Samarkand, located in an area of the central Asian steppes called Sogdiana, was already an established regional trade oasis when Alexander the Great captured it in 329 BCE. By the 7th century, Samarkand had evolved into an important way station on the Silk Road connecting the eastern and western Old World. During the CE 600s, Hsuan-tsang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim-explorer, described Samarkand as a great city surrounded by an impressive wall and filled with exotic goods from distant countries.

As a major transit centre, Samarkand was also a magnet for foreign customs and ideas borne along the Asian caravan routes by merchants, military armies, and missionaries. Arab armies sweeping eastward along trade routes in the early 700s introduced the faith of Islam to Samarkand. In return, they learned the technique of making paper from Chinese warriors captured in a battle near the city. Sogdians from the prosperous lands around Samarkand themselves influenced Chinese culture by passing along their knowledge of horse breeding and their skills as caravaneers. Evidence of Sogdian influence in China survives even today. Some Chinese almanacs still use the old Sogdian word for "sun" -- mihr -- in the word "Sunday".

By the early twelfth century, Samarkand, part of a Turkish-dominated empire called Khwarizm that included Turkestan, Persia, and part of Afghanistan, had become the chief Muslim city in central Asia. It was famous for its Muslim scholarship, religious schools, and elegant Islamic architecture. In 1220, however, the Khwatizmi shah provoked Genghis Khan into a furious attack on his western neighbour. Gathering 200,000 cavalry and 10,000 Chinese siege engineers, the Mongol warrior attacked and pillaged Samarkand in 1220, massacring most of the population. In the 1270s, when Marco Polo visited the centre, the city had degenerated into a slowly decaying cultural backwater. The disintegration of Genghis Khan's empire into warring khanates after 1260 reduced the volume of trade along the Asian caravan roads, further hastening Samarkand's decline. Tamerlane, from 1371 to 1405 the warrior leader of the Chagatai portion of Genghis Khan's old empire, revived Samarkand's fortunes, however, when he designated the city as the bureaucratic capital of his own expanding empire.

In 1402, Ruy Conzalez de Clavijo, Spain's ambassador in Samarkand, spoke with awe of the city's spacious proportions, its gardens, fountains, elegant houses and domed bazaar. All were supplied with water piped across the city's open spaces in lead aqueducts supported by wooden props. The reverence for water reflected in Samarkand's architecture bespoke centuries of Islamic influence. Much of what the ambassador saw, however, was a product of Tamerlane's personal effort to beautify his capital.

Tamerlane pursued this goal with a distinctively brutal brand of patronage, collecting skilled artisans from the foreign countries he conquered, and forcing them to work in bondage in Samarkand as painters, potters, bookbinders, weavers, metalworkers, woodcarvers and architects. His major construction project was a massive religious complex composed of a sufi hospice, a theological school, an impressive mosque, and a mausoleum in which he himself was eventually buried in 1405. Dissatisfied with the initial design of the mosque, Tamerlane at one point ordered the partially completed building demolished, and hanged two of the architects.

In its architecture as well as in the conditions under which it was built, the Gur Amir mausoleum's magnificent turquoise mosaic dome provides an eloquent example of the way in which goods and ideas have moved across the Old World landscape through time. Enslaved Syrian architects used a Damascus mosque which Tamerlane burned in 1402 as a design template for the Samarkand edifice. The Samarkand dome, in turn, inspired the onion-shaped domes of Moscow's Kremlin. One of Tamerlane's descendants, Babar, took the architectural pattern south when he founded the Mogul empire in India. Babar's own descendant, Shah Jahan, used the style when building his wife's tomb, the famous Taj Mahal, in 1648.