Samarqand

Samarqand, in present-day Uzbekistan in the region of Transoxiana (Mawarannahr), was one of the great cities of the Silk Road and, under Timur (Tamerlane), the magnificent capital of the Timurid Empire in the late 14th-15th centuries, a centre of art, science, and the Ulugh Beg observatory. The Hanafi jurist-exegete Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandi (d. c. 983) took his nisba from it.