The City of Dry Earth
The dusty hills of Afrasiab are the oldest part of Samarkand. This was once Marakanda, the capital of the ancient territory of Sogdiana, an important center of commerce and culture on the Silk Road. Before the arrival of Islam, the dominant religion here was Zoroastrianism, a faith with specific beliefs about the purity of the natural elements. Adherents believed that burying a human corpse would pollute the sacred earth.
To avoid this, the Sogdians practiced excarnation. They would place the bodies of the deceased on high, exposed structures where scavenging birds and the elements would naturally clean the bones. Later, the dry, clean bones were collected and placed into ceramic containers called ossuaries, or astodans. These bone boxes, often decorated with stamped patterns, were then stored in a sacred place. Archaeologists have uncovered many of these ossuaries in the ruins of Afrasiab, linking to the region's pre-Islamic inhabitants from the 7th and 8th centuries CE.
A Distant Genetic Echo
The bone fragments found within these ossuaries contain preserved genetic material. Scientific analysis of this ancient DNA has produced a surprising result. Researchers focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), a type of genetic information passed down exclusively from mother to child, which allows for the tracking of maternal lineages across millennia. The expectation was that the Sogdians of Afrasiab would show a close genetic relationship to other ancient and modern populations in Central Asia.
The findings contradicted this. The mtDNA profiles extracted from the ossuary bones show a distinct and strong affinity not with local groups, but with populations from the Iranian Plateau, nearly 2,000 kilometers to the southwest. This suggests that a specific community lived in Samarkand that was genetically separate from its neighbors. This group may have been a class of priests or merchants who maintained a distinct identity by practicing endogamy—marrying within their own social and genetic group. Their maternal lineages, which likely included common West Eurasian haplogroups such as U, H, and J, remained isolated from the surrounding population, leaving a genetic signal of their distant origins in a box of bones.