Emirate of Bukhara
The Emirate of Bukhara was an Uzbek state that existed from 1785 to 1920 in what is now modern-day Uzbekistan. It occupied the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, known as Transoxiana, its core territory was the land along the lower Zarafshan River, its urban centres were the ancient cities of Samarkand and the emirate's capital, Bukhara. It was contemporaneous with the Khanate of Khiva to the west, in Khwarezm, the Khanate of Kokand to the east, in Fergana; the Emirate of Bukhara was created in 1785, upon the assumption of rulership by the Manghit emir, Shah Murad. As one of the few states in Central Asia after the Mongol Empire not ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan, it staked its legitimacy on Islamic principles rather than Genghisid blood, as the ruler took the Islamic title of Emir instead of Khan. Moreover, both of its neighbors, the Khanate of Khiva and the Kokand Khanate, as well as its predecessor, the Khanate of Bukhara, were ruled by Genghisid descendants. Over the course of the 18th century, the emirs had gained effective control of the Khanate of Bukhara, from their position as ataliq.
In 1747, after Nadir Shah's death, the ataliq Muhammad Rahim Bi murdered Abulfayz Khan and his son, ending the Janid dynasty. From on the emirs allowed puppet khans to rule until, following the death of Abu l-Ghazi Khan, Shah Murad assumed the throne openly. Fitzroy Maclean recounts in Eastern Approaches how Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly were executed by Nasrullah Khan in the context of The Great Game, how Joseph Wolff, known as the Eccentric Missionary, escaped their fate when he came looking for them in 1845, he was wearing his full canonical costume, which caused the Emir to burst out laughing, "Dr Wolff was suffered to leave Bokhara to the surprise of the populace, who were not accustomed to such clemency."In 1868, the emirate lost a war with Imperial Russia, which had colonial aspirations in the region. Russia annexed much of the emirate's territory, including the important city of Samarkand. In 1873 the remainder became a Russian protectorate, was soon surrounded by the Governorate-General of Turkestan.
Reformists within the Emirate had found the conservative emir, Mohammed Alim Khan, unwilling to loosen his grip on power, had turned to the Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries for military assistance. The Red Army launched an unsuccessful assault in March 1920, a successful one in September of the same year; the Emirate of Bukhara was conquered by the Bolsheviks and replaced with the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic. Today the territory of the defunct emirate lies in Uzbekistan, with parts in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, it had included present northern Afghanistan between 1793 and 1850. The emir's daughter Shukria Raad Alimi worked as a broadcaster in Radio Afghanistan. Shukria Raad left Afghanistan with her family three months after Soviet troops invaded the country in December 1979. With her husband a journalist, two children she fled to Pakistan, through Germany to the United States. In 1982, she joined the VOA, has worked as a broadcaster for VOA's Dari Service, editor and producer. Located along important trading routes, Bukhara enjoyed a rich cultural mixture, including Persian and Jewish influences.
The city of Bukhara has a rich history of Persian architecture and literature, traditions that were continued into the Emirate Period. Prominent artists of the period include the poet Kiromi Bukhoroi, the calligrapher Mirza Abd al-Aziz Bukhari and the scholar Rahmat-Allah Bukhari. Throughout this period, the madrasahs of the region were renowned. Pink Rows Signifies progenitor chiefs serving as Viziers to the Khans of Bukhara. Green Rows Signifies chiefs who took over reign of government from the Janids and placed puppet Khans. Malikov A; the Russian conquest of the Bukharan Emirate: military and diplomatic aspects in Central Asian Survey, Volume 33, issue 2, 2014, p. 180-198
History of Central Asia
The history of Central Asia concerns the history of the various peoples that have inhabited Central Asia. The lifestyle of such people has been determined by the area's climate and geography; the aridity of the region makes agriculture difficult and distance from the sea cut it off from much trade. Thus, few major cities developed in the region. Nomadic horse peoples of the steppe dominated the area for millennia. Relations between the steppe nomads and the settled people in and around Central Asia were marked by conflict; the nomadic lifestyle was well suited to warfare, the steppe horse riders became some of the most militarily potent people in the world, due to the devastating techniques and ability of their horse archers. Periodically, tribal leaders or changing conditions would organise several tribes into a single military force, which would often launch campaigns of conquest into more'civilised' areas. A few of these types of tribal coalitions included the Huns' invasion of Europe, various Turkic migrations into Transoxiana, the Wu Hu attacks on China and most notably the Mongol conquest of much of Eurasia.
The dominance of the nomads ended in the 16th century as firearms allowed settled people to gain control of the region. The Russian Empire, the Qing dynasty of China, other powers expanded into the area and seized the bulk of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union incorporated most of Central Asia; the Soviet areas of Central Asia saw much industrialisation and construction of infrastructure, but the suppression of local cultures and a lasting legacy of ethnic tensions and environmental problems. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, five Central Asian countries gained independence — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. In all of the new states, former Communist Party officials retained power as local strongmen. Anatomically modern humans reached Central Asia by 50,000 to 40,000 years ago; the Tibetan Plateau is thought to have been reached by 38,000 years ago. Populations who lived in Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum have contributed to the populations of both Europe and the Americas.
The term Ceramic Mesolithic is used of late Mesolithic cultures of Central Asia, during the 6th to 5th millennia BC. It is characterized by its distinctive type of pottery, with point or knob base and flared rims, manufactured by methods not used by the Neolithic farmers; the earliest manifestation of this type of pottery may be in the region around Lake Baikal in Siberia. It appears in the Elshan or Yelshanka or Samara culture on the Volga in Russia by about 7000 BC. and from there spread via the Dnieper-Donets culture to the Narva culture of the Eastern Baltic. In the Pontic-Caspian steppe, Chalcolithic cultures develop in the second half of the 5th millennium BC, small communities in permanent settlements which began to engage in agricultural practices as well as herding. Around this time, some of these communities began the domestication of the horse. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, the north-west of the region is considered to be the source of the root of the Indo-European languages.
The horse-drawn chariot appears in the 3rd millennium BC, by 2000 BC, in the form of war chariots with spoked wheels, thus being made more manoeuvrable, dominated the battlefields. The growing use of the horse, combined with the failure around 2000 BC, of the always precarious irrigation systems that had allowed for extensive agriculture in the region, gave rise and dominance of pastoral nomadism by 1000 BC, a way of life that would dominate the region for the next several millennia, giving rise to the Scythian expansion of the Iron Age. Scattered nomadic groups maintained herds of sheep, goats and camels, conducted annual migrations to find new pastures; the people lived in yurts – tents made of hides and wood that could be disassembled and transported. Each group had several yurts, each accommodating about five people. While the semi-arid plains were dominated by the nomads, small city-states and sedentary agrarian societies arose in the more humid areas of Central Asia; the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex of the early 2nd millennium BC was the first sedentary civilisation of the region, practicing irrigation farming of wheat and barley and a form of writing.
Bactria-Margiana interacted with the contemporary Bronze Age nomads of the Andronovo culture, the originators of the spoke-wheeled chariot, who lived to their north in western Siberia and parts of Kazakhstan, survived as a culture until the 1st millennium BC. These cultures Bactria-Margiana, have been posited as possible representatives of the hypothetical Aryan culture ancestral to the speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages; the strongest of Sogdian city states of the Fergana Valley rose to prominence. After the 1st century BC, these cities became home to the traders of the Silk Road and grew wealthy from this trade; the steppe nomads were dependent on these settled people for a wide array of goods that were impossible for transient populations to produce. The nomads traded for these when they could, but because they did not produce goods of interest to sedentary people, the popular alternative was to carry out raids. A wide variety of people came to populate the steppes. Nomadic groups in Central Asia included the Huns and other Turk
Amu Darya
The Amu Darya called the Amu or Amo River, known by its Latin name Oxus, is a major river in Central Asia. It is formed by the junction of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers, in the Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, flows from there north-westwards into the southern remnants of the Aral Sea. In ancient times, the river was regarded as the boundary between Greater Turan. Persian: آمودریا, translit. Âmudaryâ. Ôxos). In classical antiquity, the river was known as the Ōxus in Latin and Ὦξος in Greek — a clear derivative of Vakhsh, the name of the largest tributary of the river. In Vedic Sanskrit, the river is referred to as Vakṣu; the Brahmanda Purana refers to the river as Chaksu. The Avestan texts too refer to the River as Yakhsha/Vakhsha. In Middle Persian sources of the Sassanid period the river is known as Wehrōd; the name Amu is said to have come from the medieval city of Āmul, in modern Turkmenistan, with Darya being the Persian word for "river". Medieval Arabic and Islamic sources call the river Jayhoun, derived from Gihon, the biblical name for one of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden.
Western travelers in the 19th century mentioned that one of the names by which the river was known in Afghanistan was Gozan, that this name was used by Greek, Chinese, Persian and Afghan historians. However, this name is no longer used. "Hara and to the river of Gozan...""the Gozan River is the River Balkh, i.e. the Oxus or the Amu Darya...""... and were brought into Halah, Habor, Hara, to the river Gozan..." The river's total length is 2,400 kilometres and its drainage basin totals 534,739 square kilometres in area, providing a mean discharge of around 97.4 cubic kilometres of water per year. The river is navigable for over 1,450 kilometres. All of the water comes from the high mountains in the south where annual precipitation can be over 1,000 mm. Before large-scale irrigation began, high summer evaporation meant that not all of this discharge reached the Aral Sea – though there is some evidence the large Pamir glaciers provided enough melt water for the Aral to overflow during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Since the end of the 19th century there have been four different claimants as the true source of the Oxus: The Pamir River, which emerges from Lake Zorkul in the Pamir Mountains, flows west to Qila-e Panja, where it joins the Wakhan River to form the Panj River. The Sarhad or Little Pamir River flowing down the Little Pamir in the High Wakhan Lake Chamaktin, which discharges to the east into the Aksu River, which in turn becomes the Murghab and Bartang rivers, which joins the Panj Oxus branch 350 kilometres downstream at Roshan Vomar in Tajikistan. An ice cave at the end of the Wakhjir valley, in the Wakhan Corridor, in the Pamir Mountains, near the border with Pakistan. A glacier joins the Pamir River about 50 kilometres downstream. Bill Colegrave's expedition to Wakhan in 2007 found that both claimants 2 and 3 had the same source, the Chelab stream, which bifurcates on the watershed of the Little Pamir, half flowing into Lake Chamaktin and half into the parent stream of the Little Pamir/Sarhad River.
Therefore, the Chelab stream may be properly considered the true source or parent stream of the Oxus. The Panj River forms the border of Tajikistan, it flows west to Ishkashim where it turns north and north-west through the Pamirs passing the Tajikistan–Afghanistan Friendship Bridge. It subsequently forms the border of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for about 200 kilometres, passing Termez and the Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge, it delineates the border of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan for another 100 kilometres before it flows into Turkmenistan at Atamurat. It flows across Turkmenistan south to north, passing Türkmenabat, forms the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan from Halkabat, it is split by the Tuyamuyun Hydro Complex into many waterways that used to form the river delta joining the Aral Sea, passing Urgench, Daşoguz, other cities, but it does not reach what is left of the sea any more and is lost in the desert. Use of water from the Amu Darya for irrigation has been a major contributing factor to the shrinking of the Aral Sea since the late 1950s.
Historical records state that in different periods, the river flowed into the Aral Sea, into the Caspian Sea, or both, similar to the Syr Darya. The 534,769 square kilometres of the Amu Darya drainage basin include most of Tajikistan, the southwest corner of Kyrgyzstan, the northeast corner of Afghanistan, a narrow portion of eastern Turkmenistan and the western half of Uzbekistan. Part of the Amu Darya basin divide in Tajikistan forms that country's border with China and Pakistan. About 61% of the drainage lies within Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, while 39% is in Afghanistan; the abundant water flowing in the Amu Darya comes entirely from glaci
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retirement of William P. Sisler in 2017, the university appointed as Director George Andreou; the press maintains offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard Square, in London, England. The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with Yale University Press. TriLiteral was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Notable authors published by HUP include Eudora Welty, Walter Benjamin, E. O. Wilson, John Rawls, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Jay Gould, Helen Vendler, Carol Gilligan, Amartya Sen, David Blight, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Piketty; the Display Room in Harvard Square, dedicated to selling HUP publications, closed on June 17, 2009. HUP owns the Belknap Press imprint, which it inaugurated in May 1954 with the publication of the Harvard Guide to American History; the John Harvard Library book series is published under the Belknap imprint.
Harvard University Press distributes the Loeb Classical Library and is the publisher of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, the Murty Classical Library of India. It is distinct from Harvard Business Press, part of Harvard Business Publishing, the independent Harvard Common Press, its 2011 publication Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act by Joe Roman received the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-38080-6. Official website Blog of Harvard University Press
Khwahan District
Khwahan District, is one of the 28 districts of Badakhshan Province, located in northeastern Afghanistan. The district capital is Khwahan; the population of the district is 27,000. The district borders Raghistan to the southwest, Kuf Ab in the northeast, the Panj River in the northwest, Shuro-obod district, Khatlon Province, of Tajikistan. Kuh-e kallat List of villages and places, of Khwahan District in alphabetical order Darwaz Map at the Afghanistan Information Management Services Its coordinates are 37°53'19" N and 70°13'10" E in DMS or 37.8886 and 70.2194. Its UTM position is XG09 and its Joint Operation Graphics reference is NJ42-11khwahan
Tajikistan
Tajikistan the Republic of Tajikistan, is a mountainous, landlocked country in Central Asia with an area of 143,100 km2 and an estimated population of 8.7 million people as of 2016. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, China to the east; the traditional homelands of the Tajik people include present-day Tajikistan as well as parts of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The territory that now constitutes Tajikistan was home to several ancient cultures, including the city of Sarazm of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, was home to kingdoms ruled by people of different faiths and cultures, including the Oxus civilisation, Andronovo culture, Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam; the area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid Empire, Sasanian Empire, Hephthalite Empire, Samanid Empire, Mongol Empire, Timurid dynasty, the Russian Empire, subsequently the Soviet Union. Within the Soviet Union, the country's modern borders were drawn when it was part of Uzbekistan as an autonomous republic before becoming a full-fledged Soviet republic in 1929.
On 9 September 1991, Tajikistan became an independent sovereign nation when the Soviet Union disintegrated. A civil war was fought immediately after independence, lasting from 1992 to 1997. Since the end of the war, newly established political stability and foreign aid have allowed the country's economy to grow. Like all other Central Asian neighbouring states, the country, led by President Emomali Rahmon since 1994, has been criticised by a number of non-governmental organizations for authoritarian leadership, lack of religious freedom and widespread violations of human rights. Tajikistan is a presidential republic consisting of four provinces. Most of Tajikistan's 8.7 million people belong to the Tajik ethnic group. Many Tajiks speak Russian as their second language. While the state is constitutionally secular, Islam is practiced by 98% of the population. In the Gorno-Badakhshan Oblast of Tajikistan, despite its sparse population, there is large linguistic diversity where Rushani, Ishkashimi and Tajik are some of the languages spoken.
Mountains cover more than 90% of the country. It has a transition economy, dependent on remittances and cotton production. Tajikistan is a member of the United Nations, CIS, OSCE, OIC, ECO, SCO and CSTO as well as an NATO PfP partner. Tajikistan means the "Land of the Tajiks"; the suffix "-stan" is Persian for "place of" or "country" and Tajik is, most the name of a pre-Islamic tribe. According to the Library of Congress's 1997 Country Study of Tajikistan, it is difficult to definitively state the origins of the word "Tajik" because the term is "embroiled in twentieth-century political disputes about whether Turkic or Iranian peoples were the original inhabitants of Central Asia."Tajikistan appeared as Tadjikistan or Tadzhikistan in English prior to 1991. This is due to a transliteration from the Russian: "Таджикистан". In Russian, there is no single letter j to represent the phoneme /ʤ/, therefore дж, or dzh, is used. Tadzhikistan is the most common alternate spelling and is used in English literature derived from Russian sources.
"Tadjikistan" is the spelling in French and can be found in English language texts. The way of writing Tajikistan in the Perso-Arabic script is: تاجیکستان. Cultures in the region have been dated back to at least the 4th millennium BCE, including the Bronze Age Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, the Andronovo cultures and the pro-urban site of Sarazm, a UNESCO World Heritage site; the earliest recorded history of the region dates back to about 500 BCE when much, if not all, of modern Tajikistan was part of the Achaemenid Empire. Some authors have suggested that in the 7th and 6th century BCE parts of modern Tajikistan, including territories in the Zeravshan valley, formed part of Kambojas before it became part of the Achaemenid Empire. After the region's conquest by Alexander the Great it became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, a successor state of Alexander's empire. Northern Tajikistan was part of Sogdia, a collection of city-states, overrun by Scythians and Yuezhi nomadic tribes around 150 BCE.
The Silk Road passed through the region and following the expedition of Chinese explorer Zhang Qian during the reign of Wudi commercial relations between Han China and Sogdiana flourished. Sogdians played a major role in facilitating trade and worked in other capacities, as farmers, carpetweavers and woodcarvers; the Kushan Empire, a collection of Yuezhi tribes, took control of the region in the first century CE and ruled until the 4th century CE during which time Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism were all practised in the region. The Hephthalite Empire, a collection of nomadic tribes, moved into the region and Arabs brought Islam in the early eighth century. Central Asia continued in its role as a commercial crossroads, linking China, the steppes to the north, the Islamic heartland, it was temporarily under the control of the Tibetan empire and Chinese from 650–680 and under the control of the Umayyads in 710. The Samanid Empire, 819 to 999, restored Persian control of the region and enlarged the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara which became the cultural centres of Iran and the region was known as Khorasan.
The Kara-Khanid Khanate conquered Transoxania (which corresponds wit
Timurid dynasty
The Timurid dynasty, self-designated as Gurkani, was a Sunni Muslim dynasty or clan of Turco-Mongol lineage descended from the warlord Timur. The word "Gurkani" derived from "gurkan", a Persianized form of the Mongolian word "kuragan" meaning "son-in-law", as the Timurids were in-laws of the line of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire. Members of the Timurid dynasty were influenced by the Persian culture and established two significant empires in history, the Timurid Empire based in Persia and Central Asia and the Mughal Empire based in the Indian subcontinent; the origin of the Timurid dynasty goes back to the Mongol tribe known as Barlas, who were remnants of the original Mongol army of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire. After the Mongol conquest of Central Asia, the Barlas settled in what is today southern Kazakhstan, from Shymkent to Taraz and Almaty, which came to be known for a time as Moghulistan – "Land of Mongols" in Persian – and intermingled to a considerable degree with the local Turkic and Turkic-speaking population, so that at the time of Timur's reign the Barlas had become Turkicized in terms of language and habits.
Additionally, by adopting Islam, the Central Asian Turks and Mongols adopted the Persian literary and high culture which had dominated Central Asia since the early days of Islamic influence. Persian literature was instrumental in the assimilation of the Timurid elite to the Perso-Islamic courtly culture. Abu Sa'id's sons divided Transoxiana upon his death, into Samarkand, Hissar, Balkh and Farghana. Timur Timurid Empire Mughal Empire Turco-Mongol List of Turkic dynasties and countries List of Mongol states Borjigin List of Sunni Muslim dynasties BĀYSONḠORĪ ŠĀH-NĀMA in Encyclopædia Iranica Elliot, Sir H. M.. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians; the Muhammadan Period. Timurid Dynasty Virtual Art Exhibit
Tajikistan
Afghanistan
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