The history of Tajikistan

Tajikistan covers the mountainous eastern edge of the old Iranian world, including parts of the ancient lands of Sogdiana and Bactria. Its Persian-speaking people trace their heritage to the Sogdian merchants of the Silk Road and to the Samanid dynasty, under which the Persian language and literature were reborn in the ninth and tenth centuries. Over the following centuries the region was ruled by Turkic, Mongol, Timurid and Uzbek dynasties, then conquered by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. The Soviet Union created a Tajik republic in 1924 and 1929, but left the great Tajik cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Independent since 1991, Tajikistan was devastated by a civil war from 1992 to 1997 and has been ruled since then by Emomali Rahmon.

Stone tools found in the loess hills of southern Tajikistan, at sites such as Kuldara, are among the oldest traces of humans in Central Asia. Later hunter-gatherers lived in the valleys and high Pamirs. In the fourth millennium BCE farmers founded Sarazm, near modern Panjakent in the Zeravshan valley, one of the earliest settlements in Central Asia with signs of town life. Its people mined and worked metals and traded turquoise, carnelian and copper over long distances, and the site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the Bronze Age the south of the country lay on the edge of the Oxus civilisation, a culture of fortified towns along the Amu Darya, while herders of the Andronovo culture spread across the steppe to the north. By the first millennium BCE Iranian-speaking peoples dominated the region. Settled farmers lived in the river oases, and nomads known to the Persians as Saka, cousins of the Scythians, roamed the mountains and steppes. Many scholars believe that Zoroastrianism took shape in or near Bactria.

In the sixth century BCE Cyrus the Great brought Bactria, in the south, and Sogdiana, in the north, into the Achaemenid Empire as provinces. Their horsemen and tribute were valued by the Persian kings. When Alexander the Great invaded in 329 BCE, the Sogdian leader Spitamenes waged a long guerrilla war against him. Alexander founded Alexandria Eschate, "the furthest", on the site of modern Khujand, and married Roxana, the daughter of a Sogdian or Bactrian noble.

After Alexander the region passed to the Seleucid Empire and then, around 250 BCE, to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, whose Greek kings ruled cities in what are now Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and southern Tajikistan. The temple of Takht-i Sangin on the Amu Darya, near where the Oxus Treasure of Achaemenid gold was found in 1877, dates from this era. In the second century BCE nomads from the east, the Yuezhi and the Saka, overran the Greek kingdom. One Yuezhi clan founded the Kushan Empire in the first century CE, which ruled from Central Asia into northern India and spread Buddhism northwards. Envoys of the Han dynasty of China reached the region in the second century BCE, beginning the regular exchanges that made it part of the Silk Road.

From the fourth to the eighth century the region was divided among small kingdoms under a series of overlords, among them the Sasanian Empire of Persia, the Kidarites and Hephthalites, who were nomadic powers from the north, and from the 560s the Göktürks. China's Tang dynasty claimed loose authority in the mid-seventh century. The Sogdians, whose language was Eastern Iranian, became the great traders of the Silk Road, with colonies stretching to China and Mongolia, and they carried Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and their own alphabet along the trade routes. Panjakent, a Sogdian city of merchants' houses decorated with wall paintings of epics and feasts, has been excavated in western Tajikistan. In the south, the Buddhist monastery of Ajina Tepe, with its huge clay statue of the reclining Buddha, was active into the eighth century.

Arab armies raided across the Amu Darya from the 650s. Between 705 and 715 the Umayyad Caliphate's governor of Khurasan, Qutayba ibn Muslim, conquered the Sogdian cities. Devashtich, the ruler of Panjakent, rebelled and was executed in 722, and documents from his last refuge on Mount Mugh are a major source for Sogdian history. Under the Abbasid Caliphate, Islam spread, and by the ninth century it was the main religion of the region.

The Samanids, a Persian family from the region, began as governors for the Abbasids and by the end of the ninth century ruled an almost independent state, with its capital at Bukhara. Ismail Samani, who reigned from 892 to 907, is revered in Tajikistan as the founder of the nation, and the currency, the somoni, is named after him. The Samanid Empire presided over a flowering of learning and the arts that was part of the Islamic Golden Age. Above all, it sponsored the use of New Persian, written in Arabic script, as a literary language. The poet Rudaki, born at Panjrud in today's Tajikistan, is considered the father of Persian poetry, and the young Avicenna studied in the Samanid library at Bukhara. Modern Tajik is a form of this Persian language.

In 999 the Qarakhanid Turks took Bukhara and ended the Samanid state, while the south passed to the Ghaznavid Empire. Thereafter the region was ruled by Turkic dynasties, including the Qarakhanids and the Seljuk Empire, and later by the Khwarazmshahs. Persian remained the language of government, scholarship and literature, and Persian-speaking townspeople and farmers lived alongside Turkic nomads and soldiers, a mix out of which the distinction between Tajiks and Uzbeks later grew.

The armies of Genghis Khan arrived in 1219 and 1220. Khujand, defended by its governor Timur Malik, resisted for months, but the Mongol Empire destroyed cities across the region and killed much of their population. The land became part of the Chagatai Khanate. In 1370 Timur, a Turkic-Mongol commander born near Samarkand, made himself master of Transoxiana and built the Timurid Empire, whose capital at Samarkand became one of the great cities of the Islamic world. His successors patronised Persian art, poetry and science until Uzbek tribes under Muhammad Shaybani conquered Transoxiana in the early sixteenth century. One Timurid prince, Babur, from the Fergana valley, went on to found the Mughal Empire in India.

From the sixteenth century the region was ruled by Uzbek dynasties: the Shaybanids, then the Janids of the Khanate of Bukhara, and from 1785 the Manghit emirs of Bukhara. In 1709 the Fergana valley broke away as the Khanate of Kokand, which came to hold Khujand and the north. The mountain principalities of Karategin, Darvaz and the Pamirs were largely autonomous, and their Pamiri peoples, who speak Eastern Iranian languages and many of whom are Ismaili Shia Muslims, kept a distinct culture. For a time Afghan rulers also claimed parts of the south and the Pamirs. Long-distance trade declined as sea routes replaced the Silk Road, and the region became a poor and remote corner of the Muslim world.

In the 1860s the Russian Empire advanced into Central Asia, partly to secure cotton for its industry. It took Khujand from Kokand in 1866, and after defeating Bukhara's army forced the emir to sign a treaty in 1868 that left him as a Russian vassal and gave Samarkand and the upper Zeravshan to Russia. Kokand was abolished in 1876. The north of modern Tajikistan was governed directly as part of Russian Turkestan, while the south and east stayed under the emir. In the 1890s Russia and Britain divided the Pamirs between them, leaving the narrow Wakhan Corridor to Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian Empire and British India. Russian rule brought railways and cotton, but little change to most people's lives. In 1916 an attempt to conscript Central Asians for labour duty in the First World War set off revolts, including in Khujand.

After the Russian Revolution, Central Asian resistance to the Bolsheviks became the Basmachi movement, a guerrilla war that was strong in the mountains of eastern Bukhara. In 1920 the Red Army overthrew the last emir, Alim Khan, who fled to Afghanistan, and the former Ottoman leader Enver Pasha, who joined the Basmachi, was killed fighting near Baljuvan in 1922. Resistance in the mountains lasted until the late 1920s.

In the national delimitation of Central Asia in 1924, the Soviet Union created a Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Uzbek republic. In 1929 it became a full union republic, with Khujand added, but Bukhara and Samarkand, both largely Tajik-speaking, remained in Uzbekistan, a loss that many Tajiks still resent. The small market town of Dushanbe became the capital, named Stalinabad from 1929 to 1961. The Tajik language was written in Latin script from 1928 and in Cyrillic from 1940, separating it from the Persian written in Iran and Afghanistan.

Under Joseph Stalin, collectivisation and the expansion of cotton growing were forced on the peasants, mountain villagers were resettled in the cotton lowlands, and purges removed thousands from the Communist Party. Large numbers of Tajiks fought and died in the Second World War. After the war the republic gained irrigation, the giant Nurek Dam on the Vakhsh river and a vast aluminium smelter, but it remained the poorest of the Soviet republics, with a fast-growing rural population. In February 1990 riots broke out in Dushanbe, and under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms new parties formed, including the Islamic Renaissance Party and nationalist and democratic movements.

Tajikistan declared independence on 9 September 1991, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The former Communist leader Rahmon Nabiyev won the presidential election that November, but power struggles between regional groups quickly turned violent. In May 1992 war broke out between government forces, drawn mainly from the Khujand and Kulob regions, and an opposition alliance of Islamists, democrats and regional groups from Gharm and Gorno-Badakhshan. Nabiyev was forced to resign at gunpoint in September 1992. In November Emomali Rahmon, a former collective-farm director from Kulob backed by the Popular Front militia, became head of state, and pro-government forces retook Dushanbe in December with Russian and Uzbek support. Much of the fiercest fighting and killing of civilians took place in 1992 and 1993, including reprisals against people from Gharm and the Pamirs.

The opposition, later the United Tajik Opposition, fought on from bases in Afghanistan, while Russian troops guarded the Afghan border. Rahmon was elected president in 1994. Talks under the United Nations led to the General Agreement on Peace and National Accord, signed in Moscow on 27 June 1997, which gave the opposition 30 percent of government posts. Estimates of the war's dead range from about 20,000 to more than 100,000, and over a million people were displaced. Most of the country's Russians, Germans and Jews emigrated.

After the war Rahmon steadily concentrated power. Constitutional referendums in 2003 and 2016 extended his possible rule, the last removing term limits for him personally, and in 2015 parliament gave him the title "Leader of the Nation". The Islamic Renaissance Party, the opposition's main partner in the peace deal, was banned in 2015 and many of its leaders were jailed. Elections have been judged neither free nor fair by international observers, and Rahmon was re-elected with about 90 percent of the vote in 2020. Unrest in Gorno-Badakhshan was put down by force in 2012 and again in 2022.

The economy relies on aluminium, cotton and, above all, money sent home by hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Russia, which at times has equalled nearly half of national output. Russia keeps a military base in the country, and China has become a major lender and investor. Work on the Rogun Dam on the Vakhsh, meant to be among the world's tallest, resumed in 2016. After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, Tajikistan was one of the neighbours most hostile to them. Deadly clashes on the border with Kyrgyzstan in 2021 and 2022 killed scores of people, but in 2025 the two countries signed a treaty demarcating the whole frontier, and in March of that year the leaders of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan met in Khujand to mark the settlement.