![]() ![]() Built in AD1157 to honour 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. If he followed the route of the Majan canal, which ran up the middle of the city, past the workshops of embroiderers and weavers, he would reach both Merv’s central mosque and the adjacent monument, the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar. Maybe he paid a visit to a member of the city’s elite who lived in a koshk (a fortress-like home outside the walls removed from the dust and noise of the city). 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. The smoke of potters’ kilns and steel-making furnaces (Merv was famous for its crucible steel) would have hung over the surrounding industrial suburbs. 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. Reaching Merv, the visiting trader might lead his pack-animals into the open courtyard of a two-storey caravanserai (an inn with a courtyard for travellers), where he would jostle for space with other merchants from as far as India, Iraq and western China. “For its cleanliness, its good streets, the divisions of its buildings and quarters among the rivers … their city is superior to the rest of the cities of Khurasan,” wrote the 10th-century Persian geographer and traveller al-Istakhri. Many different polities chose to make Merv the seat from which to rule Khurasan, a region that included eastern Iran and parts of modern-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The citadel of the Seljuk sultans – replete with a palace, gardens and administrative buildings – loomed over the north-eastern part of Merv. Photograph: ASAEL Anthony/Getty Images/Hemis Its streets were mostly narrow and winding, crowded with closely built houses and occasional larger structures: mosques, schools, libraries and bathhouses. The city’s enclosing walls ran in an oblong circuit of five miles, interrupted by strong towers and four main gates. 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. According to some estimates, Merv was the biggest city in the world in AD1200, with a population of more than half a million people.īut only decades later, the city was effectively razed by the armies of Genghis Khan in a grisly conquest that resulted – if contemporary accounts are to be believed – in 700,000 deaths.Ī trader arriving from Bukhara to the north-east or from Nishapur to the south-west would once have been relieved at the sight of Merv. It was a capital of the Seljuk sultanate that extended from central Asia to the Mediterranean. In its 12th-century pomp, Merv straddled the prosperous trade routes of the Silk Road. ![]()
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