Samanid Empire

At a glance

Where was the Samanid Empire?

At its centre lay the river oases of Transoxania: the Zarafshān valley with Bukhara and Samarqand, the Farghāna valley, and Shāsh around today's Tashkent. Beyond them began the steppe of the Turkish nomads. In about 840 Nūḥ b. Asad of Samarqand took Isfījāb north of Tashkent, whose Turkish ruler, as the Russian historian V. V. Barthold notes, sent the Samanids every year "four daniqs (less than fivepence) and a broom" instead of taxes.

After 900 the Samanids also held Khurasan south of the Oxus, with Nīshāpūr, Merv, Herat and Balkh. Further west they contested Rayy and the Caspian provinces with local dynasties and the Buyids.

The border data behind this map draws the Samanid Empire from AD 886 to 999. The dynasty is older: its first governorships date from about 819–20, and its rulers controlled Bukhara from 874. The later start is an artefact of the border data.

Who was Saman-khuda, the founder of the dynasty?

The family took its name from Sāmān-khudā, "lord of Sāmān". The History of Bukhara by Narshakhī, written in Arabic in AD 943–4 and surviving only in a later Persian version, explains that "He was called Saman Khudah because he had built a village which was called Saman … just as the amir of Bukhara (was called) Bukhar Khudah." Narshakhī tells how Sāmān-khudā "fled from Balkh and came to" the Umayyad governor of Khurasan, Asad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Qasrī, at Merv; the governor "subdued his foes and gave Balkh back to him. Saman Khudah accepted Islam from him." Asad governed Khurasan in the 720s and 730s for the Umayyad Caliphate, and Sāmān-khudā named his son Asad after him.

Where Sāmān lay is disputed. Narshakhī and Barthold place it in the province of Balkh; the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that other writers put it near Samarqand or near Termez. The British historian Luke Treadwell, in his Oxford doctoral thesis of 1991, followed an anonymous genealogy, the Nasabnāme, that places it near Tirmidh (Termez), where the French traveller Guillaume Capus found a village called Shahr-i Sāmān in the 1880s. Treadwell also argued that "it was probably the village of Saman rather than the city of Balkh that Asad restored to Samankhuda".

Some websites say that Sāmān-khudā converted to Islam from Zoroastrianism. No source consulted for this entry names his earlier religion: Narshakhī says only that he "accepted Islam". The eleventh-century historian Gardīzī placed the conversion nearly a century later, under al-Maʾmūn; Treadwell and Iranica prefer Narshakhī's dating.

Did the Samanids really descend from the Sasanian kings? That is what they claimed. Narshakhī states that "Saman Khudah was one of the children of King Bahram Chubin", a general of the Sasanian Empire who, as Barthold notes, "had fled to the Turks in 591". Gardīzī even traced the line to Gayōmarth, the first man of Iranian legend. "This affiliation of the Samanids with the Sasanians, whatever its truth, was generally accepted by contemporaries (as Bīrūnī testifies)," Iranica concludes.

Modern historians treat such pedigrees with caution. Treadwell describes the Iranian genealogies of the ninth- and tenth-century dynasties as "legitimatory charters rather than statements of physical descent", sought by Saffarids, Buyids, Ghaznavids and others alike.

Other origins have been proposed. Iranica notes that Samarqand suggests "a Sogdian background or even Turkish ancestry", while Balkh raises "the possibility of Iranian, Hephthalite or other connections"; it adds that the scholar Kamoliddin "has argued for a Buddhist-Manichean background and descent from the yabḡu Jabbā Khan". The old version of this entry said that Treadwell supported a Hephthalite theory. His thesis does not: it concludes that the Sasanian claim was widely accepted "no doubt because they fulfilled some of the common expectations of Iranian dynasts and because they were in fact of Iranian descent".

How did the Samanids come to power?

As servants of the ʿAbbasid caliph. Asad's four sons, Nūḥ, Aḥmad, Yaḥyā and Ilyās, helped al-Maʾmūn end the revolt of Rāfiʿ b. al-Layth in Samarqand. Barthold summarises the reward: "At the Caliph's desire the governor of Khurasan, Ghassan b. ʿAbbad (819-21) appointed Nuh governor of Samarqand, Ahmad governor of Farghana, Yahya governor of Shash, and Ilyas governor of Herat." Iranica dates this to about 204/819–20. Narshakhī has 202 (817–18) and gives Aḥmad Merv, which his translator Frye calls "an error".

The Samanids began, Barthold writes, "only in the capacity of rulers of Transoxania, subordinate to the governor of Khurasan", soon a member of the Tahirid family. Treadwell found that "the early Samanids paid a regular annual tribute to Baghdad from the land revenues of Transoxania", and that Nūḥ also supplied slaves to the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim every year.

Over the next decades the branches merged. Nūḥ died in AD 841–2 and Yaḥyā in 855; the Herat line, Iranica writes, "came to an end" after the Saffarids took Nīshāpūr in 873. Aḥmad b. Asad, who died in 864, became the ancestor of all later Samanid rulers. His son Naṣr ruled Samarqand as head of the family and in 875 received, in Barthold's words, "a diploma from the Caliph Muʿtamid granting him the administration of the whole of Transoxania".

How did Ismail Samani rise to power?

Through Bukhara. In 874 the city was in chaos after a raid from Khwārazm, and, according to Narshakhī, a respected scholar asked Naṣr to send a governor. Naṣr sent his younger brother Ismāʿīl, born in AD 849 (234 AH) according to Iranica, who entered Bukhara in Ramaḍān 260, which Narshakhī's translator dates to about 1 July 874. He broke the power of the old Bukharan nobility.

The brothers soon quarrelled over money. Narshakhī records that "Nasr ibn Ahmad had stipulated from Ismail 500,000 dirhams a year of the income of Bukhara", which Ismāʿīl stopped paying. Naṣr marched on Bukhara in December 885, and after a truce he was defeated near Wazbdīn in AD 888. Narshakhī's date, 26 October 888 in his translator's conversion, fell on a Friday, not the Tuesday he names, so Barthold says only "autumn of 888".

In Narshakhī's account, Ismāʿīl then "descended from his horse and kissed his (Naṣr's) stirrup", sent his brother back to Samarqand, and said: "(Between) a slave and his master no other arrangement is possible." Naṣr stayed nominal head of the dynasty until his death in August 892, when he named Ismāʿīl his successor.

As sole amir from AD 892 to 907, Ismāʿīl turned a family of governors into a monarchy. In 893 he led a campaign to Talas (Ṭarāz) in the steppe. Narshakhī says that there "a large church was transformed into a grand mosque, and the khutba was read in the name of the Commander of the Faithful". The chronicler al-Ṭabarī heard in Baghdad that Ismāʿīl had "captured their king and his wife Khatun as well as about ten thousand people". Iranica calls the church Nestorian, a detail not in Narshakhī.

Ismāʿīl also ended the rule of the Afshīns, the local dynasty of Ushrusana in the middle Syr Darya valley. Barthold cites coins of the last Afshīn struck in 279 AH and a coin of Ismāʿīl from Ushrusana struck in 280 AH, which places the annexation in AD 893, not in 892 as the old version of this entry said.

He made Bukhara the capital. Narshakhī writes that "in his time Bukhara became the seat of government. After him all of the amirs of the house of Saman held court in Bukhara." Narshakhī also preserves his most quoted saying, about the oasis walls he let fall into ruin: "While I live, I am the wall of the district of Bukhara."

How did Ismail defeat the Saffarids?

By winning a war that Baghdad had officially forbidden. The Saffarid dynasty of Sīstān had conquered Khurasan, and its ruler ʿAmr b. al-Layth wanted Transoxania too. In February 898, Barthold records, the caliph read out a decree "deposing Ismāʿīl and appointing ʿAmr as Viceroy of Transoxania". ʿAmr boasted, in Ṭabarī's account: "If I wanted to dam the Oxus with money bags and cross it, I would do it."

Ismāʿīl struck first. Ṭabarī says that he "gathered his men and the small landowners and village chiefs and crossed the river". In the autumn of AD 899, according to Barthold, ʿAmr's chief commander was defeated and killed. In the spring of 900 the two armies met near Balkh. Ṭabarī reports that ʿAmr took a shortcut through a swamp: "His horse became mired in it and fell down", and Ismāʿīl's men captured him. The day is disputed: the news reached Baghdad on 28 May 900, according to Barthold, and Iranica dates the battle "probably in Rabīʿ I 287/March 900".

ʿAmr was sent to Baghdad, which he reached on 23 April 901, according to Ṭabarī, and died in prison. The caliph invested Ismāʿīl with Khurasan. In 900 his commander also defeated the Zaydī ruler of Ṭabaristān, Muḥammad b. Zayd; the Caspian Zaydi Alid dynasties remained rivals in the west.

A more famous version comes from the Siyāsat-nāma, a book of government by the Seljuk vizier Niẓām al-Mulk, composed around 1091. It has ʿAmr's "70,000 horsemen" flee "without one man being wounded", leaving ʿAmr alone to be captured. Ṭabarī, much closer to the events, describes a real campaign.

Ismāʿīl died in November 907. His later reputation as the ideal just ruler owes much to Niẓām al-Mulk, who, as Frye retells it, wrote that it was Ismāʿīl's custom "to go alone on his horse to the central square of Bukhara, even when it was snowing and cold", and to stay until midday prayer so that the needy could reach him. Treadwell calls this an "idealized picture".

Were the Samanids then independent of the caliph? In practice yes, in form no. They named the ʿAbbasid caliph in the Friday sermon (khuṭba) and on their coins, and claimed no title higher than amīr. But Iranica notes that "There is no evidence that he ever forwarded regular tribute or taxation to Baghdad", only presents. Barthold concluded that "within their own territories they were undoubtedly independent rulers".

The war against ʿAmr defied the caliph's declared will, though Barthold thought it "quite possible" that Baghdad secretly encouraged Ismāʿīl. Formal loyalty lasted to the end: when Maḥmūd of Ghazna took Khurasan in AD 999, Iranica records, he recognised the new caliph al-Qādir in the khuṭba, "where the Samanids had continued to acknowledge his predecessor al-Ṭāʾeʿ".

Who ruled the Samanid Empire?

Nine amirs ruled from Bukhara between 892 and 999, after the governors of the founding generation. The chroniclers often differ on their dates by days, months or even a year.

Numbering varies between reference works: some count Aḥmad b. Asad as Aḥmad I and Ismāʿīl's son as Aḥmad II, and Iranica itself numbers Naṣr b. Aḥmad differently in different articles. A boy called Naṣr b. ʿAbd al-Malik was raised to the throne in AD 961 by the general Alptigin, but his rule, as Barthold notes, "lasted only one day".

Why was Ahmad ibn Ismail murdered?

Ismāʿīl's son Aḥmad reigned for only seven years. In January 914, while camped at Farabr on the Oxus, he was killed in his tent by his own Turkish slave soldiers (ghilmān). Hearing that Ṭabaristān was lost, Aḥmad prayed: "Great God, if this kingdom is to fall away from me, give me death." He had "a lion which was fastened by a chain at the door" of his sleeping quarters, but that night his servants "forgot to bring the lion", and "a group of the amir's slaves entered (the tent) and cut off his head". Ṭabarī's version is shorter: "the most intimate of his Turkish pages" and two others "entered Ahmad's tent and murdered him. Then they fled and were never caught."

The motive is uncertain. Barthold noted that in Aḥmad's reign "Arabic was again made the language of official documents (probably not for long)", and suggested that his favour towards Arabic-educated officials angered the guards. Treadwell, using the chronicle of Ibn Ẓāfir, found a different plot: a secretary accused of bribery recruited the killers, "the master of the wardrobe (ṣāḥib al-kiswa) and the royal treasurer (al-khāzin)", and promised to make Aḥmad's uncle Isḥāq amir. The court party put the secretary to death, and Aḥmad was remembered as "the martyred amir".

What happened under Nasr II?

Aḥmad's son Naṣr II was "a mere boy of eight" when he came to the throne, as Frye notes; the Arab traveller Ibn Faḍlān saw him in AD 921 as "a young, beardless youth". The state was run at first by the vizier al-Jayhānī, famous as a geographer, and from about 921 by the vizier Abu'l-Faḍl Balʿamī.

Naṣr's reign is the period for which the administration is best described. Narshakhī says that Naṣr built a court on the Rīgistān square of Bukhara and beside it a building "so that each functionary had a separate bureau". Narshakhī lists nine bureaux, from "the bureau of the prime minister" and the treasurer to the postmaster, the police, religious endowments and the judges. The old version of this entry dated this list to Ismāʿīl; it belongs to Naṣr's reign.

Iranica observes that "Persian had by then established itself as the working language of these government departments", and Khurasan was entrusted to a commander-in-chief (sipahsālār) at Nīshāpūr. The army relied increasingly on ghilmān, Turkish slave soldiers; Barthold finds a guard of purchased, mainly Turkish slaves already "at the court of Ismaʿil and his successors". Citing the geographer al-Maqdisī, he records that "Turkish slaves could be conveyed only by a special licence on each occasion from the Government, such certificates costing from 70 to 100 dirhams". The frontier was held partly by volunteers for the holy war: Bosworth describes "chains of ribats or fortified points garrisoned by ghazis" in Isfījāb, Shāsh and Farghāna.

The reign also had its crises. In about 930, Naṣr's three imprisoned brothers escaped from the citadel of Bukhara with the help of a baker and briefly took the city. In May 937 a fire that began in a porridge shop at the Samarqand gate burned all the bazaars of Bukhara, according to Narshakhī.

Did Nasr II convert to Ismailism?

Possibly, but the story rests on weak sources. Niẓām al-Mulk's Siyāsat-nāma tells at length how a missionary of the Ismāʿīlī branch of Shiʿism, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Nakhshabī, converted courtiers, then the mayor of Bukhara and finally the amir himself; Turkish officers and Sunni scholars then plotted against him. The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, as summarised by Barthold, adds that Naṣr agreed to pay the Fatimid caliph "119,000 dinars" as blood-money for an executed Ismāʿīlī commander, and that Nūḥ later had Nakhshabī executed.

Iranica points out that Narshakhī, Gardīzī and the sources used by Ibn al-Athīr "make no mention of this at all". Barthold himself noted that "The historians have not a word to say of the heresy of Nasr". Niẓām al-Mulk's translator Hubert Darke classed the Naṣr story among the book's "long stories", which "may be called historical romances". Treadwell's thesis does accept that "many senior courtiers converted to Ismāʿīlism". Whether the amir himself converted cannot be proved.

What is certain is how Naṣr died. According to Barthold, "his death took place on Thursday, April 6, 943, from tuberculosis of the lungs, after an illness lasting thirteen months", and in his last period he lived in a cell near the palace gate, "in pious exercises".

Why have Samanid coins been found in Scandinavia?

Because Samanid silver paid for furs, slaves and other goods from the north. The amirs began striking dirhams in their own name in the early 890s, and a silver mine in the Panjshīr valley, Iranica notes, "had produced massive quantities of silver for the mints of the Samanids".

Much of this silver left the Islamic world. Iranica describes the export through Transoxania "to the Baltic lands and Scandinavia, where literally tons of them have been found in graves of the Viking era and other hiding places", after first being carried to settlements on the Volga, "where they were exchanged for furs, slaves, amber, and other products of the northern lands". Al-Maqdisī's list of goods that reached Khwārazm from Bulghar, the capital of Volga Bulgaria, includes furs, amber and "Slavonic slaves". Most Samanid silver hoards, Treadwell notes, have been found "in Sweden, Eastern Europe and European Russia"; the historian T. Noonan estimated the surviving Samanid dirhams at "200,000 or more". According to Treadwell, the flow "probably peaked shortly before the middle of the century, began to decline in the 970's and had virtually ceased by the end of the 980's".

Not every famous hoard is Samanid. The largest Viking silver treasure, found at Spillings on Gotland in 1999, consists mostly of Arabic dirhams, but the Swedish History Museum notes that "The youngest coin identified so far dates to AD 870", before the first Samanid dirhams were struck. One Samanid dirham, tentatively identified by Treadwell as a coin of Aḥmad b. Ismāʿīl, was found in Lincolnshire, and the Portable Antiquities Scheme suggests that it "was probably brought to England by Viking traders".

What was the Samanid renaissance in literature and art?

The Samanid court saw the composition of some of the earliest works of New Persian literature; Treadwell's thesis calls Naṣr II's reign the period "during which the earliest works of Persian literature were composed". The scholar al-Thaʿālibī praised Samanid Bukhara as "the focus of splendour, the Kaʿba of empire".

Rūdakī. The most celebrated poet of the period, born around AD 858 near Samarqand, became, in Iranica's words, "the panegyrist and boon companion" of Naṣr II, supported by the vizier Balʿamī. The poet Rashīdī Samarqandī claimed to have counted 1.3 million lines of his verse; "only about a thousand verses have reached us". The best-known story about him, in which his poem on the Mūliyān stream moved Naṣr to ride home to Bukhara without his boots, comes from Neẓāmī ʿArūżī's Chahār maqāla, and Iranica calls it "partly fictional".

Persian prose. In 352/963 the vizier Abū ʿAlī Balʿamī began a Persian version of Ṭabarī's great Arabic history for Manṣūr I, adding material of his own. Iranica calls it "the oldest new-Persian prose work, after the preface … of the prose Šāh-nāma of Abū Manṣūr".

The Shāhnāma. The poet Daqīqī began a verse Shāhnāma, the Iranian national epic, "at the command of Nūḥ b. Manṣūr", as Iranica puts it, but was killed young, around AD 976. Ferdowsī took up the work in about 977, incorporating Daqīqī's verses. He finished it on 8 March 1010, more than ten years after the Samanids had lost Bukhara.

Science and philosophy. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) grew up near Bukhara, where his father, "a man of Balkh", worked in the Samanid administration under Nūḥ II. As a young man he was called to help treat Nūḥ II and was given access to the royal library: "a building which had many rooms; in each room there were chests of books piled one on top of the other". The later story that he burned the library to keep its knowledge to himself was reported by Ibn Funduq as an accusation by his opponents.

Pottery. The art historian Oleg Grabar identified two main centres of a new pottery in this period, Nīshāpūr and Afrāsiyāb-Samarqand. Its best-known pieces are white bowls with Arabic inscriptions in black slip. Grabar noted that the inscriptions "are all in Arabic", that they "tend to express the slightly moralizing morality of a middle class", and that none of them deals with princely topics.

The Met dates such bowls by century and place; calling them Samanid is an inference from their date and from the fact that Nīshāpūr was the seat of the Samanid governors of Khurasan.

Who is buried in the Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara?

Nobody knows for certain. The domed brick tomb in Bukhara is usually called the mausoleum of Ismāʿīl Sāmānī, and UNESCO describes it as "the famous tomb of Ismail Samani, a masterpiece of 10th-century Muslim architecture". Treadwell summarises the debate: "while popular tradition refers to it as the tomb of Ismaʿil ibn Ahmad (d. 295/907), Soviet and American scholars concur that it was most likely constructed by his grandson, Nasr ibn Ahmad". Frye suggested that it "may be the family sepulchre of later Samanid princes". Grabar dated it "before 332/943".

According to an article by Elizabeth Macaulay for Smarthistory, "The only inscription associated with the building was discovered on a wooden lintel over the eastern door in the 1930s", and a Soviet scholar read in it the name "Nasr b. Ahmad b. Ismail". Three unidentified male bodies were also found inside in the 1930s.

The architecture is not in doubt. Iranica calls it "one of the earliest known secular mausoleums", in which "the structural and decorative potential of baked brick was fully exploited for the first time in central Asian architecture".

Why did the Samanid Empire decline?

Because the generals and governors became stronger than the amirs. Bosworth dates the first signs of weakness to the reign of Nūḥ I (943–54), when "power was usurped by over-mighty subjects" such as Abū ʿAlī Chaghānī and the Simjūrīs, "a family of Turkish ghulam origin who held Kūhistān virtually as their own private domain". Under Nūḥ, Barthold records, the annual taxes were once levied in advance "in the form of a loan". In January 947 Abū ʿAlī briefly drove Nūḥ out of Bukhara. Succession disputes let generals and leading bureaucrats act, in Bosworth's words, "as king-makers".

Alptigin and Ghazna. When ʿAbd al-Malik I died in November 961, the commander of the guard, Alptigin, and the vizier Balʿamī tried to put the late amir's young son on the throne. The army preferred Manṣūr I. Alptigin withdrew to Balkh, defeated an army sent after him in April 962 and moved to Ghazna. He and his successors there, Iranica notes, "struck coins but placed the names of the Samanids on them". The fifth of these commanders, Sebüktigin, chosen by the troops in AD 977, was the father of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, under whom Ghazna became the centre of the Ghaznavid Empire.

The Simjūrīs. Abū ʿAlī Simjūrī, whose father had governed Khurasan for "nearly thirty years", awarded himself the title amīr-e jahān, "Lord of the World", while addressing Nūḥ II as wāli-e Bokhārā, "Governor of Bukhara".

The Qarakhanid invasion of AD 992. The Kara-Khanid Khanate, a Turkish Muslim dynasty of the steppe, now pressed from the north-east. In May 992 its ruler Bughrā Khān Hārūn entered Bukhara after the defeat of the Samanid general Fāʾiq, which Barthold says was "explained, probably not without reason, by the treason of the general". Bughrā Khān fell ill and withdrew, and Nūḥ II returned in August.

To deal with Abū ʿAlī and Fāʾiq, Nūḥ II called in Sebüktigin in AD 994. Bosworth writes that the two "routed the rebels", and Maḥmūd "was invested with command of the army of Khurāsān". Iranica records that Abū ʿAlī was eventually handed over to Maḥmūd, "who executed him". By 995 the Samanids' protector held Khurasan.

How did the Samanid Empire end?

In two blows in the same year, 999. On the evening of 1 February 999, according to Barthold, the generals Begtuzun and Fāʾiq deposed the amir Manṣūr II at Sarakhs; "a week later" he was "deprived of his sight". Maḥmūd of Ghazna posed as Manṣūr's avenger and on 16 May 999 won a battle near Merv "which delivered all Khurasan to his rule".

Transoxania fell in the autumn. When the Qarakhanid Ilek Naṣr advanced, the people of Bukhara asked their religious teachers whether to fight, and, Barthold writes, they "decided that 'when the struggle is for the goods of this world' Muslims are not obliged to 'lay themselves out to be murdered'". "On Monday, October 23, 999, the Ilak occupied Bukhara without opposition and seized the Samanid treasury." ʿAbd al-Malik and the other princes were sent to Uzgand in Farghāna. Maḥmūd and the Ilek divided the Samanid lands "with the Oxus as boundary", in Bosworth's words.

Barthold's verdict was that "amid general indifference, was the downfall of the famous dynasty accomplished". Treadwell's thesis rejects Barthold's explanation that the bureaucracy had been overwhelmed by "an alliance of military and scholarly interests", and instead sees the fatal weakness in "the institution of patronage which controlled appointments to provincial governorships".

The last Samanid. One prince did not give up. Abū Ibrāhīm Ismāʿīl escaped from Uzgand "in woman's clothes", took the title al-Muntaṣir, "the victorious", and with an army raised in Khwārazm briefly retook Bukhara, where he struck a coin dated 390 AH (1000). In the late autumn of 1003 he crossed the frozen Amu Darya with 300 horsemen and 400 foot soldiers. With the help of the Oghuz Turks, perhaps led, Barthold suggested, by a son of Seljuk, and of the volunteers of Samarqand, he defeated the Ilek near Burnamadh in May–June 1004. Then the Oghuz went home and one of his captains defected with 5,000 men. Deserted by his troops, al-Muntaṣir according to Barthold, "was killed at the beginning of 1005 by the chief of one of the Arab tribes living in the neighbourhood of Merv".

Why is Ismail Samani a national hero in Tajikistan?

Because independent Tajikistan chose him as its founding father. Since 30 October 2000 the national currency has been the somoni, which the National Bank of Tajikistan says "is named in honour of Ismoil Somoni (849-907) - founder of the first centralized state of Tajiks – Samanids State". In 2007 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that "A huge monument to Ismoil Somoni, a 10th-century Tajik king, has replaced the Lenin statue in Dushanbe's central square", and linked the new monuments to official debate about "so-called Aryan descent". A later RFE/RL article adds: "His tomb is in Bukhara, in what is currently Uzbekistan."

This is a modern national reading of a medieval realm of many peoples that relied on a Turkish slave army. The border question is older than independence: Iranica notes that since the Soviet "national delimitation" of 1924, Tajikistan has been considered the national home of the Tajiks, while "the traditional cultural centers of Bukhara and Samarkand", with sizable Tajik populations, were allotted to Uzbekistan, which "have been sources of friction between the two republics".

Common myths about the Samanid Empire

Timeline of the Samanid Empire

What the map shows next

At AD 943 on the map the Samanid Empire stands at the end of Naṣr II's reign, holding Transoxania and Khurasan. Its great rival before AD 900 can be seen at Saffarid Dynasty, in the last year before ʿAmr's defeat near Balkh. At Kara-Khanid Khanate the Qarakhanids have taken Bukhara, and by Ghaznavid Empire Maḥmūd's empire holds Khurasan south of the Oxus. Today the old Samanid heartland is divided between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.