What the Registan's Inscriptions Actually Say

The blue bands running across every portal in Samarkand are not decoration. They are writing — readable, dated, signed writing, containing Quranic verses, the names of the men who laid the tiles, boasts about the building you are standing in front of, and in some cases a hidden number giving the year of construction. Almost every visitor photographs them as pattern. They are the labels.

Uzbek scholars have spent years translating this material and publishing it in twenty volumes. Essentially none of it has reached the English-language travel web. This is an attempt to move a little of it across, with a strict rule: we give translations only where we can point at a source, and describe the rest by category rather than inventing readings.

The project that did the work

Worth knowing about, because it is the reason any of this is answerable.

The Architectural Epigraphy of Uzbekistan project is run by the World Society for the Study, Preservation and Popularization of the Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan, working with the Academy of Sciences and the Abu Rayhan Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies. Researchers have documented and translated inscriptions from over 2,000 epigraphic monuments, publishing twenty multilingual book-albums — in Uzbek, Russian, Arabic and English — covering every region of the country, with dedicated volumes for the Registan and Shah-i-Zinda.

The single most interesting outcome is not a text at all. It is a list: over a thousand names of craftsmen, architects, artists, calligraphers and poets, recovered from buildings where nobody had bothered to read the signatures. Medieval Central Asian buildings are far less anonymous than the guidebooks imply. The men who made them wrote their names on them, in plain sight, sometimes several metres up.

What the inscriptions are, by type

Six categories cover almost everything you will see.

• Quranic verses. The most common, usually on the main portal and around the mihrab. Verses concerning prayer, light, paradise and the mosque itself recur.
• Foundation texts. Who ordered the building, what their titles were, and frequently a claim about its magnificence. These are the closest thing to a plaque.
• Chronograms. A date encoded in the numerical values of Arabic letters, so a phrase that reads as a pious sentiment also adds up to a year. This is the detail most worth knowing, because it turns a decorative band into a puzzle the builders expected literate visitors to solve.
• Craftsmen’s signatures. Often small, often tucked into a corner of a panel, naming the tile-cutter or calligrapher.
• Poetry and moral sayings. Verses, wise sayings, well-wishes — especially on madrasahs and tombs.
• Decrees. Less common, but rulers did have administrative statements set in tile.

Two texts you can actually take with you

These are the ones we can source properly.

The foundation inscription of the Ulugh Beg madrasah reads, in translation: “This is a building adorning the Earth and equal to the sky. This tall building rose to the heavens. The one who was the mainstay of the best in management and prudence, who combined in himself the art of management and knowledge, ordered to build it.”

Read that again with the building in front of you. It is not humble, and it was not meant to be. The claim being made is that a ruler’s learning and his authority are the same quality, which is precisely the argument Ulugh Beg spent his life making and eventually died over — our piece on him as an astronomer covers how that ended.

The knowledge hadith. Ulugh Beg had the saying “Seeking knowledge is an obligation upon every Muslim” — reported in Sunan Ibn Majah, and often rendered as “the pursuit of knowledge is the duty of every Muslim man and woman” — placed on the doors of the madrasas he founded. It is best documented on his madrasa in Bukhara. For a prince who built an observatory and taught in his own institution, it functions as a mission statement.

We are deliberately not offering translations for the other Registan bands. Reliable readings exist in the published volumes, and paraphrasing them from memory is exactly how bad information gets into circulation.

How a chronogram works

This deserves unpacking, because it is the cleverest thing on these walls and nobody explains it to visitors.

In the abjad system, each Arabic letter carries a fixed numerical value — alif is 1, ba is 2, and so on up through the hundreds. Add the values of the letters in a phrase and you get a number. A chronogram is a phrase chosen so that its total equals the year being commemorated, in the Hijri calendar, while also reading as a sensible and usually devout statement.

So a band of tile can be, simultaneously, a pious formula, a piece of ornament and a date stamp. A literate visitor in the seventeenth century would have been expected to notice and do the arithmetic, and getting it was part of the pleasure — the architectural equivalent of a signature in a painting that also tells you the year.

It is also useful to scholars for the obvious reason: where a building has no documentary record, a chronogram can date it. Several Central Asian construction dates rest on exactly this.

Learning to see the scripts

You do not need Arabic to tell the three main hands apart, and it genuinely changes what you notice.

Square Kufic, called banna’i here, is the one most visitors mistake for pure geometry. Letters are squared off into a grid and built directly from glazed and unglazed brick as part of the wall. If you are looking at a large angular blue-and-buff pattern on a minaret or a drum and thinking it looks like a maze, look for repetition: the same short word, usually a divine name, tiled over and over across the whole surface.

Thuluth is the tall, curving, ceremonial script on the great portal bands — long vertical strokes, sweeping tails, white or gold on deep blue. This is where the Quranic verses and foundation texts usually sit.

Nastaliq, the flowing hanging script developed in the Persian world, turns up more in later work and in poetic inscriptions. Lighter, more slanted, more cursive.

Once you can spot banna’i, half the ornament in Uzbekistan resolves into words. It is the most rewarding five minutes of learning on the whole trip, and it costs nothing.

The Sher-Dor problem

The tympanum of the Sher-Dor madrasah carries two big cats stalking deer, each with a human-faced sun rising behind it. Every guide mentions that this is unusual in Islamic architecture and most stop there.

The interesting part is the tension. Figurative imagery of this kind on a religious teaching institution sat awkwardly with prevailing interpretations of Islamic law even in the seventeenth century, and the building was commissioned by a governor, Yalangtush Bahodur, who evidently did not mind. Whether the animals are lions or tigers is argued about; the Uzbek name means “having lions”, the stripes say otherwise, and the honest answer is that they are heraldic beasts rather than a species.

The sun-face motif has deep Persian and Turkic royal associations long predating Islam in the region. Whatever the building says in its inscriptions, the picture above them is making a claim about power.

Where to stand

Practical, because these things are large and high.

Portal bands read best from about twenty metres back, which in the Registan means from the far side of the square rather than close in. Bring a zoom or use your phone’s telephoto; the detail resolves properly at that magnification and not at all with the naked eye.

Craftsmen’s signatures and small panels are the opposite — get close, work at eye level and just above, and look at the edges of panels rather than their centres.

Light matters more than at most monuments. Raking light in the first and last hours picks out the relief of cut tile and makes the letters separate from the ground. At midday, everything flattens into blue.

And one caution that belongs here more than anywhere. A great deal of the tile you are reading is twentieth-century replacement, which means some inscriptions were re-cut from photographs and fragments. Where a band was lost, what is there now is a restorer’s reconstruction. We set out which buildings are most affected in the restoration audit — for epigraphy, Shah-i-Zinda and Bibi-Khanym are the two to treat most carefully.

Beyond the Registan

If this catches your interest, the richest epigraphy in the country is not in Samarkand’s main square at all.

It is at Shah-i-Zinda, where the fourteenth-century tombs carry dense, high-quality inscription work at close range on both facades and interiors — and where, because the chambers are small, you can stand a metre from a signed panel. The Bukhara trading domes and the Kalyan complex hold sixteenth-century work, and the carved wooden columns of Khiva’s Juma Mosque carry inscriptions in a completely different medium.

The twenty published volumes are the place to go next, and they are the reason this article can be as specific as it is and no more. If you find a translation online that gives you a fluent English rendering of an entire Registan portal without naming a source, be suspicious. Somebody made it up, and it will be repeated for years.

Sources: the Architectural Epigraphy of Uzbekistan project for the scale of the documentation, the twenty volumes and the recovered craftsmen’s names; Archnet’s record for the Madrasah-i Ulugh Beg for the building’s documentation. The foundation-inscription translation is as published by Uzbek epigraphic scholarship; the knowledge hadith is reported in Sunan Ibn Majah.

Featured image: LBM1948 (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.