Rabаd is the name of a commercial and industrial suburb in the medieval cities of Central Asia and South Kazakhstan, Iran and Afghanistan. In the layout of a classic medieval city centered around a citadel and shakhristan, a rabad adjoined the fortified part of the city. Later, rabads would sometimes be surrounded by fortified walls and moats for protection. A rabad was the center of the economic and political life of a medieval Muslim city.
In ancient Panjakent, to the east and southeast of the shakhristan were suburban farmsteads - the earliest iteration of the rabad. This area of these suburbs was 20-25 hectares. There were no large architectural complexes here, only separate farmsteads. In the 1950s, nine manor houses were unearthed that were taken for hills before their excavation, but the interiors when excavated were relatively well-preserved. Excavation revealed the layout of these structures. The houses consisted of an entrance area, three additional rooms, a hallway, and a ramp to the top of the building.
One of these isolated hills was measured to be 22 × 16 m in area and a height of 2.5 m. In the back room was a wine press, which lead researchers to the conclusion that the family living in this house was most likely engaged in winemaking. The owners of the estate lived in the other rooms; in one, perhaps, they also kept livestock. Sometimes just a few meters away from the manor's residential buildings were naous – tombs where residents of the suburbs buried their dead.
The town reached its peak in the 7-8th centuries, but the Arab conquest put an end to that prosperity. In some areas, there are traces of a large fire - most likely dated to 722 AD. By 738-740 the city had been restored again, but in the 770s Panjakent was destroyed once more by invading Arab troops, possibly in response to the anti-Islam uprising of the self-proclaimed prophet Mukanna, and this time life in Panjakent's shahristan and rabad ended completely.
