Samarkand

Marákanda (Μαράκανδα) is the Greek name of Samarkand, fixed by the historians of Alexander: Arrian names it as the royal city of Sogdiana with the ruler’s palace, taken in 329 BCE, and Curtius describes its long walls. It was Alexander’s base for the hard Sogdian campaigns, and the scene of the expedition’s darkest evening, the banquet at which the king killed Cleitus the Black; the city thus enters western literature attached to a moral exemplum, quoted for centuries by philosophers who never asked where Marakanda was. The Greek form renders the local name heard in speech, with its first sibilant lost at the doorstep; the entry claims no written parent, since the Sogdian spelling surfaces in the record only centuries later.

The entry’s philological interest is that the exonym is older than any native attestation, by more than six centuries. Greek caught the name in 329 BCE; the earliest surviving Sogdian writing of it belongs to the Ancient Letters of the fourth century CE, so the city’s own documentation runs behind its conqueror’s. The atlas meets this inversion at Sogdiana itself, whose Achaemenid attestations precede the native ones, and it is the standard predicament of oral civilizations conquered by literate ones: the visitors wrote first. Marakanda is Samarkand as the west first heard it, one syllable short and one murder richer, and for the ancient Mediterranean that abbreviation was the whole city.

The Latin name of Samarkand, Maracanda, taken from the Greek of the Alexander historians: Curtius Rufus, writing the fullest surviving Latin account of the conquest, places Maracanda, the capital of Sogdiana, at the center of the campaign’s darkest stretch, the guerrilla war against Spitamenes and the drunken feast at which Alexander killed his friend Cleitus. The name reached Latin as a book-word, carried by historiography rather than by any Roman who ever went there, and it never advanced past the Alexander narrative into the working geography of the empire.

That bounded life is the entry’s point on a page whose other names all keep moving. The Sogdian Smarkand fed the Persian and Arabic forms and ultimately the modern name; the Chinese Kāngguó filed the city into a Tang administrative system; Latin alone took the name, used it for one story, and set it down. Rome knew Samarkand only as the place where Alexander’s expedition began to curdle, a stage direction in a cautionary tale about conquest and drink; for Latin readers across the empire’s whole history, that was the city’s entire existence. Some names are roads and some are rooms; Maracanda is a room in one book, furnished once, never entered again.

smʾrknδh is Samarkand’s name in Samarkand’s own language, conventionally read Smārkanθ: it appears in the Sogdian Ancient Letters of c. 313, the merchant correspondence found in a watchtower west of Dunhuang, and again in the Mugh documents of the early eighth century, the archive of the last independent Sogdian lord, hidden in a mountain castle from the advancing Arabs. The usual analysis reads the name as asmara- “stone” with kanθ “town, fort,” the stone city, the second element being the same kand that closes a whole family of Central Asian town-names, Tashkent among them.

The entry does for Samarkand what swγδ does for Sogdiana on its page: it supplies the insider’s spelling against which every outsider’s version can be measured, and the measurements are instructive. Greek Marákanda dropped the initial cluster the Greek mouth disliked; Arabic and Persian Samarqand broke it open with a vowel instead; the reconstructed Smārkanθ explains both at once, the one name behind the two accommodations. Its two attestation contexts are the Sogdian trading world’s alpha and omega, a commercial letter from the network’s morning and a fugitive prince’s archive from its last day; the name is spelled the same in both. The merchants and the doomed lord agreed on the spelling, and it is their spelling, not the conquerors’, that the etymology trusts.

Kāngguó (康國), “the state of Kang,” is the Tang name for Samarkand, the head of the “nine clans of Zhaowu” under which the dynastic histories catalogued the Sogdian principalities, each reduced to a single-character surname: Kang for Samarkand, An for Bukhara, and their lesser neighbors down the list. The account of the Western Regions describes the Kang state as the greatest of the nine, its king enthroned facing east, its people gifted traders whose sons were taught commerce from boyhood, and its embassies bringing lions, dancers, and golden peaches to Chang’an; Sogdians settling in China took Kang as their family name, and it survives as a Chinese surname still.

Beside the transcriptions that fill this atlas, Kāng is a different operation entirely: not the city’s name adapted but the city replaced by a Chinese surname, the polity domesticated into the empire’s own kinship vocabulary. The choice was administrative but its effect was intimate; a Samarkandi in China was not a foreigner with an unpronounceable city but a Mr. Kang, his origin worn as a family name, and the golden-peach embassies came, in the registers, from a relative’s house. Of all the ways one civilization has written another’s city into its records, this is the most absorbing, in both senses: Samarkand entered China not as a word but as kin.

Samarkand is the Middle Persian name of the city as the Pahlavi geographical tradition records it. The Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, the Middle Persian catalogue of the cities of the empire, opens its survey of the sunrise quarter with the šahrestān of Samarkand and hangs a Kayanid foundation legend on it, crediting its building to the kings of the epic past rather than to any historical dynasty. The attestation is Book Pahlavi, which has no Unicode encoding, so the entry carries transliteration only.

The catalogue’s opening is a quiet act of imagination, because Samarkand was never a secure Sasanian possession; the empire’s real writ ran out near the Oxus, and the city belonged to the Sogdian princes whose own name for it is recorded on this page. The Pahlavi book of cities nonetheless begins Ērānšahr there, in a city beyond the border, assigned to the legendary Kayanids so that the geography of the empire could open at the eastern edge of the world it claimed rather than of the world it held. Every other tradition on this page names Samarkand as a real and reachable city; the Middle Persian entry alone names it as a wish.

Samarqand (سمرقند) is the Arabic form of the Sogdian name, in use from the conquest of the early eighth century, the initial cluster opened with a vowel and the final element regularized to -qand. Arabic tradition attached one great story to the city: that the prisoners taken at the battle of Talas in 751 included Chinese papermakers, and that paper entered the Islamic world through Samarqand’s workshops, which remained famous for it; whatever the anecdote’s precision, Samarqandi paper was real, celebrated, and consequential, the vehicle on which Arabic book culture scaled. Yāqūt records the city’s splendor and its already-legendary antiquity; the name continues unchanged in Arabic to the present.

Within the family the Arabic entry is the great transmitter: it is this vocalized form, Samarqand, that New Persian shares, that the Turkic world inherited, and that Europe eventually received, so the modern name of the city descends through the Arabic accommodation of the Sogdian cluster rather than the Greek one. The paper story gives the entry its second layer, since a city whose name means “stone fort” became synonymous with the most fragile of materials; the fort endured sieges, and the paper carried the civilization. Samarqand exported the medium on which its own name would be written for the next thousand years, which is as close to naming immortality as commerce comes.

Samarqand (سمرقند) in Classical Persian shares its written shape with the Arabic, but its channel is local: Persian rose to literary life in the very courts of Transoxiana and Khurasan for which Samarqand was a home city, not a foreign wonder, and the name passed into the new language from the region’s own speech as Sogdian itself faded before Persian and Turkic. The city appears in the Shāhnāma’s Turanian geography and across the classical literature, and at the era’s end it became the capital of Timur, who piled the plunder of half the world into it and made the name, for Persian letters and every literature touching them, a synonym for imperial splendor at the edge of the earth.

The Persian entry records the name’s change of register. In Sogdian mouths Smārkanθ was home; in Arabic, a provincial metropolis; Persian made it an image, the golden city of the east, a career crowned centuries later when European poetry borrowed the Persian resonance whole, the “golden road to Samarkand” being the Persian city of the imagination rather than the Sogdian city of stone. The family’s plainest etymology, stone fort, thus ends in the least stony of meanings; by the time the name reached its widest audience it referred to a dream. Cities are named by their founders and renamed by their poets, without a letter needing to change.