According to some estimates, Merv was the biggest city in the world in AD1200, with a population of more than half a million people, says an article in the Guardian.
In its 12th-century pomp, Merv straddled the prosperous trade routes of the Silk Road. It was the capital of the Seljuk sultanate that extended from central Asia to the Mediterranean. Once the world’s biggest city, the Silk Road metropolis of Merv in modern Turkmenistan was destroyed by Mongols in AD1221. It never fully recovered.
When George Curzon (the future viceroy of India) visited the ruined city of Merv in 1888, the vision of its decay overwhelmed him. “In the midst of an absolute wilderness of crumbling brick and clay,” he wrote, “the spectacle of walls, towers, ramparts, and domes, stretching in bewildering confusion to the horizon, reminds us that we are in the center of bygone greatness.”
A trader arriving from Bukhara to the northeast or from Nishapur to the southwest would once have been relieved at the sight of Merv. Crisscrossed by canals and bridges, full of gardens and orchards, medieval Merv and its surrounding oasis were green and richly cultivated, a welcome reprieve from the bleakness of the Karakum desert.
The city’s enclosing walls ran in an oblong circuit of five miles, interrupted by strong towers and four main gates. Its streets were mostly narrow and winding, crowded with closely built houses and occasional larger structures: mosques, schools, libraries, and bathhouses.
“For its cleanliness, its good streets, the divisions of its buildings and quarters among the rivers … their city [Merv] is superior to the rest of the cities of Khurasan,” wrote the 10th-century Persian geographer and traveler al-Istakhri. “Its markets are good.”
Reaching Merv, the visiting trader might lead his pack animals into the open courtyard of a two-story caravanserai (an inn with a courtyard for travelers), where he would jostle for space with other merchants from as far as India, Iraq, and western China.
Or he could go straight to one of Merv’s large markets, convened outside the gates of the town or sometimes near its major mosques. The smoke of potters’ kilns and steel-making furnaces (Merv was famous for its crucible steel) would have hung over the surrounding industrial suburbs.
If the trader was feeling hot, he might step inside the icehouse on the city outskirts; a tall conical building where residents accumulated snow during the winter and which they used like a vast mud-brick fridge.
Built in AD1157 to honor the long-ruling Seljuk sultan, the mausoleum was a large, square-shaped building rung with fine arches, capped by a dome sheathed in turquoise-glazed tile. The dome was so intensely blue that according to the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, who visited Merv in the 13th century, “It could be seen from a day’s journey away.”
Du Huan, a Chinese soldier who lived in captivity in Merv for a decade in the eighth century AD, described the fertility of the oasis: “A big river … flows into its territory, where it divides into several hundred canals irrigating the whole area. Villages and fences touch each other and everywhere there are trees.”
Over the centuries, Merv’s inhabitants built and maintained a series of dams and dykes on the Murghab river and a network of canals and reservoirs to ensure the supply of water to the city. The position of mir-ab, or water bailiff, was an important post in Merv: according to contemporary medieval accounts, he had a force of 10,000 workmen under his command, including a team of 300 divers who routinely patched up the dykes with timber.
Merv was famous for its exports, especially its textiles. “From this country is derived much silk as well as cotton of a superior quality under the name of Merv cotton, which is extremely soft,” noted the 12th-century Arab geographer al-Idrisi. Robes and turbans made from Merv cloth were popular around the Islamic world.
So too were Merv’s much-loved melons. “The fruits of Merv are finer than those of any other place,” wrote Ibn Hawqal, a 10th-century Arab chronicler, “and in no other city are to be seen such palaces and groves, and gardens and streams.” Merv had such a strong reputation for commerce and the pursuit of wealth that the 14th-century Egyptian scribe al-Nuwayri described the city’s chief characteristic as “miserliness”.
It produced notable poets, mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, musicians, and physicists. The polymath Umar Khayyam is known to have spent several years working at the astronomical observatory in Merv. “Of all the countries of Iran,” al-Istakhri wrote of Merv, “these people were noted for their talents and education.” Yaqut al-Hamawi counted at least 10 significant libraries in the city, including one attached to a major mosque that contained 12,000 volumes.
In 1888, Curzon saw only desolation: “Very decrepit and sorrowful looked those wasting walls of sun-dried clay, these broken arches and tottering towers; but there is magnificence in their very extent and a voice in the sorrowful squalor of their ruin.”
Credits: Eziz Boyarov, Ashgabat
Comments (0)