British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

After Alexander: Central Asia Before Islam

The planning of the Sogdian cities

G. Semenov

The lay-out of Sogdian cities remains a subject of discussion. For Pendjikent, the most investigated city, L. Gurevitch offered a reconstruction of the plan of city with a network of quarters with the module of 53.8 m. In the opinion of the author, the initial severity and regularity of lay-out were altered by reorganization and alteration: only temples maintained their sites. However, the excavations at Pendjkent have questioned Gurevitch’s main thesis: some streets, particularly the southern ones, appear to be no earlier than the 7th century. The simultaneous construction of city walls, the allocation of temple sites and the layout of some streets by the 5th century is no longer in doubt.

Based on the theory of the continuity of a street network development O. Bolshakov offered his reconstruction of the plan of Bukhara as consisting of identical rectangular quarters, 130-140 x 45-50 m. in size. He saw the confirmation of his theory in the plan of Pendjikent.

The excavation at Paikend in the Bukhara oasis has shown that the street network is more complex than identical rectangular quarters. The absence of crossroads is a feature of the street network. All known street crossings are T- shaped in the plan. If we assume that they mark the border of quarters, it is possible to allocate some quarters of varied sizes: 84 x 84, 84 x 108, 53 x more than 120 m. The borders of quarters remained constant throughout the history of the city. Inside the quarters were additional streets. The houses on both sides of the streets belonged, probably, to one quarter. Thus, in the city there are both small quarters, consisting of houses on both sides of a street, and larger quarters, uniting some streets.

Streets in cities have two basic purposes: to connect parts and at the same time to divide them into separate quarters. In Paikend the streets were, first of all, borders of quarters and only after this, were used for communication. In the old part of the city there are no highways from one gate to another. To reach a gate from houses it was necessary to walk a long way in narrow streets. In a Central Asian city quarter, streets unite inhabitants in one quarter, and borders of such quarters separate it from the next.

The analysis of the street lay-out shows some isolation of separate quarters in the city. It is possible to assume that this territorial division reflected the social and administrative independence of separate quarters. In a city of the late medieval East, the community of each quarter determined its character. Citizens knew only their own quarters, the inhabitants of which were connected by various links. The excavation at Paikend allows us to trace the existence of such quarters in antiquity and to assume their importance in the history of early medieval city.