Uzbekistan


Uzbekistan, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan, is a doubly landlocked country located in Central Asia. It is surrounded by five countries: Kazakhstan to the north, Kyrgyzstan to the northeast, Tajikistan to the southeast, Afghanistan to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southwest, making it one of only two doubly landlocked countries on Earth, the other being Liechtenstein. The country has a population of more than 38.2 million, making it the most populous country in Central Asia. Uzbekistan is a member of the Organization of Turkic States. Uzbek, spoken by the Uzbek people, is the official language and is spoken by the majority of its inhabitants, while Russian and Tajik are significant minority languages. Islam is the predominant religion, and most Uzbeks are Sunni Muslims.
The first recorded settlers in Uzbekistan were Eastern Iranian nomads, known as Scythians, who founded kingdoms in Khwarazm, Sogdiana, and Bactria in the 8th–6th centuries BC, as well as Fergana and Margiana in the 3rd century BC – 6th century AD. The area was incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire and, after a period of Greco-Bactrian rule, was part of the Sasanian Empire until the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century. The early Muslim conquests and the subsequent Samanid Empire converted most of the people into adherents of Islam. During this period, cities began to grow rich from the Silk Road, and became a center of the Islamic Golden Age. The local Khwarazmian dynasty was destroyed by the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, leading to a dominance by Mongol peoples. Timur in the 14th century established the Timurid Empire. Its capital was Samarkand, which became a center of science under the rule of Ulugh Beg, giving birth to the Timurid Renaissance. The territories of the Timurid dynasty were conquered by Kipchak Shaybanids in the 16th century. Conquests by Emperor Babur towards the east led to the foundation of the Mughal Empire in India. Most of Central Asia was gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 19th century, with Tashkent becoming the political center of Russian Turkestan. In 1924, national delimitation created the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as a republic of the Soviet Union. It declared independence as the Republic of Uzbekistan in 1991.
Uzbekistan is a secular state, with a semi-presidential constitutional government. Uzbekistan comprises 12 regions, Tashkent City, and one autonomous republic, Karakalpakstan. While non-governmental organisations have defined Uzbekistan as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights", significant reforms under Uzbekistan's second president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, have been made following the death of the first president, Islam Karimov. Owing to these reforms, relations with the neighbouring countries of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan have drastically improved. A United Nations report of 2020 found much progress toward achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
The Uzbek economy is undergoing a gradual transition to a market economy, with foreign trade policy being based on import substitution. In September 2017, the country's currency became fully convertible at market rates. Uzbekistan is a major producer and exporter of cotton. With gigantic power-generation facilities from the Soviet era and an ample supply of natural gas, Uzbekistan has become the largest electricity producer in Central Asia. From 2018 to 2021, the republic received a BB− sovereign credit rating by both Standard and Poor and Fitch Ratings. In June 2025, Fitch Ratings upgraded Uzbekistan’s long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating from BB− to BB, with a Stable Outlook, citing sustained economic reforms, robust growth, and improvements in external buffers. The Brookings Institution described Uzbekistan as having large liquid assets, high economic growth, and low public debt. Uzbekistan is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Etymology

The name Uzbeg'istán appears in the 16th century Tarikh-i Rashidi.
The origin of the word Uzbek remains disputed.
  1. "free", "independent" or "own master/leader", requiring an amalgamation of uz, beg
  2. eponymously named after Oghuz Khagan, also known as Oghuz Beg
  3. A contraction of uğuz, earlier oğuz, that is, the oghuz, or "tribe", amalgamated with bek "oguz-leader".
All three have the middle syllable/phoneme being cognate with the Turkic title beg.
The name of the country was often spelled Ўзбекистон in Uzbek Cyrillic or Узбекистан in Russian during Soviet rule.

History

The region has been referred to by many names over the millennia. The name Uzbekistan first appears in 16th century literature. Other names for the region include: Transoxiana, Turkestan, and Bukhara. In the 14th century the region served as the birthplace, home, and capital of Tamerlane. Under Tamerlane, the region was a part of the Timurid Empire which extended from the Black Sea to the Arabian Sea, and to just outside of Delhi, India.

Prehistory and ancient history

Central Asia was shaped by multiple Indo-European migrations. During early antiquity, the region was inhabited by nomadic Scythian tribes who came from the Eurasian Steppe, which includes modern Uzbekistan, sometime during the first millennium BC. When these nomadic tribes settled in the region they built an extensive irrigation system along the rivers. At this time, cities such as Bukhoro and Samarqand emerged as centres of government and high culture. By the fifth century BC, the Bactrian, Sogdian, and Tokharian states dominated the region.
As East Asia began to develop its silk trade with the West, using an extensive network of cities and rural settlements in the province of Transoxiana, and further east in what is today Xinjiang, the Sogdian intermediaries became the wealthiest of these merchants. As a result of this trade on what became known as the Silk Road, Bukhara and Samarkand eventually became extremely wealthy cities, and at times Transoxiana was one of the most influential and powerful provinces of antiquity.
File:1872 Vereshchagin Triumphierend anagoria.JPG|thumb|right|Triumphant crowd at Registan, Sher-Dor Madrasah. The Emir of Bukhara viewing the severed heads of Russian soldiers on poles. Painting by Vasily Vereshchagin.
File:KarazinNN VstRusVoyskGRM.jpg|thumb|right|Russian troops taking Samarkand in 1868, by Nikolay Karazin
The Achaemenid emperors Cyrus the Great, and later Darius the Great, exerted control over the Amu Darya, incorporating Bactria and Chorasmia as satrapies. Historical Iranian texts later record the region as Turan. In 327 BC, Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire provinces of Sogdiana and Bactria, which contained the territories of modern Uzbekistan. Popular resistance to the conquest was fierce, causing Alexander's army to be bogged down in the region that became the northern part of the Macedonian Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. The kingdom was replaced with the Yuezhi-dominated Kushan Empire in the first century BC. For many centuries thereafter the region of Uzbekistan was ruled by the Hephthalites and Sassanid Empires, as well as by other empires, for example, those formed by the Turkic Gokturk peoples.

Medieval history

The Muslim conquests from the seventh century onward saw the Arabs bring Islam to Uzbekistan. In the same period, Islam began to take root among the nomadic Turkic peoples.
In the eighth century, Transoxiana, the territory between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers, was conquered by the Arabs, becoming a focal point soon after the Islamic Golden Age.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Transoxiana was brought into the Samanid Empire. In the tenth century it was gradually dominated by the Turkic-ruled Karakhanids, as well as their Seljuk overseers.
The Mongol conquest under Genghis Khan during the 13th century brought change to the region. The invasions of Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench and other cities resulted in mass murders and unprecedented destruction, which saw parts of Khwarezmia being completely razed.
Following the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, the empire was divided among his four sons and family members. Despite the potential for serious fragmentation, an orderly succession continued for several generations. Control of most of Transoxiana stayed in the hands of the direct descendants of Chagatai Khan, the second son of Genghis Khan. Orderly succession, prosperity, and internal peace prevailed in the Chagatai lands, and the Mongol Empire as a whole remained a strong and united kingdom, known as the Golden Horde.

Timurid period

One tribal chieftain, Timur, emerged from struggles in the 1380s as the dominant force in Transoxiana. Although he was not a descendant of Genghis Khan, Timur became the de facto ruler of Transoxiana and proceeded to conquer all of western Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the southern steppe region north of the Aral Sea. He also invaded Russia before dying during an invasion of China in 1405. Timur was also known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres in the cities he occupied.
Timur initiated the last flowering of Transoxiana by gathering together numerous artisans and scholars from the vast lands he had conquered into his capital, Samarkand, thus imbuing his empire with a rich Perso-Islamic culture. During his reign and the reigns of his immediate descendants, a wide range of religious and palatial construction masterpieces were undertaken in Samarkand and other population centres.
Tamerlane also established an exchange of medical discoveries and became the patron of physicians, scientists and artists from neighbouring countries such as India; his grandson Ulugh Beg was one of the world's first great astronomers. It was during the Timurid dynasty that Turkic, in the form of the Chaghatai dialect, became a literary language in its own right in Transoxiana, although the Timurids were Persianate in culture. The greatest Chaghataid writer, Ali-Shir Nava'i, was active in the city of Herat in the second half of the 15th century.