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Epilogue: Legends of Samarkand
The best on this long road comes last.
The stories. Oh the stories
Like the ones we began with; of Bibi and her Persian lover; of Tamurlane and his warning about Hitler. . .
Memories and Mysteries in the Sand
IT IS SELDOM REMEMBERED that the stories of the Arabian nights began in Samarkand. The legend runs thus: Once upon a time there were two wise, just and popular kings who together ruled the Asian world from China to Persia. Their names were King Shahiyar of the main kingdom, and his younger brother, King Shah-Zeman, of Samarkand.
The elder king despatched his vizier, with gifts of horses adorned with gold and priceless jewels, and male white slaves and beautiful virgins, and sent him through "the deserts and wastes" to Samarkand to beseech the younger king to travel East for a brotherly reunion.
Shah-Zeman accepted the invitation and set out for his brother's dominions. At midnight, however, he remembered he had left in his palace a costly gift suitable to his brother's dignity. So he went back - only to behold his wife sleeping in his bed with a male negro slave who had fallen asleep beside her. Shah-Zeman was possessed with rage, and said to himself:
"If this is the case when I have hardly departed from Samarkand, what will be the conduct of this vile woman while I am sojourning with my brother?"
So he drew his sword and slew them both. Then he resumed his journey.
But, even across a continent, his anger and his excessive grief remained, so that he began to waste away, unable to enjoy his brother's hospitality or increasingly urgent entertainments. He remained in his room while his brother and his court went hunting. During the king's absence, Shah-Zeman observed from his window, the queen going forth with twenty women and twenty slaves. And he saw the queen, of breathtaking beauty, disrobe herself and embrace one of the slaves.
And all her retinue did likewise, and they revelled together the entire day. When Shah-Zeman beheld this orgy he said to himself, "By Allah, my affliction is lighter than my brothers", and it eased him of his personal grief and allowed him to eat and drink again.
On his return, King Shahiyar observed his brother's recovery, and was told the cause of his improving dispostion. The host immediately set up another hunting expedition, but returned early from the chase to spy on his wife - and he saw what his brother had seen. Shahiyar ordered that his wife be beheaded, together with her entire retinue of female attendants and slaves. And henceforth it was his custom to take only virgins to his bed, and to kill them in the morning.
Candidates for his couch fled the kingdom, and the brothers were running out of virgins when Shahrazad, to save the head of her father the procurer, volunteered her services. She brought her younger sister with her, instructing her to ask for a story in the night. And so the tales began; the end of each being held over for another night. Shahrazad had prepared herself with 'a thousand books of histories, relating to preceding generations and kings, and the works of poets' from which she weaved her legends and fables. Her tales - and no doubt her body language - so fascinated the king that he kept postponing his execution schedule. Whether he believed all that stuff about magic carpets and mythical beasts and genii and the rest is not known. Sherhazad's stories are not as credible, say, as a Reader's Digest history of the United States of America, but like all good stories they do have a sound cultural and historical basis.
Even if they didn't, Samarkand was a city that could never escape for long its own romantic - and gruesome - reality.
Sixteen hundred years before Tamerlane the Terrible, and fifteen hundred years before Shah-Zeman and Sherhazad, Alexander the Great destroyed the ancient city in a fit of grief and rage. He had been staying there quite happily, preparing for the next stage of a world-conquering trip, when, over wine one night, he fell into an argument with his best friend.
The Great Alexander, Conqueror of Persia, believed that he was a Greek god. His best friend demurred. Alexander was so outraged at his friend's disbelief that he stabbed him to death. Then, in sorrow and regret for what he had done, Alexander razed the city.
Of course, when you live by a river between two vast deserts, there is hardly any other place to go, even when your home has been burnt down. And when your livelihood depends on the trade of a major station on the China-to-Europe Silk Route, you'd be foolish to move. So the good citizens rebuilt Samarkand and its Chinese-Persian markets, and settled down once again. They were over-run once a century, or so, and they re-built the city each time.
But megalomania returned to Samarkand when Genghis Khan arrived with his horsemen, commanding them to "slit open the wombs of women and kill the unborn babies. Kill everybody." He savaged the ancient city so badly it would probably have died, as Khiva did generations later. But along came Tamerlane, the awesome Khan's descendant, to plunder the world in order to rebuild Samarkand as a monument to himself.
First he captured and enslaved architects, artists and builders wherever he could find them, from Beijing to Rome. Then he built a magnificent tent town, described in 1404 a.d. by Don Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, the ambassador of the King Henry III of Spain to the new "centre of civilisation", thus:
To house a gathering of the Great Horde, Tamerlane ordered 20 000 tents "pitched in regular streets around a Royal Camp." The Royal Camp had one tent lined entirely with ermine. One of its pavilions of silk measured a hundred paces by a hundred paces, with a circular, silk ceiling, forming a dome. The dome was supported by giant blue-and-gold tent-poles and five hundred red ropes. The silk walls were embroidered with crimson tapestry and adorned with silks of many colours, inset with pearls, emeralds and other precious stones.
There were "silken turrets with simulated battlements" so that from a distance the great tent would seem to be a castle". And the royal enclosure was surrounded by a wall of patterned silk with arched gateways and, within, ornaments on high of silver-gilt eagles.
For the Great Horde conference, Tamerlane ordered a special field filled with huge sixty-gallon jars of wine. Any wine-drinker approaching these without permission was immediately speared or knocked down with a mace. "We noticed," says Clavijo, "that many had thus been wounded for their inadvertence, and some thrown out for dead."
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The party-tent town, naturally, was long gone when we arrived too late. Five hundred and one years too late. What we saw instead, among other memorable things, was the mausoleum Tamerlane ordered built in ten days. He had left the feast of the Great Horde that October day in 1404, and gone to inspect the tomb for his favourite grandson and successor-designate who died in battle. The building wasn't to his liking, so he ordered it torn down and rebuilt - instantly. The architects and builders, fearing for their lives, somehow met the ten-day deadline. Clavijo watched the new monument rise, with its fluted turquoise dome on an octagonal temple. On either side, twin minarets, and walls within lined with alabaster and green marble.
"One of the most beautiful buildings in the world," said the Spanish Ambassador that October day so long ago. And it still is.
Tamerlane also ordered the Registran to be built as a meeting place for the world, with mosques and madrassas and palaces of culture. In fact the Registan - meaning Place of Sand - was a place where the sand soaked up the blood of countless victims whose heads were displayed on spikes. His grand edifices, all erected at enormous pace, were on a scale unheard of by mankind. For his erudite, artistic grandson, Ulug Beg, he built palaces and an astronomer's observatory which was to probe the universe and enlighten the planet - until the priests destroyed it as a blasphemy against Allah. Meanwhile, his favourite wife commissioned what was intended to be the world's most famous memorial . . where she thought Tamarlane and she might lie together after their deaths. (The plan didn't work out, which is why Tamarlane decided to find himself some other tomb)
The Preface of this Traveller's Tale told of the fate of this misunderstood wife - a Chinese beauty named Bibi, known as the Queen of Hearts. Unfortunately she incurred a serious lovebite from a handsome Persian architect who had come to Samarkand to help rebuild Samarkand. In the end the building turned out to be one of the most massive in all Asia, with a colonnaded courtyard bigger than a modern football pitch, and a main portal as high as four houses. But, as the legend told at the begin of this series makes clear, Bibi's memorial was built on tears and tragedy.
As I said at the beginning, the legends at the Centre of the World are better than the reality, and in Samarkand they still treasure these tales of romance and bloodshed.
END
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