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The Samanid Empire. The Samanids (819-999) were an Iranian dynasty from the village of Saman near Balkh whose four grandsons were rewarded by the Abbasids with governorships in Transoxiana for supporting the caliph al-Ma'mun. From those beginnings they built the last and greatest of the eastern Iranian empires: Isma'il ibn Ahmad (r. 892-907) united Transoxiana and Khorasan, destroyed the Saffarid empire by capturing Amr al-Layth at Balkh (900), and ruled from Bukhara a realm stretching from the Oxus to the borders of India and Iraq.
Samarkand and especially Bukhara became under the Samanids the cultural capitals of the eastern Islamic world. Their court consciously revived Persian letters: Rudaki, the blind court poet, founded the classical Persian poetic tradition; Daqiqi and the young Firdawsi began the work that became the Shahnameh; and the vizier Bal'ami produced the Persian adaptation of Tabari's great history. Scientists like the young Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who used the Samanid royal library, and geographers like al-Istakhri flourished under their protection.
The Samanids were also the frontier state of Islam in Central Asia: their ghazis raided the pagan Turks, their merchants and missionaries converted them, and Turkish slave-soldiers from the steppe entered Samanid service in growing numbers - the same institution that would produce the Ghaznavids and, in part, their own undoing. Nominally loyal to the Abbasid caliph, the Samanids were in practice fully independent monarchs who combined Iranian kingship with Sunni orthodoxy.
From mid-century court factions of Turkish generals and rival emirs hollowed out the state, and the end came quickly: in 999 the Qarakhanid Turks took Bukhara without a battle while Mahmud of Ghazna absorbed Khorasan. But the Samanid century had fixed the Persian language and Persianate culture of the Islamic east - the foundation on which every later dynasty from the Ghaznavids to the Mughals would build.
Britannica: Samanid dynasty
Encyclopaedia Iranica: Khorasan in the Taherid and Samanid Periods
Encyclopaedia Iranica: Esma'il b. Ahmad Samani