History

Before there was a country there were regions: Sogdiana around Samarkand, Bactria to the south, Khwarezm on the Amu Darya delta. Sogdian merchants ran the Silk Road's middle leg and their language became its lingua franca. Alexander took Samarkand in 329 BC and married a Bactrian woman there. Arab armies arrived in the early 8th century, and under the Samanids of Bukhara the region became the intellectual centre of the Islamic world. Genghis Khan destroyed most of that in 1220. A century and a half later Timur made Samarkand his capital and rebuilt on a scale that still defines the skyline.

By the 18th century the region had settled into three rival states: the Emirate of Bukhara, the Khanate of Khiva and the Khanate of Kokand. The Russian Empire took them one by one — Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873, Kokand annexed in 1876 — and governed the whole as Turkestan. Cotton replaced much of the food crop, a decision whose consequences reached the Aral Sea a century later. In 1924 Soviet border-drawing produced the Uzbek SSR, roughly the shape of the country today. Independence was declared on 31 August 1991 and is celebrated every 1 September.