The history of Turkmenistan

Turkmenistan stretches from the Caspian Sea to the Amu Darya river, and most of it is covered by the Karakum, the "black sand" desert. Its history has been made in a ring of oases around the desert's edge: the foothills of the Kopet Dag along the Iranian border, the deltas of the Murghab and Tejen rivers, and the lower Amu Darya. Here some of Central Asia's earliest farming villages and Bronze Age towns grew up, and the oasis city of Merv became one of the greatest cities of the Islamic world before the Mongols destroyed it. The Turkmen, Turkic-speaking descendants of the medieval Oghuz, lived for centuries as tribal herders and farmers between Persia and the Uzbek khanates, until the Russian Empire conquered them in the 1880s. Independent since 1991, the country has been ruled by a succession of all-powerful presidents who have built personality cults on the income from some of the world's largest reserves of natural gas.

Around 6000 BCE villagers of the Jeitun culture, named after a site north of Ashgabat, were growing wheat and barley and herding goats and sheep on the narrow strip of land watered by streams from the Kopet Dag. These are among the oldest farming settlements in Central Asia, and they show the spread of agriculture eastward from the Near East. Over the following millennia larger settlements grew up at Anau and Namazga Depe, where potters, metalworkers and builders of mud-brick houses developed a distinctive culture.

In the late third millennium BCE settlers moved into the delta of the Murghab river, in the region the ancient Persians called Margiana. There, and in neighbouring Bactria, flourished the Bronze Age civilisation archaeologists call the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. Its largest known site, Gonur Depe, excavated by Viktor Sarianidi from the 1970s, had a walled palace, temples, workshops and cemeteries, and traded with Iran, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. By the end of the Bronze Age, speakers of Iranian languages were settled across the region, while nomadic Dahae and Massagetae roamed the desert and the shores of the Caspian.

In the sixth century BCE the oases became part of the Achaemenid Empire, divided among the satrapies of Margiana, Parthia and Chorasmia, and Merv grew up as a fortified provincial town. Alexander the Great passed through on his eastern campaigns in the 320s BCE, and after his death the Seleucid king Antiochus I refounded Merv as Antiochia in Margiana, enclosing it with a great wall.

In the mid-third century BCE the Parni, a nomadic people from the steppe east of the Caspian, took over the province of Parthia and founded the Arsacid dynasty. The Parthian Empire they built went on to rule Iran and Mesopotamia and to rival Rome for nearly five centuries. Their early royal centre at Nisa, on the edge of modern Ashgabat, has yielded palaces, a treasury and a remarkable collection of carved ivory drinking horns showing a blend of Greek and Iranian styles. Under the Parthians and then the Sasanian Empire, from 224 CE, Merv was a frontier capital and a stop on the Silk Road between China and the west. Its people followed Zoroastrianism, but the city also had Buddhist monasteries, Jewish communities and, from the fifth century, a bishop of the Church of the East.

In 651 the last Sasanian shah, Yazdegerd III, fleeing the Arab conquest of Iran, was killed near Merv, and the city surrendered to the armies of the caliph Uthman. Merv became the capital of the Arab province of Khorasan and the base for the conquest of the lands beyond the Amu Darya. In 748 Abu Muslim, an agent of the Abbasid family, raised the black banners of revolt near Merv, and the army he recruited there overthrew the Umayyads and brought the Abbasid Caliphate to power in 750. The caliph al-Ma'mun ruled the empire from Merv for several years before moving to Baghdad in 819.

Under the Tahirids, the Samanid Empire and the Ghaznavid Empire, Merv and the other oasis towns grew prosperous and learned, and the region's population gradually converted to Islam. Scholars from Merv, known by the surname al-Marwazi, worked across the Muslim world, and the geographer Yaqut later wrote admiringly of the city's libraries.

The ancestors of the Turkmen were the Oghuz, a confederation of Turkic tribes that had moved from Mongolia into the steppe north and east of the Aral Sea by the ninth and tenth centuries. Those Oghuz who accepted Islam and moved south into the settled lands came to be called Turkmen, a name that first appears in tenth-century sources. Their leading clan, the Seljuks, crossed into Khorasan in the 1030s. In 1040 they defeated the Ghaznavid sultan at Dandanaqan, between Merv and Sarakhs, and within fifteen years their leader Tughril Beg had conquered Iran and entered Baghdad.

The Seljuk Empire stretched from Central Asia to Anatolia, and its Turkmen warriors carried Turkish settlement into Iran, the Caucasus and Anatolia, laying the foundations of modern Azerbaijan and Turkey. Merv was one of the empire's capitals. Under Sultan Sanjar, who ruled the east from 1118 to 1157, it may have been among the largest cities in the world, and his great domed mausoleum still stands among its ruins. In 1153 Oghuz tribesmen rebelled, captured Sanjar and plundered Merv, and his empire fell apart after his death. Much of the region then passed to the shahs of Khwarezm, whose capital, Gurganj, lay on the lower Amu Darya at what is now Köneürgenç in northern Turkmenistan.

In 1221 the armies of Genghis Khan destroyed both Gurganj, which they flooded by breaking the dams of the Amu Darya, and Merv, where Genghis's son Tolui ordered the massacre of almost the entire population. Merv never recovered its former size. The region was divided between the Mongol Chagatai Khanate and the Ilkhanate of Iran, and later, from the 1380s, it fell to Timur, who again wrecked Gurganj, and to his Timurid successors.

Over these centuries the Turkmen spread over the steppe and oases, and branches moved far to the west, where Turkmen confederations such as the Kara Koyunlu and the Aq Qoyunlu ruled eastern Anatolia, Iraq and western Iran in the fifteenth century. In the lands of modern Turkmenistan the people were organised into tribes, the Teke, Yomut, Ersari, Salor, Saryk and others, each led by its own elders and with no common state. Most combined herding with farming in the oases. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the south was contested with Persia, ruled by the Safavid Empire and its successors, while the north was dominated by the Uzbek Khanate of Khiva and the Emirate of Bukhara. The Persian conqueror Nader Shah briefly ruled the region around 1740. Turkmen horsemen raided Persia for captives, who were sold in the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara. In the eighteenth century the poet Magtymguly Pyragy called on the tribes to unite, and he is honoured today as the father of Turkmen literature.

The Russian Empire founded the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk, now Türkmenbaşy, in 1869, after defeating Bukhara and before taking Khiva in 1873. The Teke Turkmen of the Akhal oasis resisted fiercely and defeated a Russian expedition in 1879. In January 1881 General Mikhail Skobelev besieged and stormed their fortress at Geok Tepe, near Ashgabat. Thousands of defenders were killed in the assault, and Russian cavalry then pursued and cut down fleeing men, women and children, with total deaths estimated in the region of 15,000. The battle is commemorated in Turkmenistan as a day of remembrance. Merv submitted in 1884, and the Russian seizure of the Panjdeh oasis in 1885 almost brought war with Britain, which feared for Afghanistan and India.

The conquered land became the Transcaspian Region, governed first from Tiflis and then, from 1898, as part of Russian Turkestan. The Trans-Caspian Railway, begun in 1879, linked the Caspian with Merv and by 1888 with Samarkand, and Ashgabat grew from a fort into a Russian colonial town. Cotton growing expanded, and Russian administration became notorious for corruption. In 1916 Turkmen joined the revolt across Central Asia against forced labour conscription for the First World War.

After the Russian Revolution, a Soviet government briefly ruled Ashgabat, but in July 1918 a rising of railway workers and others set up an anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian government, supported by a small British force from Persia. In September 1918 the "26 Baku Commissars", Bolshevik leaders who had fled Azerbaijan, were shot in the desert, an event for which Soviet historians blamed the British. The Red Army retook Ashgabat in July 1919 and Krasnovodsk in early 1920, while the Turkmen leader Junaid Khan fought for control of Khiva and resisted Soviet rule into the late 1920s.

In 1924 the Soviet national delimitation of Central Asia created the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, the first state with roughly the country's present borders, with Ashgabat as its capital. Soviet rule forced nomads to settle, collectivised livestock and land, closed mosques and replaced tribal authority with the Communist Party, and resistance was crushed. Under Joseph Stalin the republic's leaders were purged in the late 1930s. On 6 October 1948 an earthquake destroyed Ashgabat, killing somewhere between 10,000 and 110,000 people; the Soviet press revealed little of its scale. From 1954 the Karakum Canal, one of the longest irrigation canals in the world, carried water from the Amu Darya across the desert to grow cotton, contributing to the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Huge gas fields were found in the 1960s, above all at Dauletabad, and gas was piped to the rest of the Soviet Union, although the republic remained one of its poorest.

Saparmurat Niyazov became party leader in 1985. Turkmenistan declared its sovereignty in 1990, and after a referendum it declared independence on 27 October 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved. Niyazov kept power as president, turned the Communist Party into a new ruling Democratic Party and banned all opposition. He took the title Türkmenbaşy, "head of the Turkmen", and built one of the most extreme personality cults of modern times: a gilded statue of him in Ashgabat turned to follow the sun, the months were renamed after himself and his mother, and his book of spiritual guidance, the Ruhnama, became compulsory reading in schools and universities. In 1999 parliament made him president for life.

In 1995 the United Nations General Assembly recognised Turkmenistan's "permanent neutrality", and the country stayed out of military alliances and kept its distance even from other former Soviet states. Gas sales, mostly through Russia, paid for marble-clad buildings in Ashgabat and for free gas, electricity and water for citizens, but Niyazov also closed hospitals outside the capital, shortened schooling and cut pensions. After an alleged assassination attempt in 2002, many people were imprisoned, and some disappeared in custody. Niyazov died on 21 December 2006.

Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, a dentist who had been Niyazov's health minister, took over and was elected president in 2007 in a vote without real competition. He reversed some of his predecessor's excesses, restoring the old names of the months, ten-year schooling and pensions, and he opened gas exports to China through a pipeline completed in 2009, which made China the country's main customer. Yet he soon built a cult of his own, with a golden equestrian statue and the title Arkadag, "protector", and the country remained among the most closed and repressive in the world, with no independent media and tight controls on travel, the internet and religion.

In March 2022 his son Serdar Berdimuhamedow won a presidential election that international observers did not consider free or fair, and he became the country's third president. His father kept a central role as chairman of the People's Council, the supreme representative body, with the title of National Leader, and the two have effectively shared power since. In 2022 the elder Berdimuhamedow ordered the extinguishing of the Darvaza gas crater, a burning pit in the Karakum that had become the country's best-known sight. Turkmenistan has continued to depend heavily on gas exports, with China its largest buyer and plans for further pipelines across the Caspian and through Afghanistan.