Afrasiyab: Samarkand's Ancient City and Museum
The Samarkand that existed before Timur: the Afrasiyab mounds, the 7th-century Ambassadors' Painting, what the museum holds and how to visit the site.
Everything most people photograph in Samarkand was built after 1370. The city Genghis Khan destroyed stood somewhere else: on a plateau north of the Siab bazaar, where there's now a landscape of bare brown mounds and gullies that looks like nothing at all.
That's Afrasiyab, the original Samarkand. People lived there from roughly the 6th century BC until 1220, when the Mongol army broke the water supply and the city moved south to where it stands today. Underneath the dust are 1,800 years of streets, walls, houses and one of the most important wall paintings in Central Asia.
What Afrasiyab was
This was Marakanda, the city Alexander the Great took in 329 BC, and later the Sogdian capital at the centre of the Silk Road trade network. Sogdian merchants from here ran caravans as far as China, and their language was the trade language of the road.
By the Samanid period the walled area covered around 220 hectares, which is enormous for a pre-modern city. It had a citadel, a grid of streets, a bazaar and an aqueduct bringing water in along a lead pipe. In 1220 the Mongols cut that aqueduct and the city could not survive without it.
When Timur rebuilt Samarkand 150 years later, he built south of the ruins rather than on top of them. That's why the site survives: nobody needed the ground.
Afrasiyab in five dates
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 6th century BC | First settlement on the plateau, later known to the Greeks as Marakanda |
| 329 BC | Alexander the Great takes the city |
| 648–651 AD | The Ambassadors' Painting is made in a Sogdian house |
| 712 onwards | Arab conquest; the city becomes part of the Islamic world and keeps growing |
| 1220 | Mongol army destroys the aqueduct; the site is abandoned for the new city to the south |
Those five lines are worth carrying round the mounds with you. Almost everything you step over belongs to one of them.
The Ambassadors' Painting
In 1965, road workers cutting through the mounds found painted plaster. What they had hit was a reception hall in a wealthy Sogdian house, its four walls covered with murals painted around 648–651 AD.
The best-preserved wall shows a procession of foreign delegations arriving at the court of Varkhuman, the ruler of Samarkand: envoys with distinctive hats and robes, Turkic guards with long plaits, white birds, horses and camels. Other walls show a Chinese scene with a boat and a hunt, and an Indian scene. The inscriptions name the ambassadors' home regions, including Chaganiyan and Chach, which is modern Tashkent.
What makes it extraordinary is what it records: a single room in which the diplomatic world of 7th-century Central Asia, Chinese, Turkic, Sogdian and Indian, is painted in one place. It is the closest thing we have to a photograph of the Silk Road at its height.
The painting has been studied intensively since its discovery, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the wall paintings is the clearest summary of what each wall shows and how the scenes are read.
The murals are damaged and faded. Large sections are missing, and what survives needs a little patience and, ideally, the museum's reconstruction drawings beside it. Don't expect Pompeii. Expect fragments that repay looking.
Who the Sogdians were
To make sense of Afrasiyab you need the people who built it. The Sogdians were an Iranian-speaking people whose city-states, Samarkand, Bukhara, Panjikent and others, sat between Persia, the steppe and China. They were not an empire. They were traders, and for several centuries they ran the middle section of the Silk Road almost as a family business.
Sogdian merchants kept warehouses in Chinese cities, and Sogdian was the working language of the trade routes in the same way English works in an airport today. Their religion mixed Zoroastrian practice with local cults, which is why the museum holds ossuaries: bone boxes used because burying a body was thought to pollute the earth.
That background explains the murals. A house in Samarkand painted with Chinese boats, Turkic guards and Indian scenes wasn't showing off exotic taste. It was showing the owner's world.
What has been found here
Excavations have run on and off since the 1870s, and the site is still largely unexcavated. Among the finds:
- The citadel and city walls, in several rings, showing how the city grew and contracted over centuries.
- Workshops for pottery and glass, and streets of mud-brick houses.
- A lead water pipe that brought water across a ravine into the city, the line the Mongols cut in 1220.
- Ossuaries decorated with painted and moulded scenes, some of the best sources for Sogdian religious practice.
- Coins from Sogdian rulers, Chinese dynasties and the Islamic period, which is how the layers are dated.
Excavation continues in summer, usually with French and Uzbek teams. If you visit in June or July you may see a working trench from the path, though you can't enter it.
The other pre-Timurid sites nearby
Afrasiyab isn't the only piece of old Samarkand. Two more are within reach on the same morning.
The Ulugh Beg observatory, on a hill a short taxi ride east, is later (1420s) but predates most of the city's tiled monuments and shows the same instinct for measurement. The Hazrat Khizr mosque, at the southern edge of the Afrasiyab plateau, stands on a site used since the 8th century and gives a fine view over Bibi-Khanym.
Together with the museum, they make a half-day about the Samarkand that existed before the domes, which is a genuinely different trip from the standard circuit.
The Afrasiyab Museum
The museum was built in 1970 over the site, specifically to house the paintings, which are displayed in a central hall with the reconstruction drawings alongside. The rest of the collection covers the site's whole span: Sogdian ossuaries, coins, terracotta figures, pottery, glass and ceramics from the pre-Mongol city.
It's a modest, old-fashioned museum with limited English labelling, and for many visitors that's the problem: the objects are remarkable, the presentation is not. A guide, or reading up beforehand, changes the visit completely.
Entry costs somewhere around 50,000 to 80,000 som for foreign visitors depending on the current tariff, and the site outside is generally free to walk on (last checked: September 2026). Allow 45 minutes for the museum.
Walking the site itself
Behind the museum, paths lead up onto the mounds. There is almost nothing standing: the excavated trenches have weathered, and what you see are grass-and-dust ridges that were once walls, with occasional cuts showing layers of mud brick.
Go anyway, for two reasons. The scale is only clear on foot: it takes a good half-hour to cross a fraction of the old city. And the view from the top edge is the best free panorama in Samarkand, with Bibi-Khanym mosque, Shah-i-Zinda and the modern city laid out below you.
Practical notes: there's no shade, no water and no signage on the mounds. Wear proper shoes, take a bottle, and avoid the middle of the day in summer. Don't pick anything up; the whole area is a protected archaeological site.
One more reason to walk up: the gullies. The deep cuts running through the plateau are erosion channels, and their sides are effectively free sections through the city. Look at the exposed faces and you can pick out bands of mud brick, ash layers from fires and lines of broken pottery, stacked in the order they were left. Archaeologists read those layers to date the site; you can at least see the principle in five minutes without digging anything.
If you're travelling with children, this is a better stop than it sounds. There are no ropes and no "don't touch" signs, the space is open, and the story is simple enough to tell on the spot: a whole city was here, an army broke the water pipe, and everyone moved.
How to fit it into a Samarkand day
Afrasiyab sits immediately north of the Siab bazaar and a short walk from Bibi-Khanym mosque, with the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis on its southern edge. The natural route is:
- Start early at Shah-i-Zinda, before the groups arrive.
- Walk north to the Afrasiyab museum and mounds, which are quiet at any hour.
- Come back down through the Siab bazaar for lunch, fruit and bread.
- Finish at Bibi-Khanym mosque across the road.
That's half a day on foot and covers 2,500 years in the right order. Our Samarkand travel guide has the rest of the city, and the site is part of the wider Samarkand World Heritage listing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Afrasiyab worth visiting if I'm short on time?
Only if you care about history rather than architecture. There are no standing monuments. If you have two days in Samarkand, spend them on the Registan, the tombs and the bazaar. If you have three or more, or you've read about the Sogdians, Afrasiyab is the most interesting hour in the city.
Can you see the Ambassadors' Painting anywhere else?
No. The murals were lifted from the excavated house and are displayed in the Afrasiyab Museum on the site. Reproductions appear in books and in other museums, but the originals are here.
How much time do you need?
About 45 minutes for the museum and another 30 to 45 to walk on the mounds and take in the view. Add travel time from the centre: it's roughly 10 minutes by taxi, or 20 on foot from Bibi-Khanym.
Is there anything to see on the mounds themselves?
Not in the conventional sense. You're walking over an unexcavated city, so what you see is terrain: ridges, hollows and exposed mud-brick layers. The reward is the scale and the panorama over Samarkand, not individual ruins.
Do I need a guide?
It helps more here than anywhere else in Samarkand, because the labelling is thin and the site is unmarked. If you're not hiring one, read about the Sogdians and the 648–651 AD murals before you go, and the visit will make far more sense.
Featured image: Ambassadors' Painting, Afrasiyab (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.