I used to think museum basements were just storage spaces for broken pottery.
Then I spent an afternoon in the Afrosiyob Museum’s collection rooms in Samarkand, watching a conservator piece together fragments of a 7th-century wall painting—one that depicted a Chinese emperor’s envoy alongside Sogdian merchants, their robes still showing traces of lapis lazuli blue and malachite green. The painting had been excavated from the ancient city mound just outside, a site that’s been continuously inhabited since roughly 500 BCE, give or take a century depending on which archaeologist you ask. What struck me wasn’t just the artistry, though that was breathtaking. It was the realization that these finds—thousands of ceramic shards, coins, ossuaries, and yes, those stunning murals—were rewriting what we thought we knew about Silk Road exchange. The Sogdians, it turns out, weren’t just middlemen shuttling goods between empires. They were cultural translators, religious innovators, and according to recent DNA analysis of skeletal remains found in Afrosiyob’s necropolis, surprisingly genetically diverse for a population we’d long assumed was ethnically homogenous. I guess that’s what happens when your city sits at the crossroads of everyone’s ambitions for two thousand years.
The Frescoes That Definately Changed Everything About Pre-Islamic Central Asia
Here’s the thing about the Afrosiyob murals discovered in 1965: they shouldn’t exist. Samarkand was thoroughly Islamicized by the 8th century, and religious prohibition should have meant total destruction of figurative art from earlier periods. Yet there they were, preserved under centuries of collapsed mud-brick in what archaeologists identified as a reception hall—probably belonging to a Sogdian king named Varkhuman, though the attribution gets messier the deeper you dig into the scholarship.
The paintings show four walls, four different embassies or processions. Chinese. Indian. Persian. Turkic nomads riding horses with elaborate saddles that metallurgists have matched to archaeological finds from the Eurasian steppe. What gets me—what still gives me chills when I look at the recreations in the museum’s main gallery—is the clothing detail. You can see textile patterns that match fragments found three thousand miles away in Tang Dynasty tombs. You can identify specific religious symbols: Zoroastrian fire altars, Buddhist lotus motifs, possibly early Christian crosses, all coexisting in one room. Wait—maybe coexisting is the wrong word. Competing? Collaborating? The archaeologists I’ve interviewed can’t agree, and honestly, I’m not sure the distinction mattered to the Sogdians themselves. They seemed more interested in the transactional possibilities of cosmopolitanism than in theological purity.
The museum holds over 22,000 artifacts from the site, though only a fraction are displayed at any given time.
Some of my favorite pieces are the ones nobody photographs: the everyday stuff that doesn’t make it onto travel blogs. Ceramic oil lamps with soot still visible on the spouts. Gaming pieces made from sheep knucklebones—almost identical to ones my grandmother described playing with in a completely different context, centuries later, continents away. Bronze mirrors inscribed with what linguists have identified as early Sogdian script, a language that’s now extinct but served as a lingua franca across much of the Silk Road until Arabic replaced it. The mirrors were Chinese in style, Sogdian in inscription, and found in a burial context that included Persian textiles. One object, three empires, and you start to understand why untangling Afrosiyob’s material culture gives archaeologists migraines.
What Bones and Trash Heaps Reveal About a City That Kept Reinventing Itself
The bioarchaeology is where things get weird and wonderful. Anyway, excavations in the residential quarters—areas the early Soviet archaeologists mostly ignored in favor of palaces and temples—have turned up dietary evidence that challenges previous assumptions about trade versus local production. Isotope analysis of human teeth suggests that while elites were consuming imported grains and possibly wine from considerable distances, most of the population ate locally grown millet and kept sheep. Not exactly the cosmopolitan diet you’d expect from a major Silk Road hub, right?
But then you look at the trash middens—and I mean really look, the way zooarchaeologists do, counting fish bones and identifying butchery patterns—and a different picture emerges. The lower-class neighborhoods show sudden increases in exotic food remains during certain periods, correlating with historical records of major diplomatic exchanges or military alliances. It’s almost like the city’s economic benefits trickled down in pulses, in moments, rather than maintaining constant inequality. Or maybe the elites just threw better parties and the scraps made it to the poor quarters. The evidence permits both interpretations, which drives the researchers slightly crazy but makes the past feel more human to me.
There’s a small gallery in the museum dedicated to everyday technologies—irrigation tools, metallurgical equipment, textile production implements—that barely gets visitors. I spent an hour there once, sketching a particularly elegant bronze awl, thinking about the hands that made it, used it, lost it. Turns out, that’s what museums like Afrosiyob really preserve: not just objects, but the messy, complicated record of people trying to make sense of their rapidly changing world. Sounds familiar, I guess.
