The Great Silk Road is one of the most significant achievements in the history of world civilization. An extensive system of caravan routes crossed Europe and Asia from the Mediterranean to China, and in Ancient times and in the middle Ages served as an important means of trade and communication between Western and Eastern cultures. The longest route passed through Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Since the appearance of the Great silk road, trade caravans passing through the modern land of the Kazakh people have had a great impact on the development of urban culture. One of the points of view is that these cities arose on the basis of caravanserais, while another point of view is based on the fact that they arose from the settlements of peoples who migrated from Central Asia during the existence of the Turkic States and established their own settlements. Historically, the road received the name “Silk Road” in connection with the silk trade, and later the word “Great” was added to this name because the road connected the vast Eastern and Western regions. Thus, this article attempts to answer the question of which mixed cultures arose as a result of the emergence of the largest urban cultures in the trading system, which went down in history as the “Great Silk Road”.

Recently, historians have paid more attention to the modern history of Kazakhstan, while some issues of the medieval, in particular, the early medieval history of the Kazakh people have remained poorly studied. To fill this gap, the authors of the article focus on the analysis of the history of large cities of the early Middle Ages in Semirechye and Southern Kazakhstan, the main trade and economic centers and direct relations of Sogdian peoples with the Turks. The article provides a lot of information for students and doctoral students studying the medieval period.