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Documentary, BBC The Silk Road 2016 S01E02
The Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of Asian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 km (4,000 mi), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds.
The name "Silk Road" was coined in the late 19th century, but some 20th- and 21st-century historians instead prefer the term Silk Routes, on the grounds that it more accurately describes the intricate web of land and sea routes connecting Central, East, South, Southeast, and West Asia as well as East Africa and Southern Europe.
The Silk Road derives its name from the highly lucrative trade of silk textiles that were primarily produced in China.
The network began with the expansion of the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) into Central Asia around 114 BCE, through the missions and explorations of the.
The Silk Road is neither an actual road nor a single route. The term instead refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.
German geographer and traveler Ferdinand von Richthofen first used the term “silk road” in 1877 C.E. to describe the well-traveled pathway of goods between Europe and East Asia.
The term also serves as a metaphor for the exchange of goods and ideas between diverse cultures.
The Silk Road was an ancient trade route that linked China with the West, that carried goods and ideas between the two great civilizations of Rome and China. Silk went westward, and wools, gold, and silver went east. China also received Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism (from India) via the Silk Road.
Originating at Xi’an (Sian), the 4,000-mile (6,400-km) road, actually a caravan tract, followed the Great Wall of China to the northwest, bypassed the Takla Makan Desert, climbed the Pamirs (mountains), crossed Afghanistan, and went on to the Levant; from there the merchandise was shipped across the Mediterranean Sea.
With the gradual loss of Roman territory in Asia and the rise of Arabian power in the Levant, the Silk Road became increasingly unsafe and untraveled.
The Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of Asian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 km (4,000 mi), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds.
The name "Silk Road" was coined in the late 19th century, but some 20th- and 21st-century historians instead prefer the term Silk Routes, on the grounds that it more accurately describes the intricate web of land and sea routes connecting Central, East, South, Southeast, and West Asia as well as East Africa and Southern Europe.
The Silk Road derives its name from the highly lucrative trade of silk textiles that were primarily produced in China.
The network began with the expansion of the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) into Central Asia around 114 BCE, through the missions and explorations of the.
The Silk Road is neither an actual road nor a single route. The term instead refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.
German geographer and traveler Ferdinand von Richthofen first used the term “silk road” in 1877 C.E. to describe the well-traveled pathway of goods between Europe and East Asia.
The term also serves as a metaphor for the exchange of goods and ideas between diverse cultures.
The Silk Road was an ancient trade route that linked China with the West, that carried goods and ideas between the two great civilizations of Rome and China. Silk went westward, and wools, gold, and silver went east. China also received Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism (from India) via the Silk Road.
Originating at Xi’an (Sian), the 4,000-mile (6,400-km) road, actually a caravan tract, followed the Great Wall of China to the northwest, bypassed the Takla Makan Desert, climbed the Pamirs (mountains), crossed Afghanistan, and went on to the Levant; from there the merchandise was shipped across the Mediterranean Sea.
With the gradual loss of Roman territory in Asia and the rise of Arabian power in the Levant, the Silk Road became increasingly unsafe and untraveled.
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LearningTranscript
00:002,000 years ago, an ancient trade route slowly spread across a continent.
00:07As a historian, the Silk Road has always fascinated me,
00:11and this is the story of my journey along it.
00:15It ran all the way from China's ancient capital through Central Asia,
00:20through mythical cities such as Samarkand or Persepolis,
00:25until it reached the bazaars of Istanbul, the merchants of Venice.
00:34How much does modern Europe owe to the art, ideas and innovations
00:39that arose on the Silk Road?
00:42To answer that question, I'll follow it through deserts and oases.
00:49I'll get to see the Silk Road treasures of Iran,
00:52now once more opening to travellers like me.
00:55I'm starting to think that I may have actually been an Iranian merchant
00:58in a former life.
01:01The Silk Road was a place of adventure and invention.
01:04It cut across borders and brought cultures into contact and conflict.
01:10In this episode, I'm in Central Asia, the heart of the Silk Road,
01:15a place of constant conquest and resettlement,
01:18of displaced peoples and ruined cities.
01:23The Silk Road's melting pot.
01:25It's the part of the Silk Road which Europe has often overlooked,
01:29but it's quite possibly to this territory that the West owes its greatest debts.
01:34We weren't rediscovering our own ideas.
01:37We were discovering someone else's.
01:40I'll meet the last survivors of a race, the Sodians,
01:45who once traded from the Mediterranean to the China Sea.
01:49I'll search for traces of their art and culture.
01:53I'll delight in a city built by tens of thousands of captive craftsmen
01:57for one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever seen.
02:02And I'll go back to school in the Silk Road cities
02:05where modern mathematics and astronomy were actually born.
02:10And I'll see you in trouble.
02:11Let's walk back home.
02:12Let's go.
02:13Let's go.
02:14I'll tentacle.
02:15I'll take that.
02:16Let's go.
02:17We'll be right back home.
02:19We'll be right back home.
02:20So...
02:21Please...
02:22You're right back home.
02:23You're right back home.
02:24To be in theham grave.
02:25Too many more.
02:26To be in the realm.
02:28Welcome to the Yagnob Valley in Tajikistan, the very heart of the Silk Road.
02:52I've got a feeling the roads here are roughly as old as the Silk Road itself.
02:58I'm in Tajikistan, in a mountain range called the Zarafshan, north of the Himalayas, west
03:07of the high Pamirs.
03:14For more than a thousand years, Silk Road traders had to find their way through mountains like
03:19these, through these valleys.
03:22If they timed their trip badly, they froze to death.
03:26The idea of coming to a remote Tajik Valley seemed like a very good idea in Devon.
03:32I'm starting to wonder whether it was.
03:36I also realised that I like wide roads.
03:41I'm trying to get to an isolated group of villages further down the valley, which for more than
03:461,200 years has been the last refuge of a people that once traded all the way along the Silk
03:52Road, from the Mediterranean to China's eastern coast, the Sogdians.
04:01They had a kingdom, Sogdiana, and I'm driving through it now, or at least through its ghost.
04:10For centuries, their language was the common tongue of Silk Road trade and traders, a form
04:14of ancient Persian that Darius the Great would have understood, that Alexander the Great would
04:20have heard.
04:22But in the course of the 8th century, the Sogdians came into conflict with Islam, which was slowly
04:27moving eastwards.
04:29Sogdian culture began to fragment.
04:32Once they'd been so central to Silk Road trade that the word Sogdian replaced the word merchant.
04:39And by the 10th century, they were largely lost, except for in this remote valley, where some
04:47of them hid for more than 1,000 years.
04:52Amazingly, in this valley, their language has survived.
05:05The people who speak it now are known as the Yagnobi.
05:08I want to meet them.
05:11I'm hoping that it's not just the language that's lasted.
05:15Is there some trace of Sogdian culture?
05:22This is my destination.
05:23Well, thanks for the lovely drive.
05:34You're welcome.
05:35You're welcome.
05:36We've got to drive back too.
05:41Here I can meet Nils Karimov and his family.
05:44Hey.
05:45Hello.
05:46Hello.
05:47Hello.
05:49Hello.
05:50Hello.
05:51I'm desperate to hear this lost language spoken.
05:54Nils brings the family together, and after one of the toddlers tries to strangle a cat,
05:58they try to put the babies to sleep, in a language I would struggle to hear anywhere else in the world.
06:05But they put the babies together, and they spray them all in the world to their children.
06:11We walk every day.
06:13Well, it's not quite a cat.
06:15I have to come to eat.
06:18You're welcome.
06:19Hey, what are you doing?
06:23Hey.
06:25Hey, OK.
06:25Good news.
06:27Hey, OK.
06:29The children just aren't sleepy.
06:36They still feel privileged listening to words
06:39that Alexander the Great might once have heard.
06:51The family get on with daily life.
06:55The winter snows are coming and they can't afford
06:58to waste much time talking to me.
07:00But I have questions to ask.
07:03There are ruins all over the valley,
07:05evidence that the population has declined.
07:14What's happened here?
07:18Professor Seyfeddin Mirzazadeh,
07:20a Yagnobi who's made a career outside the valley,
07:23is staying with Nios.
07:25I asked them both about the valley's recent history.
07:29What happened to the Yagnobi people?
07:31It was wonderful,
07:35that the audience fell in the city of Niosu,
07:37and Christians fell in the Holy Spirit,
07:39and the scriptures in the Holy Spirit.
07:45I saw a war from the people,
07:47because they lived in the Holy Spirit
07:50that they did their lives.
07:51I had their own traditions,
07:54and I saw some people in the middle of the day.
07:58Zafarabad is north of the valley, close to the border with Uzbekistan.
08:06During the Soviet years, the Yagnobi were put to work here, picking cotton.
08:11It's only about 60 miles from the valley,
08:14but it placed the Yagnobi and their fragile traditions
08:17in the heart of another culture.
08:28This was all in Soviet times.
08:45What were they trying to do to the Yagnobi by forcing them to migrate?
08:49What else needs to be done to preserve the Yagnobi culture as best we can?
09:01Our mission is to the Yagnobi culture.
09:07Especially during the last years of our lives,
09:12we can bring up the Yagnobi culture.
09:18We can bring up these things to the Yagnobi culture.
09:27It turns out the truth is I'm too late.
09:3070 or 80 years too late to see what I wanted to see.
09:34The Yagnobi had long since forgotten Sogdian poetry and culture,
09:38and the Soviet era destroyed much of their language.
09:42Off camera, the professor admits
09:44that only around 30% of its vocabulary survives.
09:49If I want to find traces of Sogdian art, of their spirit,
09:53I'll have to look elsewhere.
09:55Here in the valley, Niels and others work to stop what they still have
10:02from getting lost in the rising tide of global culture.
10:06In the little schoolhouse, Niels shows me that the kids here
10:10aren't without a decent basic education
10:12and that they're being taught Yagnobi.
10:14And a little further up the valley, I find the remains
10:27of some of the many villages depopulated during Soviet times,
10:31mostly uninhabited ruins, some recently reoccupied.
10:36We meet these three gentlemen and pause for a photo opportunity.
10:47After they've left, our guide tells me that the oldest gent
10:50was talking about exactly how old these ruins are,
10:54that their foundations date from the time of Alexander the Great,
10:58three centuries before Christ.
11:02The Yagnobi live here with an awareness that their history is long,
11:06but they have forgotten all its details.
11:10Everyone living here now has made a deliberate decision
11:13to come back to this valley after Soviet Russia moved them elsewhere.
11:18They choose to live without almost everything
11:21that the modern world has to offer.
11:24It's not exactly no frills, but this is not a smartphone.
11:36It's hard to believe that their ancestors once ranged
11:39across this entire continent, trading in everything
11:42from silk to ceramics, jewels to weapons.
11:45Hard to believe that there were kings of the Sogdians,
11:49or that these people have been so completely forgotten.
11:53So lost to history.
11:58I've had such a lovely time that I thought we'd take a photo
12:01to remember it by. Is that OK?
12:03Hardest of all, perhaps, to believe that a culture can survive
12:06in a single valley for 1,200 years.
12:10Good. All right, then.
12:11Let's fucking hold this up. Let's get in.
12:14One, two, three...
12:16One for the journal, although I won't need much help to remember this day.
12:29Goodbye, Nios and your family.
12:31Thank you for resisting history.
12:33Thank you for proving that another kind of life is possible.
12:42It's been an honour.
12:44We start the drive back.
12:54It's a chance to reflect on who I've just met.
12:58As far as the rest of the world is concerned,
13:01these people don't exist.
13:03I'm very glad to have met them.
13:07Very glad indeed.
13:08I'm hoping that further to the west, out of this valley,
13:14I might find some trace of Sogdian art or culture.
13:18Near the valley's mouth, I find something else,
13:22a remnant of Tajikistan's recent past,
13:25as part of the Soviet Union.
13:27Bus stop, artwork, space-age relic,
13:31and a reminder of political reality.
13:33In pastel-painted concrete and pebbles,
13:36we see the hammer and sickle,
13:38and Sputniks orbiting the Earth.
13:44It's too good to miss.
13:46I need a snap for the journal.
13:48It reminds me once again of where I am,
13:51and where it was,
13:53that all around me are nations whose boundaries were set
13:56not by history, but by the Soviets,
13:59who sought to frustrate national identities.
14:03In terms of the ancient Silk Road,
14:05I'm still well within the boundaries of Sogdiana.
14:09But if you look at a modern map of Central Asia,
14:12at the illogical lines that determine the outlines of countries
14:15like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan,
14:19what you're essentially looking at is a map of Stalin's mind.
14:24Look at these straight lines.
14:29What happens if you're a Kazakh nomad here,
14:32whose summer pastures lie beyond this new border?
14:36I'm leaving Tajikistan behind, going west, to Uzbekistan,
14:41to its capital Tashkent.
14:43Relations between these two neighbours,
14:45who share so much history, not least the memory of Sogdiana,
14:49are currently so poor that I can't cross by road.
14:53I have to fly to Istanbul, and then from there to Tashkent.
14:58When the walls went down in 1990 and 1991,
15:02and the Soviet Union collapsed,
15:04Uzbekistan gained its independence.
15:07It's been ruled ever since by President Islam Karimov.
15:14Throughout the country,
15:15statues of the former gods of the Soviet Union, Lenin, Stalin,
15:20have been replaced by statues of one man,
15:24a colossal figure in Silk Road history.
15:27There used to be a statue of Karl Marx here.
15:42And it's Karl's replacement that I've come to meet.
15:46One of the biggest figures in Silk Road history.
15:50Three great conquerors swept through this entire territory.
15:55Men whose names have never been forgotten.
16:00Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ.
16:03Genghis Khan in the 13th century.
16:06And this man, the last of the three.
16:09He rolled across Central Asia like a sandstorm,
16:12a century after Genghis Khan.
16:15He's been known by many names,
16:17but will use just one to avoid confusion.
16:20Timur.
16:25Tamerlane, Tamburlane, Timur.
16:28Why so many names?
16:30Because his name was spoken in so many different languages,
16:34and because he was also known as Timur Lang,
16:37which meant Timur the Lame.
16:39Wounds from arrows caused him to walk with a limp.
16:44He was almost certainly the most pitiless of all the conquerors.
16:48A favourite trick was to promise the people of a city under siege
16:53that no blood would be shed if they surrendered.
16:56When they opened their gates, he would bury them alive.
17:00Even in Europe, he became proverbial.
17:04200 years after Timur's death,
17:07Christopher Marlow would write a play devoted to this historic monster.
17:11The play was a huge success,
17:14a celebration of boundless ambition, thirst for dominion,
17:18and the glamour of power.
17:20This is one of Timur's monologues from the play.
17:26I hold the fates bound fast in iron chains,
17:31and with my hand turn fortune's wheel about.
17:35And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
17:38than Tamburlane be slain or overcome.
17:43Europe would never forget him.
17:45Vivaldi, Handel, and about 50 others would create operas about him.
17:49And in the 20th century, he fascinated the Soviets.
17:54This is a sketch of a reconstruction of Timur's face
17:58made by a Soviet scientist, Mikhail Gerasimov,
18:01who exhumed the corpse in 1941.
18:04Usually, I distrust such things.
18:07But whoever made this worked with Timur's personality firmly in mind.
18:12It's certainly not a face that would forgive failure
18:16or understand excuses.
18:19Perhaps that's why it works.
18:22Perhaps there is something in it after all.
18:24Perhaps it is a good likeness.
18:30It's a chilly thought and a chilly face.
18:34Perhaps this was the man.
18:37Perhaps those were the eyes.
18:41Timur is everywhere.
18:43He's even on the money.
18:45He's at the heart of a new cult of Uzbek nationality.
18:53Night falls on Tashkent.
18:57And there are signs that the youth of Uzbekistan
18:59are very happy to have Timur back.
19:02Tomorrow, I'm on the road again, heading for the city that's always been associated with Timur,
19:14his reign, and the Silk Road itself.
19:20Samarkand.
19:21And the quickest way to get there is this.
19:29Uzbekistan's pride and joy.
19:31A high-speed rail link from its capital to its cultural heart.
19:35It'll get me to Samarkand in slightly less than two hours.
19:41It may not be a very romantic way to get there, but hey.
19:49Uzbekistan is remaking, rewriting its history.
19:52In the 19th century, Europe put Central Asian history to use as well.
19:58Think of Burton's translation of the Thousand and One Nights.
20:02We wanted this exotic world to stand for something.
20:05We made it stand for sensuality, wickedness and risk.
20:13A place of sexual license and ladies in transparent trousers.
20:17If you go back far enough, there are some occasions
20:19when that might possibly have been true.
20:22At some celebrations shortly before the death of Timur,
20:24eight of his wives were paraded before a Spanish visitor.
20:29And the drinking went on for several days.
20:35For Europeans, the Silk Road became the very heartland of license.
20:40The poet James Elroy Flecker was inspired to write this.
20:45Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
20:49When shadows pass gigantic on the sand
20:51And softly through the silence beat the bells
20:55Along the golden road to Samarkand.
21:03We travel not for trafficking alone
21:06By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned
21:09For lust of knowing what should not be known
21:13We take the golden road to Samarkand.
21:15Hotter winds, fiery hearts, knowing what should not be known.
21:23These ideas suggest that Samarkand is a place of forbidden and dangerous knowledge.
21:29Knowledge, certainly, but forbidden and dangerous?
21:32Well, it depends entirely what you think of the mapping of the stars.
21:37The study of medicine, the ideas of Aristotle,
21:39Or the fundamental principles of mathematics.
21:42These are just some of the things that we'll find that we owe entirely or in part
21:47To Samarkand and the Silk Road cities that lie beyond.
21:50Alexander the Great visited the city that would one day become Samarkand in 329 BC
22:04And announced that everything I have heard about Samarkand is true
22:08Except it is even more beautiful than I had imagined.
22:11But the city Alexander saw was destroyed more than a thousand years ago.
22:18We're here to see what replaced it.
22:23Timur's Samarkand.
22:24This is the Regist stand.
22:25MUSIC CONTINUES
22:55It was built sometime after the death of the Emir Timur.
23:00But it's astonishingly faithful to the style with which he's always been associated,
23:05which rose to prominence during his reign, the Timurid style.
23:12This extraordinarily impressive plaza was once described
23:16by one of Britain's most notoriously dismissive, arrogant and snotty diplomats
23:21as the noblest public square in the world.
23:25Better, in short, than anything Britain has to offer.
23:30And he was right. Look at any surface and be astonished.
23:34It's the extraordinary deep blue-green tiles of the domes
23:38that catches the eye first, like a memory of the sea thousands of miles away.
23:43And then when your eye slides off those domes onto the walls,
23:46there's more deep blues and gold that really punches through.
23:49The walls are covered in repeated patterns and quotations from the Koran.
23:55It's astonishingly beautiful and looks almost brand new.
24:03Because it is.
24:05Everywhere I look, there are construction workers, angle grinders, scaffolding,
24:10signs of renovation and restoration.
24:12And in a tiny workshop in one of the inner courtyards,
24:21I find Ravshan Halimov and his family working away.
24:26They've been working in the precincts of the Registan for decades.
24:36Lovingly, painstakingly, making replacements for the most important ingredient
24:41in the decorations of these buildings.
24:43The ceramic tiles.
24:48Some plain, some patterned, some containing quotations from the Koran.
24:53Some made like jigsaws from almost 30 pieces.
25:01I could watch them for hours.
25:04But I have questions to ask.
25:07How difficult has it been to restore the tile work?
25:11How difficult has it been to make sure that the colours are accurate,
25:28that the colours are correct?
25:29Is there a sense that all of this restoration work
25:42has to do with the memory of Timur and his family?
25:45So this family, and everyone working away outside,
26:00grinding stone, replacing tiles, even sweeping up dead leaves,
26:05is working away on the memory of Timur,
26:08the Silk Road's greatest conqueror.
26:09A few hundred yards' walk from the Registan is the Bibi Ghanoum.
26:19This enormous mosque was built on Timur's orders,
26:23in honour of one of his wives.
26:27Unusually, he was here in the later stages of its construction.
26:31He was normally far away conquering someone.
26:36According to myth, Timur brought 100,000 captured craftsmen to Samarkand
26:41to work on this and other projects.
26:44And as the city grew, he named its streets and suburbs
26:47after the other countries that he'd recently bagged,
26:51like notches on a bedpost.
26:53The Bibi Ghanoum was under construction
26:57as his death impended in the early 1400s.
27:00And in those same years, his empire reached its greatest extent,
27:04threatening Turkey to the west, China to the east.
27:07He called himself the Sword of Islam,
27:09but he was Islam's scourge more than its protector.
27:13Most of those he defeated were Muslims.
27:17As for the Bibi Ghanoum,
27:19he wasn't satisfied with the rate at which it was rising.
27:21He toured the site, threatening the sluggish,
27:24rewarding the industrious by throwing coins at them
27:27and chunks of meat.
27:34The pace of construction duly accelerated,
27:37but the work became more slapdash.
27:39Within years of its completion,
27:41the mosque began to crumble and collapse.
27:44Flawed though it was, one contemporary remarked
27:46the dome would be supreme were it not for the sky itself.
27:51The fact that the Bibi Ghanoum was built at all
27:56is a testament to Timur's tyrannical will and power.
28:02But in terms of restoration,
28:04it looks as though the Bibi Ghanoum is rather unloved.
28:07You wonder if it's been restored at all.
28:11You can wander into some of its spaces and regret the damage,
28:15but enjoy the traces of a culture
28:17for which every surface was a decorative opportunity,
28:20now enjoyed by feathered residents.
28:24But the truth is,
28:25these buildings were much more damaged than they seem today.
28:29This is the Bibi Ghanoum now,
28:31and this is then a little more than a hundred years ago.
28:39This small exhibition shows exactly how far these buildings have come.
28:44Now I'm looking at photographs
28:45that show the state of the Registan a hundred years ago.
28:49It wasn't just the Bibi Ghanoum that had suffered as time passed.
28:52It's a bit like the before and after shots
28:55of a famous actor who's had plastic surgery.
28:57Samarkand has certainly had some work done.
29:02It's the most impressive feat of restoration I've ever seen,
29:06but have they gone too far?
29:08How would it be, for instance,
29:09if the Italian government had decided
29:11to completely reconstruct the Roman Colosseum?
29:15But then, how would it be
29:16if visitors were denied this spectacle?
29:19Timur's tomb, the Gur-Emir,
29:28is about ten minutes' walk from the Registan.
29:31It, too, had suffered from neglect and earthquakes.
29:34It, too, has been almost completely restored.
29:39Timur died in February of 1405.
29:42He'd been laying plans to invade China at the time,
29:45but he caught a cold, which turned into a fever, and killed him.
29:50According to the histories,
29:52the army he had amassed for the China campaign
29:54numbered some 200,000 men.
29:58But they were disbanded,
29:59and Timur was brought back here to Samarkand for burial.
30:03Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky China,
30:08saved from the scourge of God by a passing virus.
30:11Almost as soon as he died,
30:22his empire began to crumble.
30:24Like his buildings,
30:26it had only existed because of Timur himself.
30:29He was the mortar between every brick,
30:32and now he was gone.
30:35Officially, Timur lies beneath this chunk of black jade,
30:38once the largest piece of this rare mineral
30:41to be found anywhere on Earth.
30:45But he doesn't lie beneath this slab of darkness.
30:50He's in a crypt somewhere below stairs.
30:55Visitors by special appointment.
30:58Cameras not permitted.
30:59If you want easy access to the old emir,
31:05you can find it.
31:07Here.
31:10Samarkand has its own new statue of him.
31:13Tashkent showed him on a horse, conquering.
31:17This one has him on his throne, ruling.
31:20Not all of the legends surrounding Timur are ancient history.
31:24There are some stories from Soviet times.
31:30It was on the 22nd of June, 1941,
31:33that Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gorazimov
31:36opened Timur's tomb
31:38and removed his body for scientific scrutiny.
31:41It had always been said that curses would rain down
31:44on the heads of anyone who disturbed Timur's remains.
31:48And later that very day,
31:50Hitler invaded Russia.
31:52Spooky.
31:53If you believe in curses.
31:58It was Gorazimov who made the facial reconstruction,
32:02a sketch of which we saw earlier.
32:05I'm not sure that these new statues referred to it that much.
32:09I think they paid more attention to snaps of Sean Connery.
32:13Still works, though.
32:15Young Uzbeks come here to pay their respects
32:17and stand on his boot.
32:19I'm turning my back on Timur.
32:25I've heard that here in the heart of Samarkand
32:28is some trace of the art and culture
32:30that I couldn't find in the remote valley of the Yagnob,
32:33the last traces of the Sogdians.
32:35Before Timur, there was Genghis Khan and it was Genghis who came here in 1220 to sweep away the city of Afrosyab.
32:46He did a pretty thorough job, as you can see.
32:50The city is somewhere underneath these gentle green hillocks and hummocks.
32:55It was incomparably older than Timur's Samarkand.
32:59And unlike Timur's buildings, it's been largely left to die in peace.
33:04Except in one corner of the site, where the Soviets built a small section of mudbrick wall
33:10to give visitors some idea of what this city was like, or how it was defended.
33:17Here was the capital city of Sogdiana,
33:19the very heart of that trading network that stretched all the way from the Mediterranean to China.
33:24It was almost 2,000 years old when Genghis Khan destroyed it.
33:29And for 400 years before he arrived,
33:32it had been occupied by the previous wave of Silk Road conquerors, the Arabs.
33:36And, of course, Alexander the Great had been here when the city was young, conquering it.
33:45On the Silk Road, you find yourself wondering if the cities got tired of all of this.
33:49You can almost hear the stones, or the mudbricks, sighing gently.
33:55Here we go again.
33:57Here comes another conqueror.
34:00The ruins of Afrosyab were discovered in the 1960s,
34:04covered in rubble and dust and sand and centuries.
34:14In the nearby museum, built during Soviet times,
34:18the most precious finds are preserved.
34:21Seventh-century paintings made by the Sogdians.
34:25And precious is most definitely the word.
34:29These delicate survivors are absolutely ravishing.
34:38Pale, fragmented phantoms of extraordinary delicacy.
34:43And vigour.
34:49Those swans look angry.
34:53But most of what we see on these walls is a variety of visitors to the Sogdian court.
34:59It's the Sogdians working the room.
35:01And that's what's rather wonderful about these murals.
35:04It's not just that they were drawn by ancestors of the Yagnobi,
35:08who we met all those miles ago in their lost valley.
35:12It's that what we see here is the Sogdians just going about their business,
35:17doing what they always did before the nature of the Silk Road washed them away.
35:22In the Yagnob Valley, the people survive.
35:28Here is what they've lost, the art of being Sogdian.
35:33And it feels familiar.
35:36Here, once again, is art in the service of the state,
35:40celebrating Sogdian virtues,
35:43trade, deals, connections, alliances.
35:46Who knows who these silhouettes may once have been?
35:59These people traded the entire Silk Road from east to west.
36:04These people came to stand for trade itself.
36:12Here, it's been speculated, is the Sogdian king.
36:16In fabulously decorated robes,
36:19waiting to greet some very important visitors.
36:31And here we have some Chinese traders,
36:34carrying bales of silk,
36:36and very faint, but also unmistakably,
36:39silk cocoons.
36:42Silk, the very reason that I'm here,
36:44the very stuff on which this Silk Road was made.
36:50It's oddly pleasing.
36:52It's like seeing an old friend.
36:55And there's another old friend I want to visit,
36:57an essential ingredient in the music,
36:59not just of the Silk Road and Central Asia,
37:02but of Europe.
37:03In one small corner of the Registan,
37:07there's a little music shop,
37:08owned and run by Master Babur.
37:12He has a lot of instruments to show me,
37:14but one looks particularly familiar.
37:17What about this one in the corner?
37:19In the corner,
37:20this is also one of the very ancient musical instruments,
37:24which we call it oud.
37:26It looks a bit like a lute to me.
37:27Yes, exactly the same musical instrument.
37:30OK, I will show you from oud also a little music.
37:38No one is quite sure exactly when the Arab oud
37:41was first absorbed into European culture.
37:44It's been suggested that this happened
37:46as early as the 8th century.
37:48The oud became our lute,
37:51an instrument that remained central to European music
37:53until the 1800s.
38:08It's the sound of history right there.
38:09Sound of history, sound of ages,
38:12sound of Silk Road.
38:15Can I have a go?
38:16Of course, of course.
38:18You can, you can, you can, you can fly.
38:22Yes, of course, usually it's played sitting.
38:24Yeah.
38:26You can fly.
38:34I'm used to playing the guitar,
38:36and I play it very well,
38:37but the oud is a challenge to say the least.
38:40This one, it has no frets.
38:42It's quite, it's quite difficult to play, isn't it?
38:45Yes, of course.
38:45Thank you very much.
38:46Thank you very much.
38:49The origin of the lute has long been acknowledged,
38:52but in the next city,
38:53I'll be discovering debts we've owed to the Silk Road
38:56for more than a thousand years
38:58and done our best to deny.
39:01Five hours' drive west of Samarkand
39:03lies Bukhara,
39:05a treasure house of the mind.
39:06Bukhara sat at one of the crossroads,
39:14the interchanges in the Silk Road.
39:17Trade goods could arrive here
39:18and depart in almost any direction.
39:21The deals were done in domes like these, trading domes.
39:31For hundreds of years, the money changed hands here.
39:36And where they still stand, of course,
39:38these domes are perfect tourist traps.
39:41It's position and its wealth made Bukhara attractive.
39:51An essential stop on any conqueror's tour through Central Asia.
39:55They all came here.
39:58Bukhara was conquered even more than most.
40:00In 1220, Genghis Khan,
40:08before reducing most of this city to a smouldering ruin,
40:11told the citizens of Bukhara
40:13that they must have been very great sinners indeed
40:16for God to have sent him as their punishment.
40:20But these huge walls, built around 850,
40:23were simply too big to destroy.
40:25There's been a fortress on this site for about 2,000 years.
40:30This is the Ark of Bukhara.
40:38And its massive walls were here to defend
40:40not just the people of the city,
40:43but also one of the greatest libraries
40:45the world has ever seen.
40:48It's a monument to the thirst for human knowledge
40:51and to an Islamic golden age
40:54when many of the world's greatest thinkers
40:56were to be found here
40:58or in other Silk Road cities
41:00ranging all the way to Baghdad.
41:09In the 9th century,
41:11Bukhara bloomed into an intellectual powerhouse.
41:15By then, Europe had squandered
41:17most of Rome's sophistication
41:18and the text of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle had been lost.
41:27But not here.
41:29On the Silk Road,
41:30Islamic philosophers preserved and translated the works of Aristotle
41:34and they interpreted them too.
41:36So, when the Christian West eventually rediscovered these ancient ideas,
41:41it was on Arab translations that they depended.
41:44One of those philosophers became particularly famous.
41:47His name was Ibn Sina,
41:49known in the West as Avicina.
41:51And in the 11th century,
41:53Bukhara was his hometown.
41:54Ibn Sina's preservation of Aristotle is only the tip of an iceberg.
42:07The thinkers of the Silk Road were very deep
42:10and at the core of their thought,
42:12absolutely central to it,
42:14was mathematics.
42:15It's a part of their art.
42:18In Islam, figurative imagery was frowned upon
42:21and so the decorations of buildings of any sort
42:24were framed around geometric patterns,
42:27repetitions,
42:28tessellations.
42:31Maths and geometry are everywhere.
42:37It's time to go back to Maktab.
42:41School.
42:42Where Uzbek children are taught
42:44to remember their forefathers
42:45and their massively significant ideas.
42:49It's the bread and butter of Uzbek education.
42:51It's the bread and butter of Uzbek education.
42:51The bread and butter of Uzbek education.
42:59Myителis will be extrovert,
43:01bad dilemmals.
43:01But unfortunately,
43:03my soniała OFFICER was put behind the disabilities of the project.
43:06The great usuario of Uzbek education are
43:09greatest Due弟elget COVID-19 in science.
43:11It's not possible by the humanston and basics of the process.
43:13There's a few sag tygeon,
43:14what occur would you take?
43:15A smart thing,
43:16how do you care about your Tracy?
43:17In your χ.
43:18In your place?
43:18What kind of states do,
43:19some ideas?
43:19Your ideas?
43:21What may he be known?
43:24I don't know.
43:25I don't know.
43:26It was here on the Silk Road that mathematics matured
43:56into a system that we've depended on ever since.
44:01It was in the 12th century that al-Khwarizmi's work reached Europe as a Latin translation.
44:08That translation used his name as its title, Al-Gharithmi.
44:14This wave of translations from Arabic led in Europe to what we now call the 12th century
44:19Renaissance, a movement of ideas without which the Renaissance proper could never have happened.
44:26But once you realise just how much of this was entirely new to Europeans, it becomes clear
44:34that the very word Renaissance or rebirth is more than a little dishonest, because we weren't
44:40rediscovering our own ideas, we were discovering someone else's.
44:45And what we would learn from these Islamic philosophers was a great deal more than algebra and algorithms.
44:54Astronomy matured here, and it was here that it was demonstrated that the Earth revolves
44:59around the sun, and spins on its own axis.
45:03as much as any other decoration here, carpets depend on the mathematics of repetition.
45:24So, they're very beautiful, and of course, they're made of silk.
45:37This kind of carpet, which we always think of as Turkish, belongs to the Silk Road history
45:42you can reduce to clichés, cartoons, kids' stories.
45:47It's like a magic carpet for Aladdin.
45:53It's exactly what we expect to find along the Silk Road.
45:58The Turkish carpet is hard to completely steal.
46:02Even the woollen rugs we copied from this, which spread across British floors in the 19th century,
46:07always had something slightly foreign about them.
46:12But the ideas that grew here were a different matter.
46:16Those could easily be taken and disguised as ours.
46:24A thousand, a million tiny thefts and small dishonesties, or even simply the idea of a renaissance,
46:31of a rebirth, add up to a rejection, a silencing of the idea that the modern West could owe anything
46:39to Islamic culture.
46:41In a Silk Road history that's absurdly rich with myths, that, perhaps, is the greatest myth of them all.
46:53Al Khwarezmi's birthplace lies ten hours' drive to the west, in the city of Kiva.
46:59I'm leaving Sogdiana far behind and entering another ancient kingdom.
47:04Al Khwarezmi, which gave Al Khwarezmi his name, had a great deal in common with Sogdiana.
47:16These people were descended from Iranian colonists.
47:19The language they spoke was similar to Sogdian.
47:26Kiva is only a few miles from the border with Turkmenistan.
47:33And these hats belong to the old nomadic culture of the Turkmen.
47:37They're called Tilpac hats.
47:42And nowadays, people of Turkmen origin can be found in Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and here.
47:55Once more, those Soviet borders just seem absurd.
47:59And the absurdity is only underlined when I sit down for lunch with my guide, Utkir.
48:07Everything I'm about to eat is certainly Uzbek, but I've been eating it since I was back in China.
48:14A menu that hardly varies across a lot more than a thousand miles of Central Asia.
48:20In this oven made from mud and straw, they're baking flatbreads, naan breads.
48:27In the kitchen, pasta dumplings.
48:31And, of course, noodles.
48:35While we're waiting for the food, Utkir is cruel to the naan breads.
48:41What have we got here?
48:43This is manti.
48:44And that's a sort of dumpling.
48:46They cook with squash and with meat.
48:48OK.
48:49Meat candy beef.
48:50And we've got some noodles.
48:52This is a noodle.
48:53It's related with China.
48:56Well, let's try some.
48:57Shall we start with some?
48:58Actually, we eat with hands.
49:00We eat with hands, OK.
49:01Yes.
49:05Oh, wow.
49:06It's a little bomb of flavour.
49:12Lovely.
49:13Very sweet.
49:14And this is so remarkable in its design as well.
49:20It looks Chinese to me.
49:22No, this is traditional in Uzbek.
49:29Mmm.
49:31Delicious.
49:32Freshly made noodles.
49:34I think I need a bit of that lovely looking bread with this.
49:37And it's got these extraordinary patterns on.
49:41It can be even the family pattern.
49:43Can it?
49:44They decorate everything in Uzbekistan, even the bread.
49:47The food is remarkably tasty.
49:49I don't know whether it was invented here or arrived here from Italy
49:53or came here from China.
49:55Nobody does.
49:56Once again, I'm reminded.
49:58The Silk Road is a massive melting pot.
50:01And I'm in the very middle.
50:02Kiva exists to serve and preserve the past.
50:14And one of its mosques, the Juma Mosque, is now a museum in which more than a millennium
50:19of cultural change is wonderfully preserved.
50:23It contains an extraordinary display of one of the things Kiva has become famous for.
50:30The carving of wood, particularly wooden pillars.
50:35It's an extraordinarily peaceful place.
50:39And in some ways, it seems a shame to talk in it.
50:43But needs must.
50:45The pillars are all very beautiful.
50:47And they have similar designs, but they're also all noticeably different.
50:52Why is that?
51:14So that's fascinating, we have a combination of a celebration of the natural world.
51:44With a celebration of human knowledge and science.
52:08So the spirit of Al-Khwarizmi's wonderful mind broods over these pillars.
52:14They're expressions of Khwarezm's cultural and religious history.
52:18The oldest pillar here is a thousand years old.
52:22But the floral style has roots that are older still.
52:25It reaches back to the religion that Islam slowly supplanted here.
52:30Zoroastrianism.
52:31And of course, it's not just ancient history.
52:42Shavkat Jumanayazov's workshop is about 100 yards from the Juman Mosque.
52:47With his brother and their apprentices, they still carve in the same style.
52:51Although these days, the customer is more likely to be a local hotel or restaurant.
52:55It's a delight to watch them.
53:04I'm surprised by the confident, detailed violence with which they work.
53:12For the journal, I want something more than just a photo.
53:15Shavkat offers to draw us a part of the design for his pillar carving.
53:22Kindly, he tells us the pattern's name.
53:24I've no idea what it means, and I don't want to know.
53:37I love the mystery.
53:39It's one of the pages in the journal that pleases me most.
53:41Paging back through the last several hundred miles,
53:48I'm struck by the number of times I see ghosts.
53:51Or perhaps survivors is a better word.
53:54On the Silk Road, nothing ever entirely dies.
53:58There are still Sogdians, hiding as simple farmers in a remote valley.
54:03The Soviet buses are gone, but the bus stops still stand.
54:07And even Timur isn't dead and buried.
54:09He's hard at work, on horseback, on the throne, and on the money.
54:16Everything looks old, but is actually new.
54:20And in a village outside Kiva, there's a workshop I can visit
54:36where history is remade on a daily basis.
54:42It's not just that old cognac and vodka bottles
54:44can have a new life here, as ingredients in the glaze.
54:48It's the fact that it's only since independence
54:51that this workshop and its master, Alonazar Sadulayev,
54:55have returned to the traditional styles
54:57that were once the basic ingredients of Timurid decoration.
55:00of course.
55:00There's no other thing.
55:01Of course.
55:02Now, I will work in a way that we will work
55:04with a few of our ancestors,
55:07and we will work in a way that the grandparents
55:10and the sisters and the sisters
55:12are going to go to their lives.
55:13And, secondly, the nation is
55:17at this level of power.
55:19We are not going to work with them,
55:20but we don't work with our grandparents.
55:22We have to do our work.
55:24We have to do our technology.
55:26We have to do our work.
55:29We have to do our work.
55:32What is the connection between the tile makers of Kiva and Timur?
55:37My father and my father were in the house of Kiva.
55:43We were in the house of Kiva.
55:46We were in the house of Kiva.
55:49We were in the house of Kiva.
55:53We were in the house of Kiva.
55:55We were in the house of Kiva.
55:57We were in the house of Kiva.
55:59We were in the house of Kiva.
56:03We were in the house of Kiva.
56:08Several hundred years ago,
56:10Timur put people from this province, Korezm,
56:13to work on his palaces, mosques and minarets
56:16and all the stately places in his capital of Samarkand.
56:20One small irony, however.
56:24He didn't like living inside.
56:26He was descended from Mongols,
56:28at least in part from nomads.
56:30The buildings were all for show,
56:32to impress the foreign idiots who kept coming,
56:35wringing their hands, suing for peace,
56:37who needed above all to be impressed and terrified by the scourge of God.
56:42Timur preferred to live in the city's extensive gardens.
56:46In tents.
56:51Every political regime in history
56:53has used art and architecture to project its power.
56:56Timur did it.
56:57Uzbekistan's current rulers are doing it too.
57:00And that's what this part of my trip along the Silk Road
57:03in Central Asia has made clear to me.
57:06So these tiles are for tourists and citizens too.
57:10They come with a message baked in beneath the glaze.
57:13It says, be proud of our history.
57:16Visitors, be impressed when you see tiles like these
57:20by the thousands on the walls of the Registan,
57:23or in your hotel, carefully reassembled to surround a fireplace.
57:28Try not to think of our Soviet past,
57:31which we too are trying to forget.
57:34And don't waste too much time waiting here,
57:37because there are no Soviet buses anymore.
57:45Next time I'm heading to Iran,
57:47a country whose rich Persian past is filled with fascinating characters,
57:51and where the culture and art of the empires they've built
57:55spread to every part of the Silk Road.
58:00From Iran, I'll travel to the cities
58:02at the western end of the Silk Road,
58:04and I'll discover that many of their great palaces,
58:07buildings and churches were inspired by the East,
58:11paid for and made possible by the Silk Road.
58:16And I'll see you next time.
58:17See you next time.
58:18See you next time.
58:19See you next time.
58:20Bye.
58:46Bye.
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