Afrasiab Museum

About

Afrasiab is the mound on which ancient Samarkand stood: 219 hectares and eleven cultural layers laid down over 2,100 years. The outlines of the citadel, the walls and the canal that brought water into the city can still be read in the ground.

Bartold and Vyatkin dug here, later Sh. Tashkhodzhaev, Ya. Gulyamov and M. Kh. Isamiddinov. A permanent archaeological team was formed in 1958; over thirty years it ran more than fifty excavations, fixed the site's chronology and drew topographic plans of the city in different periods. An Uzbek-French expedition has worked here since 1989, and one from the Samarkand museum-reserve since 2010.

The museum opened on 24 October 1970 on the eastern edge of the site. The first hall covers the study of Afrasiab itself, with a relief map. The second holds the city's earliest centuries, among them a storage jar of the late eighth to early seventh century BCE that puts Samarkand's age at around 2,750 years. The third is given to the Hellenistic period: models of the defensive walls of the third and second centuries BCE, weapons, coins, terracotta and carved decoration. The fourth covers daily life in the first to fifth centuries CE, including a fourth-century altar hearth and terracotta figurines. The fifth holds Zoroastrian material: ossuaries, a room with an altar, a wooden caryatid in the form of a dancer, a letter written on leather and a stone weight with Sogdian inscriptions.

The great treasure is the Hall of Ambassadors murals, found by chance in 1965 during construction of the Tashkent road a few hundred metres away. This was the reception hall of Varkhuman, who ruled Samarkand in the third quarter of the seventh century; the paintings were lifted, moved into the museum and have been on show since 1985.

The west wall carries the ceremony itself: sixteen lines of Sogdian text on the hem of one figure's robe describe the audience, and below it envoys advance with gifts. Chinese in black caps bring silk and fruit, long-haired Turks stand nearby, along with envoys of the mountain principalities and Koreans with feathers in their hair. The north wall shows the queen boating with musicians and a hunt after big cats; the south wall a Nawruz procession to the ancestral tombs with sacrificial animals and a white elephant; the east wall water, fish and children — either the mythical lake Chaichasta or the Zarafshan river.

The upper floor runs from the Arab conquest to the coming of Genghis Khan: the water supply with a model of the Juyi Arziz aqueduct, ninth-century ceramic pipes, craftsmen's kilns, Silk Road goods, and the fused chain mail of the men who defended the city.