Its day 8 of the tour and we are in Samarkand all day, which is woefully inadequate, but what can you do ...
The city is one of the oldest continually occupied cities in central Asia ... probably started in the neolithic (40,000 years ago), certainly settled by the 7th or 8th centuries BC. Usual stiry - captured by Alexander the Great in 329BC, then occupied by various 'foreign' powers - Iranian, Turkic etc . Genghis Khan captured and virtually destroyed it in 1220. Ho-hum.
It was rebuilt by Timur (Tamerlane) and was the centre of his empire from the late 1300s until it started crumbling after his death in 1405. His son and grandson couldn't keep up the violence that marked Timur's reign.
Timur's grandson and Emir Ulugh Beg was highly educated and was more of a scientist than a warrior. he built an 'observatory' in the mid 1400s but this was destroyed by fundamentalists shortly after his death. It was in where he built his 'observatory' - a multi-storied building with a massive (11m long) 'meridian arc', by which he measured the position of over 1,000 stars etc. his measurement books are preserved today.
Here is Ulugh:
A model of his observatory:
And a cut-away of his 11m long meridian arc, half of which was below the ground:
And, amazingly, half of it was discovered, buried b y Soviet archaeologists last century. Funny colours due to the lighting:
There is a museum on site worth a visit. Ulugh was a big name in astronomy circles in the 1400s-1600s.
Nice views also from the hill to other monuments in the city.