Episode 2 The Silk Road

2,000 years ago,

an ancient trade route slowly spread across a continent.

As a historian, the Silk Road has always fascinated me

and this is the story of my journey along it.

It ran all the way from China's ancient capital

through Central Asia, through mythical cities

such as Samarkand or Persepolis

until it reached the bazaars of Istanbul,

the merchants of Venice.

How much does modern Europe owe to the art,

ideas and innovations that arose on the Silk Road?

To answer that question, I'll follow it through deserts and oases.

I'll get to see the Silk Road treasures of Iran,

now, once more, opening to travellers like me.

I'm starting to think that I may have actually been

an Iranian merchant in a former life.

The Silk Road was a place of adventure and invention.

It cut across borders and brought cultures into contact and conflict.

In this episode, I'm in Central Asia,

the heart of the Silk Road, a place of constant conquest

and resettlement, of displaced peoples and ruined cities.

The Silk Road's melting pot.

It's the part of the Silk Road which Europe has often overlooked,

but it's quite possibly to this territory that the West

owes its greatest debts.

We weren't rediscovering our own ideas.

We were discovering someone else's.

I'll meet the last survivors of a race, the Sogdians,

who once traded from the Mediterranean to the China Sea.

I'll search for traces of their art and culture.

I'll delight in a city built by tens of thousands of captive craftsmen

for one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever seen...

..and I'll go back to school in the Silk Road cities

where modern mathematics and astronomy were actually born.

Welcome to the Yaghnob Valley in Tajikistan,

the very heart of the Silk Road.

I've got a feeling that the roads here are roughly as old

as the Silk Road itself.

I'm in Tajikistan in a mountain range called the Zarafshan,

north of the Himalayas, west of the high Pamirs.

For more than 1,000 years, Silk Road traders had to find their way

through mountains like these, through these valleys.

If they timed their trip badly, they froze to death.

The idea of coming to a remote Tajik valley

seemed like a very good idea in Devon.

I'm starting to wonder whether it was.

I also realise that I like wide roads.

I'm trying to get to an isolated group of villages

further down the valley which, for more than 1,200 years,

has been the last refuge of a people that once traded all the way along

the Silk Road, from the Mediterranean

to China's eastern coast - the Sogdians.

They had a kingdom, Sogdiana, and I'm driving through it now -

or at least, through its ghost.

For centuries, their language

was the common tongue of Silk Road trade and traders,

a form of ancient Persian that Darius the Great

would've understood, that Alexander the Great would have heard.

But in the course of the eighth century,

the Sogdians came into conflict with Islam,

which was slowly moving eastwards.

Sogdian culture began to fragment.

Once, they'd been so central to Silk Road trade

that the word "Sogdian" replaced the word "merchant" -

but by the 10th century, they were largely lost.

Except for in this remote valley,

where some of them hid for more than 1,000 years.

Amazingly, in this valley, the language has survived.

The people who speak it now are known as the Yaghnobi.

I want to meet them.

I'm hoping that it's not just the language that's lasted.

Is there some trace of Sogdian culture?

This is my destination.

Well, thanks for the lovely drive.

You're welcome.

You've got to drive back too.

Here, I can meet Niyoz Karimov and his family.

Hey. Assalaamu Alaikum.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER

I'm desperate to hear this lost language spoken.

Niyoz brings the family together

and after one of the toddlers tries to strangle a cat,

they try to put the babies to sleep

in a language I would struggle to hear anywhere else in the world.

THEY SPEAK IN YAGHNOBI

The children just aren't sleepy.

I still feel privileged,

listening to words that Alexander the Great might once have heard.

CHILD COUGHS

The family get on with daily life.

The winter snows are coming

and they can't afford to waste much time talking to me.

But I have questions to ask.

There are ruins all over the valley,

evidence that the population has declined.

What's happened here?

Professor Saiffidin Mirzozoda,

a Yaghnobi who's made a career outside the valley,

is staying with Niyoz.

I asked them both about the valley's recent history.

What happened to the Yaghnobi People?

Zafarabad is north of the valley, close to the border with Uzbekistan.

During the Soviet years, the Yaghnobi

were put to work here, picking cotton.

It's only about 60 miles from the valley, but it placed the Yaghnobi

and their fragile traditions in the heart of another culture.

This was all in Soviet times.

What would be trying to do to the Yaghnobi by forcing them to migrate?

What else needs to be done

to preserve the Yaghnobi culture as best we can?

It turns out the truth is I'm too late -

70 or 80 years too late - to see what I wanted to see.

The Yaghnobi had long since forgotten Sogdian poetry and culture

and the Soviet era destroyed much of the language.

Off-camera, the professor admits

that only around 30% of its vocabulary survives.

If I want to find traces of Sogdian art, of their spirit,

I'll have to look elsewhere.

Here in the valley, Niyoz and others

work to stop what they still have from getting lost

in the rising tide of global culture.

In the little schoolhouse,

Niyoz shows me that the kids here

aren't without a decent, basic education

and that they are being taught Yaghnobi.

APPLAUSE

And a little further up the valley, I find the remains of some

of the many villages depopulated during Soviet times.

Mostly uninhabited ruins, some recently reoccupied.

We meet these three gentleman and pose for a photo opportunity.

After they've left, our guide tells me that the oldest gent

was talking about exactly how old these ruins are -

that their foundations date from the time of Alexander the Great,

three centuries before Christ.

The Yaghnobi live here with an awareness that their history is long

but they have forgotten all of its details.

Everyone living here now has made a deliberate decision

to come back to this valley after Soviet Russia moved them elsewhere.

They choose to live without almost

everything that the modern world has to offer.

VOICE ECHOES ON PHONE

It's not exactly no-frills...

..but this is not a smartphone.

It's hard to believe that their ancestors

once ranged across this entire continent,

trading in everything from silk to ceramics, jewels to weapons.

Hard to believe that there were kings of the Sogdians,

or that these people have been so completely forgotten,

so lost to history.

I've had such a lovely time

that I thought we'd take a photo to remember it by.

Is that OK?

'Hardest of all, perhaps, to believe that a culture

'can survive in a single valley for 1,200 years.'

Good. All right, then.

I can hold this up. Just get in.

One, two, three.

One for the journal.

Although I won't need much help to remember this day.

'Goodbye, Niyoz and your family.

'Thank you for resisting history.'

Thank you for proving that another kind of life is possible.

It's been an honour.

We start the drive back.

It's a chance to reflect on who I've just met.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, these people don't exist.

I'm very glad to have met them, very glad indeed.

I'm hoping that further to the west, out of this valley,

I might find some trace of Sogdian art or culture.

Near the valley's mouth, I find something else,

a remnant of Tajikistan's recent past

as part of the Soviet Union.

Bus stop, artwork, space age relic and reminder of political reality.

In pastoral painted concrete and pebbles,

we see the hammer and sickle and Sputniks orbiting the Earth.

It's too good to miss.

I need a snap for the journal.

It reminds me once again of where I am and where it was,

that all around me are nations whose boundaries were set not by history,

but by the Soviets, who sought to frustrate national identities.

In terms of the ancient Silk Road, I'm still well within

the boundaries of Sogdiana.

But if you look at a modern map of central Asia,

at the illogical lines that determine the outlines of countries

like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan,

what you're essentially looking at is a map of Stalin's mind.

Look at these straight lines.

What happens if you are a Kazakh nomad here

whose summer pastures lie beyond this new border?

I'm leaving Tajikistan behind, going West to Uzbekistan,

to its capital, Tashkent.

Relations between these two neighbours

who share so much history,

not least the memory of Sogdiana,

are currently so poor that I can't cross by road.

I have to fly to Istanbul and then from there to Tashkent.

When the walls went down in 1990 and 1991,

and the Soviet Union collapsed, Uzbekistan gained its independence.

It's been ruled ever since by President Islam Karimov.

Throughout the country, statues of the former gods of the Soviet Union,

Lenin and Stalin, have been replaced by statues of one man,

a colossal figure in Silk Road history.

There used to be a statue of Karl Marx here.

GONG SOUNDS

And it's Karl's replacement that I've come to meet.

One of the biggest figures in Silk Road history.

Three great conquerors swept through this entire territory,

men whose names have never been forgotten.

Alexander the Great, three centuries before Christ,

Genghis Khan in the 13th century

and this man, the last of the three.

He rolled across Central Asia like a sandstorm

a century after Genghis Khan.

He's been known by many names

but we'll use just one to avoid confusion.

Timur.

Tamerlane, Tamburlaine, Timur - why so many names?

Because his name was spoken in so many different languages

and because he was also known

as Timur-lang, which meant Timur the Lame.

Wounds from arrows caused him to walk with a limp.

He was almost certainly the most pitiless of all the conquerors.

A favourite trick was to promise the people of the city under siege

that no blood would be shed if they surrendered.

When they opened the gates,

he would bury them alive.

Even in Europe, he became proverbial.

200 years after Timur's death,

Christopher Marlowe would write a play

devoted to this historic monster.

The play was a huge success,

a celebration of boundless ambition, thirst for dominion

and the glamour of power.

This is one of Timur's monologues from the play.

"I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains

"And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about

"And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere

"Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome."

Europe would never forget him.

Vivaldi, Handel and about 50 others

would create operas about him

and in the 20th century, he fascinated the Soviets.

This is a sketch of a reconstruction of Timur's face

made by a Soviet scientist, Mikhail Gerasimov,

who exhumed the corpse in 1941.

Usually, I distrust such things, but whoever made this

worked with Timur's personality firmly in mind.

It's certainly not a face that would forgive failure

or understand excuses.

Perhaps that's why it works.

Perhaps there is something in it, after all.

Perhaps it is a good likeness.

It's a chilly thought, and a chilly face.

Perhaps this WAS the man, perhaps those WERE the eyes.

Timur is everywhere.

He's even on the money.

He's at the heart of a new cult of Uzbek nationality.

Night falls on Tashkent...

..and there are signs that the youth of Uzbekistan

are very happy to have Timur back.

Tomorrow, I'm on the road again,

heading for the city that's always been associated with Timur,

his reign and the Silk Road itself.

Samarkand.

And the quickest way to get there is this.

Uzbekistan's pride and joy -

a high-speed rail link from its capital to its cultural heart.

It'll get me to Samarkand in slightly less than two hours.

It may not be a very romantic way to get there, but hey.

Uzbekistan is remaking, rewriting its history.

In the 19th century,

Europe put Central Asian history to use as well.

Think of Burton's translation of The 1,001 Nights.

We wanted this exotic world to stand for something.

We made it stand for sensuality,

wickedness and risk.

A place of sexual licence

and ladies in transparent trousers.

If you go back far enough,

there are some occasions when that might possibly have been true.

At some celebrations shortly before the death of Timur,

eight of his wives were paraded before a Spanish visitor,

and the drinking went on for several days.

For Europeans, the Silk Road became the very heartland of licence.

The poet James Elroy Flecker was inspired to write this.

"Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells

"When shadows pass gigantic on the sand

"And softly through the silence beat the bells

"Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

"We travel not for trafficking alone

"By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned

"For lust of knowing what should not be known

"We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."

Hotter winds, fiery hearts, knowing what should not be known -

these ideas suggest that Samarkand

is a place of forbidden and dangerous knowledge.

Knowledge, certainly, but forbidden and dangerous?

Well, it depends entirely

what you think of the mapping of the stars,

the study of medicine, the ideas of Aristotle,

or the fundamental principles of mathematics.

These are just some of the things

that we'll find that we owe entirely or in part

to Samarkand and the Silk Road cities that lie beyond.

Alexander the Great visited the city that would one day

become Samarkand in 329 BC,

and announced that "everything I have heard about Samarkand is true,

"except it is even more beautiful than I had imagined."

But the city Alexander saw was destroyed more than 1,000 years ago.

We're here to see what replaced it.

Timur's Samarkand.

This is the Registan,

actually built some time after the death of the Emir Timur.

But it's astonishingly faithful

to the style with which he's always been associated,

which rose to prominence during his reign.

The Timurid style.

This extraordinarily impressive plaza was once described

by one of Britain's most notoriously dismissive,

arrogant and snotty diplomats

as "the noblest public square in the world."

Better, in short, than anything Britain has to offer.

And he was right.

Look at any surface and be astonished.

It's the extraordinary deep blue-green tiles of the domes

that catches the eye first,

like a memory of the sea thousands of miles away.

And then, when your eye slides off those domes onto the walls,

there's more deep blues and gold that really punches through.

The walls are covered in repeated patterns

and quotations from the Koran.

It's astonishingly beautiful and looks almost brand-new.

Because it is.

Everywhere I look, there are construction workers,

angle grinders, scaffolding,

signs of renovation and restoration.

And in a tiny workshop in one of the inner courtyards...

I find Ravshan Halimov and his family working away.

They've been working in the precincts of the Registan

for decades.

Lovingly, painstakingly making replacements

for the most important ingredient in the decorations of these buildings.

The ceramic tiles.

Some plain, some patterned,

some containing quotations from the Koran.

Some made like jigsaws,

from almost 30 pieces.

I could watch them for hours.

But I have questions to ask.

How difficult has it been to restore the tile work?

How difficult has it been to make sure that the colours

are accurate, that the colours are correct?

Is there a sense that all of this restoration work

has to do with the memory of Timur and his family?

So this family and everyone working away outside, grinding stone,

replacing tiles, even in sweeping up dead leaves,

is working away on the memory of Timur,

the Silk Road's greatest conqueror.

A few hundred yards' walk from the Registan is the Bibi-Khanym.

This enormous mosque was built on Timur's orders

in honour of one of his wives.

Unusually, he was here in the later stages of its construction.

He was normally far away conquering someone.

According to myth, Timur brought 100,000 captured craftsmen

to Samarkand to work on this and other projects.

And as the city grew, he named its streets and suburbs after

the other countries that he'd recently bagged,

like notches on a bedpost.

The Bibi-Khanym was under construction

as his death impended in the early 1400s

and in those same years, his empire reached its greatest extent,

threatening Turkey to the west, China to the east.

He called himself the Sword of Islam

but he was Islam's scourge more than its protector.

Most of those he defeated were Muslims.

As for the Bibi-Khanym,

he wasn't satisfied with the rate at which it was rising.

He toured the site, threatening the sluggish,

rewarding the industrious by throwing coins at them

and chunks of meat.

The pace of construction duly accelerated

but the work became more slapdash.

Within years of its completion,

the mosque began to crumble and collapse.

Flawed though it was, one contemporary remarked

the dome would be supreme, were it is not for the sky itself.

The fact that the Bibi-Khanym was built at all

is a testament to Timur's tyrannical will and power.

But in terms of restoration, it looks as though the Bibi-Khanym

is rather unloved.

You wonder if it's been restored at all.

You can wander into some of its spaces

and regret the damage

but enjoy the traces of a culture for which every surface

was a decorative opportunity, now enjoyed by feathered residents.

But the truth is, these buildings

were much more damaged than they seem today.

This is the Bibi-Khanym now

and this is then, a little more than 100 years ago.

This small exhibition shows exactly how far these buildings have come.

Now I'm looking at photographs that show the state of the Registan

100 years ago.

It wasn't just the Bibi-Khanym that had suffered as time passed.

It's a bit like the before and after shots

of a famous actor who's had plastic surgery.

Samarkand has certainly had some work done.

It's the most impressive feat of restoration I've ever seen.

But have they gone too far?

How would it be, for instance, if the Italian government had

decided to completely reconstruct the Roman Colosseum?

But then how would it be if visitors were denied this spectacle?

Timur's tomb, the Gur Emir, is about ten minutes' walk from the Registan.

It, too, had suffered from neglect and earthquakes.

It, too, has been almost completely restored.

Timur died in February of 1405.

He'd been laying plans to invade China at the time

but he caught a cold which turned into a fever and killed him.

According to the histories,

the armies he had amassed for the China campaign

numbered some 200,000 men.

But they were disbanded,

and Timur was brought back here to Samarkand for burial.

Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky China.

Saved from the scourge of God by a passing virus.

Almost as soon as he died, his empire began to crumble.

Like his buildings, it had only existed because of Timur himself.

He was the mortar between every brick and now he was gone.

Officially, Timur lies beneath this chunk of black jade -

once the largest piece of this rare mineral

to be found anywhere on earth.

But he doesn't lie beneath this slab of darkness.

He's in a crypt somewhere below stairs.

Visitors by special appointment.

Cameras not permitted.

If you want easy access to the old emir, you can find it...

Here.

Samarkand has its own new statue of him.

Tashkent's showed him on a horse, conquering.

This one has him on his throne, ruling.

Not all of the legends surrounding Timur are ancient history.

There are some stories from Soviet times.

It was on 22 June, 1941,

that Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov

opened Timur's tomb and removed his body for scientific scrutiny.

It had always been said that curses would rain down

on the heads of anyone who disturbed Timur's remains,

and later that very day, Hitler invaded Russia.

Spooky.

If you believe in curses.

It was Gerasimov who made the facial reconstruction,

a sketch of which we saw earlier.

I'm not sure that these new statues referred to it that much.

I think they paid more attention to snaps of Sean Connery.

Still works, though.

Young Uzbeks come here to pay their respects and stand on his boot.

I am turning my back on Timur.

I've heard that here in the heart of Samarkand

is some trace of the art and culture that I couldn't find

in the remote valley of the Yaghnob -

the last traces of the Sogdians.

Before Timur, there was Genghis Khan,

and it was Genghis who came here in 1220 to sweep away

the city of Afrosiab.

He did a pretty thorough job, as you can see.

The city is somewhere underneath

these gentle green hillocks and hummocks.

It was incomparably older than Timur's Samarkand.

And unlike Timur's buildings,

it's been largely left to die in peace.

Except in one corner of the site where the Soviets built

a small section of mudbrick wall to give visitors some

idea of what this city was like, or how it was defended.

Here was the capital city of Sogdiana,

the very heart of that trading network that stretched all

the way from the Mediterranean to China.

It was almost 2,000 years old when Genghis Khan destroyed it,

and for 400 years before he arrived,

it had been occupied by the previous wave

of Silk Road conquerors, the Arabs.

And, of course, Alexander the Great had been here

when the city was young, conquering it.

On the Silk Road, you find yourself wondering

if the city's got tired of all of this.

You can almost hear the stones or the mud bricks sighing gently,

"Here we go again.

"Here comes another conqueror."

The ruins of Afrosiab were discovered in the 1960s,

covered in rubble and dust and sand and centuries.

In the nearby museum, built during Soviet times,

the most precious finds are preserved.

Seventh century paintings made by the Sogdians -

and precious is most definitely the word.

These delicate survivors are absolutely ravishing.

Pale, fragmented phantoms of extraordinary delicacy...

..and vigour.

Those swans look angry.

But most of what we see on these walls

is a variety of visitors to the Sogdian court.

It's the Sogdians working the room.

And that's what's rather wonderful about these murals.

It's not just that they were drawn by ancestors of the Yaghnobi,

who we met all those miles ago in their lost valley.

It's that what we see here is the Sogdians

just going about their business, doing what they always did

before the nature of the Silk Road washed them away.

In the Yaghnob Valley, the people survived.

Here is what they've lost - the art of being Sogdian.

And it feels familiar.

Here, once again is art in the service of the state.

Celebrating Sogdian virtues -

trade, deals, connections, alliances.

Who knows who these silhouettes may once have been?

These people traded the entire Silk Road from east to west.

These people came to stand for trade itself.

Here, it's been speculated, is the Sogdian king

in fabulously decorated robes,

waiting to greet some very important visitors.

And here we have some Chinese traders carrying bales of silk -

and, very faint, but also unmistakeably, silk cocoons.

Silk - the very reason that I'm here,

the very stuff on which this Silk Road was made.

It's oddly pleasing.

It is like seeing an old friend.

And there's another old friend I want to visit,

an essential ingredient in the music,

not just of the Silk Road and Central Asia, but of Europe.

In one small corner of the Registan,

there's a little music shop, owned and run by Master Babur.

He has a lot of instruments to show me,

but one looks particularly familiar.

What about this one in the corner?

In the corner?

This is also one of the very ancient musical instrument

-which, we call it oud.

-It looks a bit like a lute, to me.

Exactly, exactly same musical instrument.

OK, I will show you from oud also a little music.

HE PLAYS THE OUD

'No-one is quite sure exactly when the Arab oud

'was first absorbed into European culture.

'It's been suggested that this happened as early

'as the eighth century.

'The oud became our lute,

'an instrument that remained central to European music until the 1800s.'

Wonderful. It's the sound of history right there.

Sound of history, sound of ages. Sound of the Silk Road.

And... Could I have a go?

Of course, of course. You can...

You can try it.

-Of course, it is played sitting.

-Yeah.

-HE PLAYS OUD

-You can try.

HE PLAYS OUD

'I'm used to playing the guitar - and I play it very well -

'but the oud is a challenge, to say the least.'

-This one has no fret. It's quite difficult to play, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Of course.

-Thank you very much.

-You play well!

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

The origin of the lute has long been acknowledged,

but in the next city,

I'll be discovering debts we've owed to the Silk Road

for more than 1,000 years

and done our best to deny.

Five hours drive west of Samarkand lies Bukhara -

a treasure house of the mind.

Bukhara sat at one of the crossroads,

the interchanges in the Silk Road.

Trade goods could arrive here

and depart in almost any direction.

KAMANCHEH PLAYS

The deals were done in domes like these, trading domes.

For hundreds of years, the money changed hands here.

And where they still stand, of course,

these domes are perfect tourist traps.

It's position and its wealth made Bukhara attractive -

an essential stop on any conqueror's tour through Central Asia.

They all came here.

Bukhara was conquered even more than most.

In 1220, Genghis Khan,

before reducing most of the city to a smouldering ruin,

told the citizens of Bukhara that they must have been very

great sinners indeed for God to have sent him as their punishment.

But these huge walls, built around 850, were simply too big to destroy.

There's been a fortress on this site for about 2,000 years.

This is the Ark of Bukhara.

And its massive walls were here to defend,

not just the people of the city,

but also one of the greatest libraries the world has ever seen.

It's a monument to the thirst for human knowledge

and to an Islamic Golden Age

when many of the world's greatest thinkers were to be found here

or in other Silk Road cities, ranging all the way to Baghdad.

In the ninth century,

Bukhara bloomed into an intellectual powerhouse.

By then, Europe had squandered most of Rome's sophistication,

and the text of Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, had been lost.

But not here.

On the Silk Road, Islamic philosophers

preserved and translated the works of Aristotle,

and they interpreted them, too.

So when the Christian West eventually rediscovered these

ancient ideas, it was on Arab translations that they depended.

One of those philosophers became particularly famous.

His name was Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna -

and, in the 11th century, Bukhara was his hometown.

Ibn Sina's Preservation of Aristotle is only the tip of an iceberg.

The thinkers of the Silk Road were very deep,

and at the core of their thought - absolutely the central to it -

was mathematics.

It's a part of their art.

In Islam, figurative imagery was frowned upon

and so the decorations of buildings of any sort

were framed around geometric patterns,

repetitions, tessellations.

Maths and geometry are everywhere.

It's time to go back to maktab -

school -

where Uzbek children are taught to remember their forefathers

and their massively significant ideas.

It's the bread and butter of Uzbek education.

It was here on the Silk Road that mathematics

matured into a system that we've depended on ever since.

It was in the 12th century that Al-Khwarizmi's work

reached Europe as a Latin translation.

That translation used his name as its title, Algoritmi.

This wave of translations from Arabic led, in Europe,

to what we now call the 12th century Renaissance -

a movement of ideas without which the Renaissance proper

could never have happened.

But once you realise just how much of this was entirely new

to Europeans, it becomes clear that the very word "renaissance",

or rebirth, is more than a little dishonest,

because we weren't rediscovering our own ideas,

we were discovering someone else's.

And what we would learn from these Islamic philosophers

was a great deal more than algebra and algorithms.

Astronomy matured here, and it was here that it was demonstrated

that the Earth revolves around the sun and spins on its own axis.

As much as any other decoration here,

carpets depend on the mathematics of repetition.

They're very beautiful, and of course they're made of silk.

This kind of carpet, which we always think of as Turkish,

belongs to the Silk Road history

you can reduce to cliches, cartoons, kid's stories.

It's like a magic carpet for Aladdin.

It's exactly what we expect to find along the Silk Road.

The Turkish carpet is hard to completely steal.

Even the woollen rugs we copied from this,

which spread across British floors in the 19th century,

always had something slightly foreign about them.

But the ideas that grew here were a different matter.

Those could easily be taken and disguised as ours.

A thousand, a million tiny thefts

and small dishonesties, or even simply the idea of a renaissance,

of a rebirth, add up to a rejection,

a silencing of the idea that the modern West

could owe anything to Islamic culture.

In a Silk Road history that's absurdly rich with myths,

THAT perhaps, is the greatest myth of them all.

Al-Khwarizmi's birthplace lies ten hours drive to the

West in the city of Khiva.

I'm leaving Sogdiana far behind

and entering another ancient kingdom.

Khorezm - which gave Al-Khwarizmi his name -

had a great deal in common with Sogdiana.

These people were descended from Iranian colonists.

The language they spoke was similar to Sogdian.

Khiva is only a few miles from the border with Turkmenistan...

..and these hats belong to the old nomadic culture of the Turkmen.

They are called "Telpak" hats.

And nowadays people of Turkmen origin can be found in Turkmenistan,

Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and here.

Once more, those Soviet borders just seem absurd.

And the absurdity is only underlined

when I sit down for lunch with my guide, Utkir.

Everything I am about to eat is certainly Uzbek,

but I've been eating it since I was back in China.

A menu that hardly varies across a lot more

than 1,000 miles of central Asia.

In this oven made from mud and straw, they are breaking flatbreads,

naan breads.

In the kitchen, pasta dumplings.

And, of course, noodles.

While we're waiting for the food,

Utkir is cruel to the naan breads.

-What have we got here?

-This is manti.

That's a sort of dumpling.

They cook with squash and with meat.

-OK.

-Meat can be beef.

And we've got some noodles.

This noodle is related with China.

-Well, let's try some. Shall we start with some...

-Manti.

-Actually, we eat with hand.

-With hands, OK.

-Yes.

Oh, wow! It is a little... bomb of flavour.

Lovely. Very sweet.

And this...is so remarkable in its design as well,

it looks Chinese to me.

No, this is traditional Uzbek.

Mmm! Delicious.

Freshly made noodles.

I think I need a bit of that lovely looking bread with this.

And it's got these extraordinary patterns on.

-It can be even the family pattern.

-Can it?

They decorate everything in Uzbekistan, even the bread.

'The food is remarkably tasty.

'I don't know whether it was invented here

'or arrived here from Italy,

'or came here from China. Nobody does.

'Once again, I am reminded, the Silk Road is a massive melting pot

'and I am in the very middle.'

Khiva exists to serve and preserve the past

and one of its mosques, the Djuma Mosque,

is now a museum in which more than a millennium

of cultural change is wonderfully preserved.

It contains an extraordinary display of one of the things

Khiva has become famous for.

The carving of wood.

Particularly wooden pillars.

It's an extraordinarily peaceful place.

And in some ways, it seems a shame to talk in it.

But, needs must.

The pillars are all very beautiful.

And they have similar designs,

but they are also all noticeably different.

Why is that?

That's fascinating.

We have a combination of a celebration of the natural world

with a celebration of human knowledge and science?

So, the spirit of Al-Khwarizmi's wonderful mind

broods over these pillars.

They're expressions of Khorezm's cultural

and religious history.

The oldest pillar here is 1,000 years old,

but the floral style has roots that are older still.

It reaches back to the religion that Islam slowly supplanted here -

Zoroastrianism.

And, of course, it's not just ancient history.

Shavkat Tumaniyozov's workshop is about 100 yards

from the Djuma Mosque.

With his brother and their apprentices,

they still carve in the same style, although these days

the customer is more likely to be a local hotel or restaurant.

It's a delight to watch them.

I'm surprised by the confident, detailed...violence

with which they work.

For the journal, I want something more than just a photo.

Shavkat offers to draw us a part of the design for his pillar carving.

Kindly, he tells us the pattern's name.

I've no idea what it means and I don't want to know.

I love the mystery.

It's one of the pages in the journal that pleases me most.

Paging back through the last several hundred miles,

I am struck by the number of times I see ghosts -

or perhaps "survivors" is a better word.

On the Silk Road, nothing ever entirely dies.

There are still Sogdians hiding as simple farmers in a remote valley.

The Soviet buses are gone, but the bus stops still stand.

And even Timur isn't dead and buried.

He's hard at work on horseback, on the throne, and on the money.

Everything looks old, but is actually new.

GLASS SMASHES

And in a village outside Khiva, there's a workshop I can visit

where history is remade on a daily basis.

It's not just that old cognac and vodka bottles

can have a new life here as ingredients in a glaze,

it's the fact that it's only since independence that this workshop,

and its master, have returned to the traditional styles

that were once the basic ingredients of Timurid decoration.

What is the connection between the tile makers of Khiva and Timur?

Several hundred years ago, Timur put people from this province

Khorezm, to work on his palaces, mosques and minarets

and all the stately places in his capital of Samarkand.

One small irony, however -

he didn't like living inside.

He was descended from Mongols -

at least in part from nomads.

The buildings were all for show, to impress the foreign idiots

who kept coming, wringing their hands, suing for peace,

who needed, above all,

to be impressed and terrified by the scourge of God.

Timur preferred to live in the city's extensive gardens, in tents.

Every political regime in history has used art

and architecture to project its power.

Timor did it, Uzbekistan's current rulers are doing it, too -

and that's what this part of my trip along the Silk Road in Central Asia

has made clear to me.

So, these tiles are for tourists and citizens, too.

They come with a message baked in beneath the glaze.

It says, "Be proud of our history."

"Visitors be impressed when you see tiles like these

"by the thousand on the walls of the Registan or in your hotel.

"Carefully reassembled to surround a fireplace.

"Try not to think of our Soviet past which we too are trying to forget.

"And don't waste too much time waiting here.

"Because there are no Soviet buses. Any more."

Next time, I am heading to Iran.

A country whose rich Persian past

is filled with fascinating characters,

and where the culture and art of the empires they built

spread to every part of the Silk Road.

From Iran, I will travel to the cities

at the western end of the Silk Road,

and I will discover that many of their great palaces,

buildings and churches were inspired by the East...

Paid for and made possible by the Silk Road.