Afrasiab (old Samarkand)

In the Shahnameh, Afrasiab is the king of Turan through most of the heroic age: a brilliant, ruthless and sometimes tormented ruler who outlives generations of Iranian kings and heroes. He kills Nowzar, has Siyavash put to death, imprisons Bijan, and is finally hunted down by Kay Khosrow, who finds him hiding in a cave by a lake and puts him to death. Samarkand itself appears in the poem as a city of the east, named in the wars of later kings.

Samarkand's old city, on a plateau of loess north of the modern centre, was the Sogdian capital known to the Greeks as Marakanda. It was destroyed by the Mongols in 1220 and never rebuilt, and the city moved south. At some point later the abandoned mound came to be called Afrasiab, after the epic king. Nobody knows exactly when, and it is a name given by tradition, not evidence that the poem placed his court here.

The ruins today

Archaeologists have excavated Afrasiab since the nineteenth century. Its most famous find is a hall of wall paintings from the seventh century, often called the Ambassadors' Painting, which shows envoys from China, Korea and elsewhere arriving at the court of the Sogdian king Varkhuman. A museum now stands on the site, and the mound is part of Samarkand's UNESCO World Heritage listing. Iranian and Central Asian readers sometimes smile at the irony: one of the great archaeological sites of the Persian-speaking world bears the name of Iran's epic enemy.