August
08
/ 2022
When Tashmuhammed Kari-Niyazov and Mikhail Gerasimov were tasked by Stalin to lead an expedition to Samarkand in Uzbekistan to open the tomb of Tamerlane, they didn’t know just how significant their work would be. To this day, it is still a widely held belief in Russia and ex-Soviet states that it was the actions of the archaeologists Kari-Niyazov and Gerasimov releasing the curse of Tamerlane that caused Hitler to break his peace treaty and attack the USSR. But what, exactly, leads people to believe this? Who was Tamerlane and How Big was His Empire? Tamerlane or Timur (his birth name) was born in Transoxiana in modern-day Uzbekistan. Tamerlane claimed to be a descendant of Tumanay Khan, which would mean he
