Farab (Otrar)

Farab, known by the 13th century as Otrar, lay on the middle Syr Darya in what is now the Turkistan Region of southern Kazakhstan; today it is largely ruins. It stood where caravan routes linking China, the Middle East and Europe crossed. In 1219 Genghis Khan besieged it for five months after its governor executed a Mongol trade caravan, and the inhabitants were massacred. Timur died here in 1405. The biographer Ibn Khallikan reports that the philosopher al-Farabi, the 'Second Teacher' after Aristotle, was born in the village of Wasij near Farab; modern scholars regard his birthplace as uncertain, with other candidates in Turkmenistan and in Faryab, Afghanistan.