+15 | Long Walk in Samarkand
If you want to understand city - please Walk. To day we walked 15 kilometers.
What’s the meaning of Samarkand?
The name comes from Sogdian samar "stone, rock" and kand "fort, town." In this respect, Samarqand shares the same meaning as the name of the Uzbek capital Tashkent, with tash- being the Turkic term for "stone" and -kent the Turkic analogue of kand.
Samarkand, city in east-central Uzbekistan that is one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. Known as Maracanda in the 4th century bce, it was the capital of Sogdiana and was captured by Alexander the Great in 329 bce.
In Sanskrit and old Persian, the word Samarkand is also a compound word and means “battlefield”. Accordingly, the word samar in the word means “war” and the word kand means “square, field, place”. The second part of the word samarkand, the word kand, is used today in the sense of “city” in both Turkish and English.
Samarkand, founded almost 2,500 years ago, is located on the famous Silk Road that the Caravans travelling from China and India to Asia Minor took. Flourishing scientific knowledge, arts and crafts were the basis of nicknames such as "The Eden of the East" and "The Sparkling Summit of the Earth".
Let’s walk thru.