The best estimate of Bukhara's age is about 20 m, the
depth of the archaeological remains under some of its fortifications. Years
are more problematical. Textbooks say the city is 2000 years old; Bokhariots
themselves say 3000. There was certainly  something
for Alexander to conquer in 329 BC : 'He overcame a lion in single combat,
extorting from the Spartan envoy the exclamation, "Well done
Alexander, nobly has the won the prize of kingship from the
king of the woods!" ' (Curzon). There was human settlement too, but probably
nothing as big as a city.
The name Bukhara dates from the 1st century AD and may
come from vihara, Sanskrit for monastery, or bukhar, a Farsi word for 'source
of knowledge'. Either way, Bukhara would clearly like to be known as a
place of prayer and learning from the very beginning. Like the rest of
Sogdiana, it fell successively within the Achaemenid, Greek, Seleucid,
Parthian, Kushan and Sassanian empires before the Arabs arrived. It was
capital city for none of them, although the Hephthalite capital was only
40 km away at Paikend.
By 712 it was a wealthy trading center, but then three
years of resistance led by a princess with expensive taste in slippers
failed to deter Qutaiba ibn-Abbas and his army, and Bukhara's 700 richest
families left town rather than submit to Arab rule. Soviet history, as
ever, puts a different gloss on things: the invasion prompted in the 770s
the first of several 'large scale anti-feudal risings', this one led by
a certain Mukanna. It came to nothing. The authority of the Caliph of Baghdad
prevailed. Islam gradually eclipsed the competition : Buddhism, Zoroastrianism
and various fringe cults. And when Bukhara broke from the Caliphate under
Ismail Samani in 873, it was as capital of Central Asia's first independent
Muslim state.
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