Daily History Challenge · No. 37 · Tuesday 4 August 2026 · Chain

Puzzle No. 37: Chain

The anchor was Construction of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand (1404 CE). Every challenger is listed below with its year.

The anchor

c. 1399-1404Construction of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand

Commissioned during the reign of Timur (Tamerlane) and associated with his senior wife Saray Mulk Khanum, the Bibi-Khanym Mosque was built between roughly 1399 and 1404 to be the great congregational mosque of his imperial capital, Samarkand. Conceived after Timur's campaign in India, it drew on artisans, masons, and materials gathered from across the conquered lands, with chroniclers describing the use of elephants to haul stone, and it stood among the largest and most ambitious mosques in the Islamic world. The complex followed the classic four-iwan plan around a vast rectangular courtyard, crowned by a towering double-shell dome and a monumental entrance portal flanked by minarets. Its scale strained contemporary engineering, and parts of the structure began to crack and decay soon after completion, a process accelerated by later neglect and by an earthquake in 1897. Celebrated as a landmark of the Timurid Renaissance, it shaped monumental architecture across Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and was extensively reconstructed in the Soviet era. Today it forms part of the Samarkand UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Read the full story · See the world in 1404 CE