Twelve years ago, in the dawn of Central Asia’s independence from the broken Soviet Union, I had stood on the city’s crumbling plateau and looked down on a sea of biscuit-colored roofs and turquoise domes – and this image, circled in spring by snow-lit mountains, had printed itself insensibly on my mind. For a few minutes, as I stand here again, the memory persists, pushing non-existent Russian trucks around the traffic island at my feet, and installing a defunct clock there, while the bazaars spread still ramshackle beyond, with a ghostly flyover beyond that. The valley fills with remembered mud homes, and a dark, restless tide of men is returning from market under the shattered hulk of Bibi Khanum, the cathedral mosque of Tamerlane the Great.
But little by little the city- vivid for an instant in my memory –fades and reshapes into the present, until I grow unsure if it ever existed. It hardens into somewhere more self-conscious and sanitized. A new roundabout is in place before me, stubbled with globular lamps. Under the old clock is an advertisement for Unitel, and the cars are Korean-made. The bazaar has been rebuilt in a prettified Uzbek style, with curved walls of faceted mirrors, and a statue of three girls holding plates. In Soviet years this confection would have reeked of imperial condescension. But the Uzbeks have built it themselves. Streets have been renamed. Statues of Turkic grandees have arisen. And the Bibi Khanum, is no longer a gaping ruin but a thunderous restoration.
Everything is huger than my memory of it. In the modern suburbs, hefty buildings have gone up – colleges, institutes – to join the dour Soviet blocks I remember. I wonder frenetically what I have forgotten, what imagined. I ask people: when was this built? Is that one new? But they rarely know. University students are trickling into the boulevards: girls in jeans or mini skirts, too young to remember Communism. The only veils are worn by beggars at the mosque gates, a Russian woman among them. Yet people say little has changed, except they are poorer now. The same queues are waiting for the minibuses outside the bazaar, and unemployed youth loiter round government drink shops, or at kiosks selling pop cassettes and gangster videos. For hours I wander wide-eyed, while around me the city recomposes itself: the new, the remembered and thee forgotten settling at last under the snowless autumn hills.
The oldest Samarkand, named from a mythic giant, had sunk beneath the plateau of Afrasiab in the city’s northeast. Once fortified with eight miles of ramps and iron gate, it is now a fissured wasteland where the shards twinkle underfoot. On the heights of the citadel wrecked by Genghis Khan – a gaunt, rain-smoothed bluff – the trenches of Russian archaeologists are filling with dust. Its crevasses were once gates, its gullies street, Pavements and plastered walls, stairs and storage pits are sunk colorlessly into the ground. Here and there a trace of auburn pottery shines, iridescent glass, bones.
This was Maracanda, metropolis of the Sogdians, the greatest merchants of the Silk Road. A sophisticated Iranian people – less a nation than a confederation of states – their city was already rich when Alexander the Great entered it in 329 BC, and it remained beautiful long after the Arab conquest in the eighth century scattered its people.
On the plateau’s edge a small museum has collected Sogdian and Hellenistic things: cosmetics, carved chessmen, iron swords. The portable hearths of fire worship have come to light, still layered with ash; ossuaries where the bones of the dead were laid after dogs has picked them clean; and terracotta goddesses of earth and water. The Sogdians’ faith was a syncretic mix of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian beliefs, tinged with Hinduism. Born traders – so the Chinese believed- their mothers fed them sugar in the cradle to honey their voices, and their baby palms were daubed with paste to attract profitable things. Their slow, shaggy camels carried raw Chinese silk even to Byzantium. Xuanzang, passing through Samarkand in AD 630 described them as skilled in all the arts, yet savage soldiers, who met death as salvation. Their armor was supreme in its day – they perfected chain mail –and they took back into China the secret of fine glass, with horses and Indian precious stones, the skills of wine-making and of undergrounds irrigation. By their heyday in the sixth century AD Sogdian was the lingua franca of the Silk Road.
On the frescoed walls of the palace – the museum’s showpiece- ambassadors bring tributes to the gods of Samarkand. Attended by Turkish mercenaries, whose hair streams to their waists, the Chinese carry silk bales and cocoons to the foot of an obliterated throne. On another wall Vakhuman, the king of Samarkand, visits the tomb of his ancestors. Nothing is left above the stride of his outsized horse except the fall of a fantastical coat, embroidered with beasts in faded damson and white, his hanging bow and sword. But around him all is opulence and delicacy, as his court assembles to honor his lineage,. Through voids of flaking plaster, above a procession of amputated horses’ legs, the boots of a royal wife survive, riding side-saddle. Two jeweled emissaries – on dromedary and elephant – are parading together in ruined pomp, cradling their wands of office; and a group of courtiers advances to meet the king in Persian silks like his, spangled with dragons; while above them all, defying gravity, a file of geese marches to sacrifice.
At some time in the mid-fourteenth century, Tamerlane, the Conqueror of the World, was born into an obscure Turco-Mongol clan fifty miles south of Samarkand. In 1362 he was no more than a fugitive sheep-rustler, lame from war wounds. But within forty years, after twenty campaigns of ruthless brilliance, he governed a bloodied empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of China. All across Asia the cities that resisted him were marked by towers and pyramids of cemented skulls –old men, women, soldiers butchered together. In north India alone he left behind five million dead.
Yet his was a complex barbarism. With ravening curiosity, even on campaign, he plunged into debate with a traveling court of scholars and scientists. He wanted to hunt down the truth as he might an enemy. In his private library he gazed entranced at the illuminated manuscripts he could not read. He loved in particular the practical disciplines of mathematics, astronomy and medicine, and deployed his passion for chess over a board of 110 squares, on whose battlefield manoeuvred intricate new pieces –camels, war engines, giraffes.
But his thirst for ascendancy overbore all else. He venerated Islam as a source of power, yet manipulated it cynically to his will. And his paradox was intensified in the refined dynasties he spawned: the Timurids of Herat, the Mogul empire of India. In the courtly miniatures of Bihzad and Mir Sayyid Ali, his painted descendants savor roses or cradle books of verse. They are delicate, even exquisite. But they stir a vague disquiet: the intimation that culture is not always gentling, and not humane. For those dreamy princes perhaps come fresh from murdering a brother or erasing a city, before they settle again to ponder tulips and pen a book.
In Samarkand Tamerlane built a capital to his own glory. After each campaign the city overflowed with captured scholars and craftsmen until it bulged south and west of Afrasiab into a walled and gated cosmopolis whose mosques and academies, arsenals and bazaars, were crammed with the skills and goods of empire. Its suburbs were named contemptuously after the great cities Tamerlane conquered, and ringed with sixteen parks whose faience pavilions glowed heretically with murals celebrating his wars and loves. Yet even when not campaigning, he spent little time here. With the nomad’s unease in cities, he camped among the outlying gardens in a sea of silk-hung tents. His Samarkand was less a home than a momentous trophy, laced from his conquests.
Near the city’s center his megalomania reached its zenith in the Bibi Khanum mosque: a monument to God and to himself. It was pegged out with 160-minarets and sprouted the tallest of the turquoise domes which were to become the hallmark of his heirs. Returning suddenly from campaign, he executed its architects for building the portals too low, then himself flailed forward its construction, tossing meat and coins to the masons who pleased him, while ninety-five elephants lugged its marble into place from Persia and the Caucasus.
But the builders in their terror raised it too quickly, for within the emperor’s own lifetime it began to crack apart. By the nineteenth century it had degenerated into a cotton warehouse and a stable for tsarist cavalry. Only in the last few years has it been shored up; and now restoration, little by little, is snuffing out the strange vitality of ruin, and building in its place a shining blandness. The titanic entranceway and colossal iwan – the vaulted, open-sided hall – the acres of beige brick, all have lost their voice, Dwarfed and a little bored by them, I trespassed into the central prayer chamber, where the restorers had yet to go. Here, where the 130-foot dome leaked down cracks like inverted creepers, splitting the sanctuary walls through and through, the Bibi Khanum completed itself shakily in my imagination, and only the squeak of sparrows nesting in the cupola were not coeval with Tamerlane’s assault on heaven. . .
At he intersection of the Registan avenue and the fountain sloping to Tamerlane’s grave, a giant statue sits. The monster straddles its throne in heavy silks, his hands ready on the hilt of his scimitar. But his features have been transmuted to those of a philosopher-king, and a stream of wedding parties poses for photographs beneath him. Mounting the steps in a flock of fussing relatives, the brides ascend bare-shouldered under a cloud of silk and chiffon, their hair bound in jeweled coils or massed behind a tiara. They never smile. Their grooms climb self-consciously beside them in skewed ties and ill-fitting suits. But to the feet of Tamerlane (which are shod in outsize jester’s boots) they carry their bouquets delicately, and lay them in tribute on the marble ledge below.
Looming above them, the Scourge of God has become symbol and father of Uzbekistan. His feet, by day’s end, are drowned in flowers. In late Soviet times he was either ignored or vilified. Now his statues are going up everywhere. Politicians invoke him, academics write encomiums, conferences abound. He appears on banknotes and roadside billboards; streets and schools and state honors are named after him. His example is extolled before the army. Unveiling his equestrian statue in the center of Tashkent (ousting the bust of Marx),President Karimov hailed him as ‘our great compatriot’, and has even invoked him in the war against terror.
Yet Tamerlane was not a Uzbek at all. He was Turco-Mongol. So were the other reconstructed national heroes: his descendant Babur, founder of the Mogul dynasty – whose statue startled me in Namangan- and the astronomer-emir Ulig Beg, whose broken sextant still curves like a giant escalator under the earth of Samarkand. And the proliferating statues to ‘the father of Uzbek literature, the poet Alisher Navoi, celebrate a man who mentioned Uzbeks only to disparage them.
In was late in the fifteenth century, in fact, before the Uzbeks arrived from the north, where their name had once been attached to a khan of the Golden Horde. The name carried with it no national or ethnic meaning, and the world into which they settled was rich with overlapping identities. Islam nurtured the family and the umma, the whole community of the faithful: it preached no country. Nomads sang their lineage back to the seventh generation, and that, with the clan, was their home.
So the tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multi-lingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages, allotted suitable heroes and carved out countries as best it could. By the time Uzbekistan lurched into independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past. . .
I stand by the crypt door, above its dark descending ramp. The caretaker is old and nervous. As we go down, lit by a naked bulb, I see the emperor’s grave-slab below, more elaborate than the rest. In 1941 Russian anthropologist had opened the coffin and found the skeleton of a large man, lame on one side, with scraps of ginger beard still clinging to his skull. I smooth my fingertips over the slab’s broken surface. It is carved with a genealogy which Tamerlane never claimed in life. In dense Arabic script, it traces his line back through Genghis Khan to Adam. And it roots him deep in Islam through Muhammad’s cousin Ali – a catalyst of the schism between Sunni and Shia – far back to the virgin Alanquva, who was impregnated by a moonbeam.
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