In the 14th century, Timur the Lame led a nomad army against the whole settled world. He plundered from the Ganges to the Dardanelles, but the heartland of his empire lay between two great rivers north of Afghanistan, the Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya. Today both rivers sink into the sands of what is now the Republic of Uzbekistan. Many ancient cities lie beneath those sands, among them the city of Benaket.
I was in Uzbekistan this summer exploring the life of another great conqueror, Babur, and decided to try to find Benaket. It has an interesting history: as a 13-year-old, Babur came to meet the hostile Mongol Khan, a descendant of Genghis, in a garden outside Benaket’s city walls, and made the Khan his ally.
I consulted guidebooks and several historians, but at first it seemed as if the soft bricks of the city had simply melted away. All I discovered was that Benaket had another name, Shahrukhiya, after Timur the Lame’s son Shah’rukh. I went home, spread out maps and opened my copy of Babur’s memoirs, in which I had first seen mention of Benaket. It gave me just enough to guess that Benaket might be south-west of Tashkent near the Syr Dar’ya.
The next morning I dragged my taxi-loving interpreter on to a bus headed for Chinoz, a town about 40 miles south-west of Tashkent. The people there wanted to help, but my questions got nowhere. Finally the wizened old chairman of the war veterans’ association was summoned to the town hall. He answered with a story. In the 1970s, he told me, the municipality had held a competition for the best local history. The prize was a new Volga limousine, the Soviet Mercedes.
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