deep trenches and long ridges of compacted earth. It looks like empty land. It is not. You are standing on top of the oldest Samarkand of all, the city that came long before the turquoise domes.

Afrasiyab is the name locals give to this great mound on the northern edge of the modern city. People lived here for well over two thousand years. They built houses, palaces, temples and workshops, and then they built new ones on top of the old. Over the centuries, layer after layer of mud brick and debris piled up. The result is the shape you see now — a raised plateau made almost entirely of human life. Archaeologists read it the way you might read the pages of a very old book, one layer at a time.

The name itself comes from legend, not from the city's founders. Afrasiyab is a mythical king of Turan, the land beyond the Oxus River, who appears in the Persian Book of Kings, the Shahnameh. Later generations looked at these ruins, felt their great age, and linked them to that half-legendary ruler. Historians do not believe he built anything here. But the name stuck, and it carries a feeling that is easy to understand. Standing on these ridges, you sense a place older than any written record of it.

The earliest settlement here dates to the first millennium before the common era. Greek writers knew the city as Marakanda. In 329 BCE, Alexander the Great and his army arrived and took it. The Greek sources describe a walled city with a fortress, set in a fertile valley watered by canals. Those canals still matter. The modern channels that run near the site follow a very old idea — bring water from the Zarafshan River, and the dry land turns green.

For most of its life, this was a Sogdian city. The Sogdians were an Iranian people, and they were the great merchants of the Silk Road. Their caravans carried silk, silver, horses, spices and ideas between China, India, Persia and the steppe. Sogdian traders built communities as far east as China. Samarkand, here on this plateau, was one of their most important homes. When you picture the Silk Road at its height, picture Sogdian voices, Sogdian letters, and streets running across the ground where you stand.

Now for one of the surprises. In 1965, workers were building a road across the site. Their digging exposed the walls of a seventh-century palace hall. On those walls were paintings, still bright after more than a thousand years underground. Today they are called the Ambassadors' Painting. They show a royal reception during the reign of the Sogdian king Varkhuman. Foreign envoys arrive with gifts, in procession, from across Asia. It is one of the rare surviving images of the Silk Road world painted by the people who lived in it.

The details reward a slow look. On one wall, a Chinese princess sits in a boat among water and fish. Elsewhere, riders on elephants and camels move in long lines. Turkic soldiers sit with their long hair falling down their backs in braids. And two figures wear headdresses topped with feathers. Many scholars identify them as envoys from a kingdom on the Korean peninsula. Think about that for a moment. Korean diplomats, painted on a wall in Central Asia, thirteen centuries ago.

Those paintings, and many thousands of other finds, are kept in the Afrasiyab Museum, at the edge of the site. The museum was built in the second half of the twentieth century for one of the city's anniversary celebrations. Inside, the original wall paintings fill a dedicated hall. Around them are coins, ceramics, ossuaries and tools. Ossuaries are small clay boxes that held the bones of the dead, a Zoroastrian custom. Zoroastrianism was the old Iranian faith built around fire and purity, followed by many Sogdians.

In the early eighth century, Arab armies took Samarkand, and Islam slowly became the main religion. The city kept growing. It became famous for its ceramics, with bold calligraphy painted on white glaze. It also became famous for paper. A popular tradition says that Chinese prisoners taught the craft here after a battle in the 750s. Historians debate how true that story is. But Samarkand paper was certainly prized across the Islamic world, and paper making still survives in workshops near the city today.

Then came the end. In 1220, the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan reached Samarkand. The city fell, and much of it was destroyed. Life on this plateau never fully returned. When Samarkand rose again, it rose to the south, on new ground. A century and a half later, Timur, the conqueror often called Tamerlane in the West, made that new city his capital. The glittering Samarkand that visitors know today was built beside these ruins, not on top of them.

So the plateau stayed open. That is the second surprise. In most ancient cities, the oldest layers lie under modern streets and houses. Here, they lie under grass and sky. That is why the excavations could reach so deep. As you walk, look into the trenches. You may see thin bands of different colours in the walls of earth — ash, burnt clay, fallen brick. Each band is a moment in the city's life.

The edges of the site connect it to living Samarkand. To the south, the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis climbs the slope. Its blue-tiled tombs sit against the old mound. To the north, near a small river, is the shrine known as the Tomb of Daniel. Pilgrims of several faiths visit it, and its long tomb is the subject of local legends. Many visitors pass all three places in one walk. In doing so, they move from the ancient city to the Timurid one in a few minutes.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment on one of the higher ridges. Look south, toward the domes of the later city, rising above the rooftops. Then look down at the uneven earth beneath your shoes. Here is a city that traded with China, hosted envoys from Korea, and painted its kings in gold and blue. Now it is quiet ground, grass and wind. As you walk back down toward the streets, notice the dust on your shoes. It is, quite literally, a little piece of old Samarkand.