In Samarra the stucco and wall paintings are similar to that of the palaces of Panjakent in what is now Tajikistan.
Some of the main historical cities of Persia are located in the older Khorasan: Nishapur and Tus (now in Iran), Merv and Sanjan (now in Turkmenistan), Samarkand and Bukhara (both now in Uzbekistan), Herat and Balkh (now in Afghanistan), Khujand and Panjakent (now in Tajikistan).
Shaivism was popular in Sogdiana and Eastern Turkestan as found from the wall painting from Penjikent on the river Zervashan.
It was constituted from rayons of Samarkand (Samarkand and Panjakent uzeyds), Jizzakh (Jizzakh and Katta-Kurgan uzeyds) and Khojent (Khojent and Uratyube uzeyds).
Among the 8th-century murals in Panjakent, in the western Sugdh province of Tajikistan, there is a panel from room 1, sector 21, representing a series of scenes moving from right to left where it is possible to recognize the same person first in the act of checking a golden egg and later killing the animal in order to get more eggs, only to understand the stupidity of his idea at the very end of the sequence.
Marshak was a leading authority on the history of Panjakent, the archaeology and art history of Central Asia, and medieval eastern silverware.