The history of Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan lies at the heart of Central Asia, between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, in the land the Greeks called Transoxiana and the Arabs Mawarannahr, "what lies beyond the river". Its irrigated oases, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Tashkent and the Fergana Valley, were among the richest cities of the Silk Road, ruled in turn by Persian kings, Alexander and his successors, Kushan emperors, Turkic khagans and Arab caliphs. Under the Samanids Bukhara was a capital of Islamic learning, and under Timur and his descendants Samarkand became one of the most splendid cities in the world. The Uzbek khanates that followed were conquered by Russia in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union drew the borders of an Uzbek republic in 1924, turning it into a vast cotton plantation. Independent since 1991, Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia.

People have lived in the region for a very long time. In 1938 Soviet archaeologists found the skeleton of a Neanderthal child, buried around 70,000 years ago, in the cave of Teshik-Tash in the south. In the Bronze Age, farming settlements with irrigation canals grew up along the rivers, while the steppe to the north belonged to herders. By the first millennium BCE the oases were home to Iranian-speaking peoples: the Sogdians of the Zarafshan valley around Samarkand and Bukhara, the Bactrians in the south along the Amu Darya, and the Khwarezmians on its lower course near the Aral Sea. Nomadic Saka and Massagetae, related to the Scythians, roamed between them. Many scholars think the early religion of Zoroastrianism took shape somewhere in this eastern Iranian world.

In the sixth century BCE Cyrus the Great brought the region into the Achaemenid Empire, and Sogdiana, Bactria and Khwarezm paid tribute to Persia as satrapies for two centuries. In 329 BCE Alexander the Great arrived, took Maracanda, as Samarkand was then called, and spent two hard years subduing the Sogdian resistance led by Spitamenes. He married Roxana, the daughter of a Sogdian or Bactrian noble, and founded a garrison city on the Syr Darya, Alexandria Eschate, "the furthest".

After Alexander, the Seleucid Empire briefly held the region before Greek governors in Bactria broke away around 250 BCE to form the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. In the second century BCE nomads from the east, the Yuezhi, overran Bactria, and one of their clans later founded the Kushan Empire, which in the first to third centuries CE ruled from southern Uzbekistan across Afghanistan into northern India. Under the Kushans, Buddhism flourished in the south; monasteries and stupas have been excavated around Termez, from where the faith spread along the trade routes to China.

The Chinese envoy Zhang Qian reached the Fergana Valley in about 128 BCE, and in 104 BCE the Han dynasty sent an army to besiege Dayuan, the Fergana kingdom, to obtain its prized "heavenly horses". This was the beginning of regular traffic along the Silk Road. For the next thousand years Sogdian merchants were its leading traders, with colonies stretching from the Crimea to the Chinese capital, and the Sogdian language served as a lingua franca. Samarkand's wall paintings at Afrasiyab, from the seventh century, show envoys from China, Korea and India visiting a Sogdian king.

In the fifth century the Hephthalites, sometimes called the White Huns, dominated the region, until in the 560s the Göktürks and Persia's Sasanian Empire destroyed them. The Turkic khagans then became overlords of the Sogdian city-states, which kept their own rulers and Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian temples.

Arab armies raided across the Amu Darya from the 650s, after the conquest of Persia. Between 705 and 715 the Umayyad Caliphate's governor of Khorasan, Qutayba ibn Muslim, conquered Bukhara, Samarkand and Khwarezm, and in 751 an Arab army defeated the forces of the Tang dynasty at Talas, ending Chinese ambitions west of the mountains. Islam spread gradually over the following centuries, and the region's support was crucial to the Abbasid revolution of 750.

In 819 the Abbasid caliph appointed members of the Persian Saman family as governors of Samarkand, Fergana and other cities, and by the end of the century the Samanid Empire, with its capital at Bukhara, was effectively independent. Under the Samanids the region was a heartland of the Islamic Golden Age. New Persian, written in Arabic script, became a literary language, with poets such as Rudaki. The region produced many of the greatest scholars of the Islamic world: al-Khwarizmi, the mathematician whose name gave us the word "algorithm", came from Khwarezm, as did the polymath al-Biruni; Avicenna was born near Bukhara around 980 and studied in the Samanid library; and al-Bukhari compiled the most respected collection of the sayings of the Prophet. The Samanids also bought Turkish slave soldiers from the steppe, who would soon become rulers themselves.

In 999 the Turkic Kara-Khanid Khanate took Bukhara and ended Samanid rule, while the Ghaznavids, a dynasty founded by a former Samanid slave general, took the lands south of the Amu Darya. The arrival of the Kara-Khanids began the slow process by which Turkic languages came to dominate the oases, though Persian remained the language of culture and many cities stayed bilingual. The Kalyan minaret of Bukhara, built by a Kara-Khanid ruler in 1127, still stands. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Seljuk Empire and then the Buddhist Qara Khitai made the Kara-Khanids their vassals. Around 1200 the shahs of Khwarezm, with their capital at Gurganj, conquered Transoxiana and much of Iran.

When the Khwarazmshah's governor at Otrar killed a caravan of merchants sent by Genghis Khan, the Mongols invaded. In 1220 they took Bukhara and Samarkand, and in 1221 Gurganj, killing or enslaving much of the population and wrecking the irrigation works. Transoxiana then became part of the Chagatai Khanate of the Mongol Empire, named after Genghis's second son. The cities slowly recovered, and the Mongol rulers converted to Islam, but in the fourteenth century the khanate broke apart in struggles among Turkic-Mongol tribal chiefs.

One of these chiefs, Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane, was born in 1336 near Kesh, now Shahrisabz, into a Turkicised Mongol tribe. By 1370 he had made himself master of Transoxiana, and over the following thirty-five years he conquered Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, the Golden Horde's capital on the Volga, Delhi, Damascus and Ottoman Anatolia, killing vast numbers of people and leaving pyramids of skulls behind him. Because he was not descended from Genghis Khan, he never took the title of khan, ruling instead as amir in the name of puppet khans. He died in 1405 while marching on China.

The loot and the captive craftsmen of his campaigns went to Samarkand, which Timur rebuilt as his capital with blue-tiled domes, gardens and the vast Bibi-Khanym mosque. His tomb, the Gur-e Amir, survives there. Under his successors, the Timurid Empire shrank, but its cities enjoyed a cultural flowering. His grandson Ulugh Beg, who governed Samarkand from 1409 to 1449, was a gifted astronomer; his madrasa on the Registan square was completed in 1420, and his observatory produced star tables of unmatched accuracy. Herat, in modern Afghanistan, became the other great Timurid centre, where the poet Ali-Shir Navoi, regarded as the founder of literature in the Chagatai Turkic language, from which modern Uzbek descends, worked in the late fifteenth century.

The name Uzbek was originally used for nomadic tribes of the eastern Golden Horde, north of the Aral Sea. In 1500 and 1501 their leader Muhammad Shaybani, a descendant of Genghis Khan, conquered Samarkand and Bukhara from the quarrelling Timurids. Among those he drove out was Babur, a Timurid prince from Andijan in the Fergana Valley, who lost Samarkand for the last time in 1512 and went on to found the Mughal Empire in India in 1526.

The Shaybanids ruled the Khanate of Bukhara, where in the sixteenth century they built many of the madrasas and covered bazaars that still define the old city. They fought the Shia Safavid Empire of Iran, a rivalry that was partly religious, since the Uzbeks were Sunni. A separate Uzbek dynasty ruled the Khanate of Khiva in Khwarezm from 1512. The shift of world trade to European sea routes, war with Iran and raids by Kazakh and Kalmyk nomads gradually impoverished the region, though the khanates remained centres of Islamic scholarship and the slave trade, and Bukhara's markets sold Persians and Russians captured in raids. In the early eighteenth century a third Uzbek state, the Khanate of Kokand, broke away in the Fergana Valley. The Persian conqueror Nader Shah made Bukhara and Khiva his vassals in 1740, but after his death the Manghit dynasty took power in Bukhara and ruled it, from 1785, as an emirate.

In the nineteenth century the Russian Empire, pushing south through the Kazakh steppe and competing with Britain in the "Great Game", turned on the khanates. The American Civil War, which cut off supplies of American cotton, made the region's cotton even more attractive. General Mikhail Chernyaev took Tashkent, then part of Kokand, in 1865, and it became the seat of the Governor-General of Turkestan in 1867. Samarkand fell in 1868, and Bukhara became a Russian protectorate that year; Khiva followed in 1873, and Kokand was abolished and annexed outright in 1876.

The emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva kept their thrones and their internal powers but lost control of their foreign relations. Russian rule brought railways, the Trans-Caspian line reaching Samarkand in 1888, Russian settlers in new European quarters beside the old cities, and a huge expansion of cotton planting. A rebellion in Andijan in 1898 was crushed. Among Muslim intellectuals the Jadid movement, named after its "new method" schools, called for educational and religious reform, modern newspapers and eventually self-rule. In 1916 an order conscripting Central Asians for labour behind the front in World War I set off a revolt across the region that Russian forces put down with great brutality.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian workers and soldiers formed a Soviet government in Tashkent that excluded the Muslim majority. Muslim leaders proclaimed an autonomous government at Kokand in November 1917, but the Tashkent Soviet's forces destroyed it in February 1918, sacking the city and killing thousands of its inhabitants. Armed resistance to Soviet rule, which the Bolsheviks called the Basmachi movement, continued in the Fergana Valley and the mountains into the 1920s. In 1920 the Red Army overthrew the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva, and the Jadid reformer Fayzulla Khodzhayev led the short-lived Bukharan People's Soviet Republic.

In 1924 the national delimitation of Central Asia divided the region along ethnic lines and created the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, at first including Tajikistan, which became a separate republic in 1929; Samarkand was the capital until 1930, when Tashkent replaced it. Karakalpakstan, near the Aral Sea, was joined to Uzbekistan in 1936 as an autonomous republic. The new Uzbek nation was given a standardised language, written successively in Arabic, Latin and from 1940 Cyrillic script. A campaign launched in 1927, the hujum or "assault", pressed women to abandon the veil; some who did were killed by relatives. Agriculture was collectivised, mosques and madrasas closed, and under Joseph Stalin the republic's leaders, including Khodzhayev, were executed in the purges of 1937 and 1938.

During World War II factories and hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the European Soviet Union moved to Uzbekistan, and the republic also received deported peoples, among them the Crimean Tatars in 1944, many of whom died soon after arrival. After the war, Moscow demanded ever more cotton. Irrigation schemes diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, and from the 1960s the Aral Sea, shared with Kazakhstan, began to shrink, eventually losing most of its area and leaving behind salt flats, polluted soils and a public-health crisis in Karakalpakstan. In 1966 an earthquake destroyed much of old Tashkent, which was rebuilt as a showcase Soviet city. Sharof Rashidov, party leader from 1959 to 1983, ran the republic through networks of patronage, and after his death investigators uncovered a vast fraud in which cotton harvests had been inflated to collect payments from Moscow.

Islam Karimov became party leader in 1989, during the last years of the Soviet Union, and in 1990 the republic declared its sovereignty. After the failed coup in Moscow, Uzbekistan declared independence on 31 August 1991, and Karimov was elected president that December as the Soviet Union dissolved. He ruled for twenty-five years, extending his terms by referendum, banning real opposition and keeping tight state control of the economy, which depended on exports of cotton, gas and gold. The cotton harvest relied on the forced labour of students, teachers, doctors and other public employees, for which the country faced international boycotts.

Karimov presented his rule as a bulwark against Islamist extremism. After bombings in Tashkent in 1999, which the government blamed on Islamist militants, thousands of people were imprisoned, and human rights groups documented widespread torture. In May 2005 troops opened fire on a mass protest in Andijan; the government gave an official toll of 187, but witnesses and rights groups said several hundred people were killed. When Western governments called for an independent inquiry, Karimov expelled the American air base that had supported the war in Afghanistan and moved closer to Russia and China. Relations with neighbours, especially Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, were tense over borders and water.

Karimov died on 2 September 2016. His prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, became acting president and won an election in December 2016. Mirziyoyev opened borders and restored relations with neighbouring states, freed some political prisoners, made the currency convertible in 2017, invited foreign investment and tourism, and moved to end forced labour in the cotton harvest, which the United Nations said in 2020 had made major progress. Political competition remained closely managed, and international indices continued to describe the country as authoritarian.

In July 2022 proposed constitutional changes that would have ended Karakalpakstan's status as a sovereign republic within Uzbekistan, with a right to secede, set off protests in Nukus. The amendments were withdrawn, but the protests were suppressed under a state of emergency, and at least 18 people were killed. A new constitution approved in a referendum in April 2023 lengthened the presidential term to seven years, and Mirziyoyev won a snap election in July 2023 that began a fresh term under the new rules. By 2026 Uzbekistan had about 39 million people, nearly half the population of Central Asia.