Turkmenistan's history: tribal confederations inside borders drawn in 1924

Who governed the oases before the Turkmen

The oldest towns in what is now Turkmenistan stood where water reached the desert. UNESCO's description of the Merv oasis lists Bronze Age centres dated 2500 to 1200 BC, among them Gonur, Kelleli and Togoluk, followed by Iron Age settlements from 1200 to 300 BC. The History of Turkmenistan article links finds near Mary and Gonur Depe to the society archaeologists call the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex. By 2000 BC Indo-European peoples had settled the region, with the Dahae confederation east of the Caspian and the Massagetae to the north.

Written history begins with the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, which divided the land between the satrapies of Margiana, Chorasmia and Parthia. Erk Gala, the oldest fortress at Merv, was built in the 7th century BC to control the oasis on the Murghab. Alexander the Great marched north into Central Asia in 330 BC and founded an Alexandria near the Murghab, the city that later became Merv.

After Alexander's empire broke apart, the satrap of Parthia declared independence and the Parthian kingdom grew from the foothills of the Kopet Dag. Nisa, near modern Ashgabat, is traditionally said to have been founded by Arsaces I, who reigned about 250 to 211 BC. UNESCO describes the two mounds of Old and New Nisa as the site of one of the earliest cities of an empire that lasted from the mid 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD and stood as a barrier to Roman expansion. Excavations there recovered ivory rhytons, drinking horns carved with Iranian subjects and scenes from classical mythology.

From the 4th to the early 7th century AD much of the population lived along the river valleys, and Merv and Nisa raised silkworms. A caravan route between Tang China and Baghdad passed through Merv.

How Merv became a capital of the caliphate

Arab armies took Central Asia in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, and Merv became the capital of the province of Khorasan. In February 748 Abu Muslim declared the Abbasid dynasty at Merv and set out from it to take Iran and Iraq. In the early 9th century the city was the seat of the caliph al-Ma'mun and, for a time, the capital of the whole caliphate. Scholars from the city carried the name al-Marwazi, and the geographer Yaqut studied in its libraries.

The Seljuks, a clan of Oghuz Turks from the steppe east of the Aral Sea, took Merv without a fight in 1037 under Tughril, and in 1040 they defeated the Ghaznavid sultan Masud. Merv became a favourite city of the Seljuk sultans, and Alp Arslan and Ahmad Sanjar were buried there. UNESCO singles out Sanjar's mausoleum for its brickwork, carved stucco and surviving mural paintings, and records that the walls of the medieval city run for 12 kilometres. The historian Tertius Chandler estimated Merv's population at 200,000 in 1150 and put it at as many as 500,000 by 1210.

Turkmen nomads from beyond the Amu Darya pillaged the city in 1153. In 1221 Merv opened its gates to Tolui, the son of Genghis Khan, and most of its people were killed. The figures in the chronicles cannot be checked: Ibn al-Athir's account has Tolui killing 700,000 people, and the Persian historian Juvayni gave more than 1,300,000. The Mongols also destroyed the farms and irrigation works of the province. Merv was partly rebuilt and never regained its size.

On the Amu Darya to the north, Urgench was the capital of Khorezm. The monuments at Kunya-Urgench date mainly from the 11th to the 16th centuries, and UNESCO counts among them a mosque, the gates of a caravanserai, fortresses, mausoleums and a minaret 60 metres high.

Where the name Turkmen came from

The Turkmen descend in large part from the Oghuz, a confederation of Turkic-speaking pastoral tribes that lived in what is now Mongolia and around Lake Baikal. In the second half of the 8th century Oghuz groups moved west into Central Asia. In the 11th century the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari described the language of the Oghuz and Turkmen as distinct from that of other Turks and listed twenty-two Oghuz clans.

The name Turkmen first appears in written sources of the 10th century, for Oghuz groups that had moved south into Seljuk lands and accepted Islam, and by the 13th century it had replaced the name Oghuz. Its meaning is disputed. A popular etymology already current in the 11th century reads it as "resembling a Turk"; modern scholars have proposed "pure Turk"; and the Muslim chronicler Ibn Kathir derived it from Türk and iman, faith, after a conversion of two hundred thousand households in 971.

Turkmen fighters went west with the Seljuk armies into Azerbaijan and Anatolia. The Mongol conquest scattered the tribes, and the 14th to 16th centuries produced the tribal groupings that survive today. In the late 17th century the Salor confederation broke up. The Teke moved to the Ahal region at the foot of the Kopet Dag and later into the Murghab basin, and the Yomut split into an eastern and a western group.

By the 16th century most of the tribes were under the nominal control of the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara, and the southernmost lands belonged to Persia. Nader Shah of Persia took the region in 1740; after his assassination in 1747 Khiva and Bukhara recovered it. The Teke, pushed north from the Tejen by Persia in the 1830s, defeated the army of the Khan of Khiva in 1855 and a Persian army in 1861, and by about 1856 were the sovereign power in the south and south-east. The poet Magtymguly Pyragy, venerated in Turkmenistan as the father of its literature, wrote in this period calling for unity among the tribes, and the oral epic of Gorogly, which UNESCO describes as a narrative of a hero and his forty horsemen, took shape at about the same time.

How the Russian Empire took Transcaspia

Russia established a foothold in 1869 with the port of Krasnovodsk, now Türkmenbaşy, on the Caspian shore. It subdued the Khanate of Khiva in 1873 and turned on the Teke. A first attempt to take the Ahal oasis failed in 1879, when Teke forces defeated the Russian column. Russia's stated reason for moving into Transcaspia was to suppress Turkmen raiding and the slave trade it supplied to Khiva and Bukhara, and the historian Paul Spickard writes that the Turkmen were known and feared for their part in that trade.

The second campaign ended at the desert fortress of Geok Tepe, now Gökdepe, in January 1881. The History of Turkmenistan article puts the dead at 7,000 inside the fortress and another 8,000 killed trying to flee across the desert. The defeat is marked in Turkmenistan as a day of national mourning. Ashgabat was founded as a Russian garrison on 18 January 1881 beside a Teke village of the same name, and in September of that year Qajar Iran signed the Treaty of Akhal, which set what is still essentially the border between Turkmenistan and Iran. Russian troops occupied Merv in 1884, and the annexation of the Panjdeh oasis to its south in 1885 nearly brought war with Britain.

The Transcaspian Railway began on the Caspian shore in 1879 and reached Ashgabat in 1885, and towns grew along it. Transcaspia was governed from Tiflis until 1898 and then from Tashkent as part of Russian Turkestan. Its military governors earned a reputation for corruption: a commission under Count Konstantin Pahlen documented their abuses in 1908. In 1916 a revolt against conscription for the First World War swept Russian Central Asia, Turkmen territory included.

What Soviet rule built and broke

After the October Revolution of 1917 Ashgabat became a base for anti-Bolshevik forces. A small British force under General Wilfrid Malleson held Ashgabat and parts of the south until 1919, and the last Turkmen fighters of the Basmachi resistance crossed into Afghanistan and Iran in 1922 and 1923. Transcaspia became the Turkmen Oblast of the Turkestan republic on 7 August 1921.

The national delimitation of October 1924 joined that oblast to the Çärjew and Kerki provinces of the Bukharan People's Republic and the Daşoguz province of the Khorezm People's Republic. Turkmens made up about 80% of the new republic's population, and on 13 May 1925 it became a full union republic, the Turkmen SSR, with its capital at Ashgabat.

Collectivisation ended nomadic herding. By the late 1930s most Turkmens had settled, Russian and other European migrants had moved into the towns, and Turkmens had been required to add the Russian endings -ov or -ev to their surnames. The Turkmen written language was standardised in the 1920s, first in a simplified Arabic script and later in Cyrillic, and from 1938 fluency in Russian was required to advance through secondary and higher education.

Ashgabat was levelled by the earthquake of 1948. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 110,000, and other local sources put them at two-thirds of a city of 176,000. In the 1950s the Karakum Canal was dug to carry Amu Darya water 1,375 kilometres across the desert to new cotton land, and the Döwletabat gas field was discovered in the 1960s. Politically the republic stayed quiet: the one upheaval was a corruption scandal that removed the long-serving first secretary Muhammetnazar Gapurow, who was replaced by Saparmurat Niyazov on 21 December 1985.

How independence was declared and kept

Turkmenistan's leadership began criticising Moscow's economic policies only after other republics had claimed sovereignty in 1988 and 1989. Its Supreme Soviet declared sovereignty by a unanimous vote on 22 August 1990. In the all-union referendum of March 1991, 98% of participants voted to preserve the Soviet Union. After the August coup in Moscow, Niyazov called a referendum on independence; the official result was 94% in favour, and the Supreme Soviet declared independence on 27 October 1991. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on 26 December 1991.

Niyazov had been elected president in October 1990 and was the only candidate in the presidential election of 1992. He took the title Türkmenbaşy, head of the Turkmen, in 1993. A plebiscite in 1994 extended his term to 2002, and on 28 December 1999 the parliament declared him president for life. The Communist Party dissolved itself in 1991 and was replaced by the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, and opposition parties were banned. The manat was introduced on 1 November 1993, and the Latin alphabet replaced Cyrillic the same year.

The policy that outlasted him was neutrality. On 12 December 1995 the United Nations General Assembly recognised Turkmenistan as a permanently neutral state, with the support of 185 countries according to the government's own account. Niyazov kept the country out of regional alliances and in the late 1990s dealt both with the Taliban and with their opponents in the Northern Alliance. His book, the Ruhnama, published in 2001 and 2004, was made compulsory reading in schools. After an alleged assassination attempt in 2002 he dismissed officials and tightened controls on the press, and in 2005 he closed the hospitals outside Ashgabat and the rural libraries.

What changed after Turkmenbashy died

Niyazov died on 21 December 2006 without a named successor. The deputy prime minister Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow became acting president, although the constitution designated another official, Öwezgeldi Ataýew, as successor, and on 11 February 2007 he was elected with 89% of the vote in an election outside observers condemned. He reopened the Academy of Sciences in June 2007, restored the old names of the months in 2008 and ended the president's power to rename cities and institutions. A new constitution was adopted in September 2008, and the death penalty, suspended since 1999, was abolished the same year. The free monthly allowances of electricity, gas and water that citizens had received since independence were abolished on 1 January 2019.

In March 2022 the presidency passed to his son after an early election that international observers described as neither free nor fair, and in January 2023 a reorganised People's Council took supreme constitutional authority. How that system works now is the subject of the politics article.