{"id":318155,"date":"2026-07-13T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=318155"},"modified":"2026-07-09T08:59:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:59:47","slug":"postcard-from-transoxania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/07\/postcard-from-transoxania\/","title":{"rendered":"Postcard from Transoxania"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Marco Polo Drive of Peace, Culture, and Sustainable Development<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Khiva, Uzbekistan 7 Jul 2026\u00a0<\/em>– Transoxania, <\/em>the ancient Greek name for today\u2019s Uzbekistan, has hosted many of the great turnings of history. \u00a0The name signifies the lands beyond the Oxus River, which we now call the Amu Darya, the river which for millennia has given life to the oases of this desert region and made it a central node of the Silk Road. It was in Transoxania that Alexander the Great fought some of his hardest campaigns, against the Eastern Persian people known as the Sogdians.<\/p>\n

The battles ended when Alexander took his Sogdian bride,\u00a0 Roxana \u2014 \u201cLittle Star\u201d in the old Iranian tongue \u2014 and thereby drew the Sogdians to his side. Our local driver, a cheerful man, is also named Iskander (Alexander). The same name has been carried with pride across twenty-three centuries in the land the Macedonians wooed to their side.<\/p>\n

The Sogdians were here well before Alexander, before Rome, and more than two millennia before the Western-dominated world of recent centuries. The Polo brothers passed this way some 750 years ago.\u00a0 And into this ancient and enchanting region our small caravan of electric cars rolled in today.<\/p>\n

We have arrived to the center of the world as the ancient and medieval world knew it. This is the hinge between China and Persia, India and the steppe, the place where silk, paper, faiths, and the numerals we count with all changed hands.\u00a0 It is now becoming a 21st<\/sup> century destination for tourism, trade, and culture along the new \u201cmiddle corridor\u201d once again connecting Europe and China.<\/p>\n

The US marked its 250th birthday while we were on this road. Two hundred and fifty years is a blink of the eye in Transoxania. I feel a great sorrow at how the toddler U.S. empire has been behaving \u2014 lashing out at ancient civilizations, the Iranians above all, a people whose statecraft and poetry and science reach back some ten times longer than America\u2019s own short national life. As we know, America\u2019s war of whim against Iran this year did not go well.<\/p>\n

There is a wisdom in the old city walls and ancient madrassahs of Khiva that Washington would do well to relearn: that great and ancient nations are not to be bullied into submission but should be met in trade as equals. Peace, the first aim in our Marco Polo journey, starts with humility before the dignity of other peoples.<\/p>\n

The walled inner city of Khiva \u2014 the Itchan Kala<\/em> \u2014 is a wondrously preserved medieval town, its mud-brick ramparts glowing amber at dusk, its minarets and madrassahs and the stout turquoise stump of the unfinished Kalta Minor rising within. I am spellbound.\u00a0 Yet this walled city is no mere museum piece. Some two thousand people still live inside the ancient walls, sending their children to school along lanes worn smooth by a thousand years of tradesmen and artisans. Layer upon layer of civilization is stacked here \u2014 Khwarezmian, Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Timurid, Uzbek, Russian \u2014 and the whole of it is still a living, working part of the city today. That is a marvel: a place that carries its whole past forward without ceasing to be a home.<\/p>\n

This region, Transoxania to the ancient Greeks and Uzbekistan for us, remains a crossroads of many great civilizations, all inter-mixed rather than replaced. The Persian world gave the land its poetry and its administrative genius. The Greek world left its Iskanders and cities today such as Khujand, Tajikistan (once known as Alexandria Eschate, or Alexandria the Furthest).\u00a0 The Turkic peoples gave the Uzbek language and part of the population that fills these streets today. Christianity was here too, especially in the form of the Nestorian churches that once dotted the Silk Road as far as China. In Bukhara, where we go today, \u00a0there survives the remnants of an ancient Jewish community, the Bukhara Jews, who have prayed and traded and sung here for millennia. All of these civilizational threads are still visible in the weave of this remarkable region.<\/p>\n

After Bukhara \u2014city of pilgrims, scholars and saints \u2014 we will reach Samarkand, the jewel at the center of Transoxania. Samarkand was the capital of the vast empire of Timur, whom Europe came to know as Tamerlane: a conqueror as brutal as any in history, and yet also the founder of a dynasty that made this city a beacon of art and learning. It is his grandson I most long to honor there. Ulugh Beg<\/em> \u2014 prince, sultan, and, most gloriously, astronomer \u2014 built on the hill of Samarkand one of the great observatories of the pre-modern world, with a sextant so vast its arc was sunk deep into the bedrock. There, over seventeen years, he and his team of mathematicians measured the heavens with a precision Europe could not then match.<\/p>\n

Their great star catalogue, the Z\u012bj-i Sult\u0101n\u012b<\/em> of 1437, fixed the positions of more than a thousand stars anew \u2014 the first such catalogue built on fresh observation since Ptolemy, thirteen centuries before \u2014 and it was not surpassed in accuracy until Tycho Brahe, a century and a half later. Ulugh Beg\u2019s measurement of the length of the year, and of the tilt of the Earth\u2019s axis, were finer than the values Copernicus himself would use. And the knowledge traveled: his tables reached Europe, were printed at Oxford by Thomas Hyde in 1665, and were studied by astronomers such as Hevelius, feeding the very stream of observation from which the Copernican revolution and modern astronomy would rise. That a Timurid prince on this Silk Road hill helped light the way for Kepler and Newton is the kind of connection our Marco Polo drive was made to celebrate \u2014 the long, patient, borderless collaboration of human minds across every frontier of nations, faiths, and languages.<\/p>\n

From the heart of the Silk Road, with the dust of Khiva on our sandals and Samarkand\u2019s blue domes still ahead \u2014 warmest greetings, and our fondest yearnings for peace among the old and young nations alike.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General [Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. His books include <\/em>The End of Poverty<\/a>, Common Wealth<\/a>, The Age of Sustainable Development<\/a>, Building the New American Economy<\/a>, and most recently,<\/em> A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism<\/a>. Sachs was also an advisor to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sonia Sachs is Jeff’s wife.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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