Tajikistan Through Time
Who ruled when. The shaded band marks the current chapter. The scale compresses the ancient past. Select a bar to jump to its chapter.
Heroes and Great Minds
Nineteen people Tajiks remember, from the rebel who fought Alexander to the poet of independence. Nine of them look out from the country's banknotes today.
On the somoni banknotes
All heroes
Words of the Story
One key word from each chapter, in Tajik Cyrillic (used since 1940) and in the Perso-Arabic script that Tajiks used for a thousand years before 1928, and that Iranians and Afghans still use.
Six letters Russian doesn't have
Tajik Cyrillic adds these letters for Persian sounds.
Sources and further reading
- Richard Foltz, A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East (I.B. Tauris, 2019)
- Paul Bergne, The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic (2007)
- Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer, Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (ANU Press, 2013), free PDF
- Bobojon Ghafurov, The Tajiks: Ancient, Archaic and Medieval History (1972)
- Encyclopaedia Iranica (articles on Sogdiana, Samanids, Tajikistan)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Tajikistan
- World Bank, Tajikistan Economic Update 2025
- Our World in Data: remittances, 2024
- Tajikistani Civil War and Tajikistani somoni (Wikipedia)
- Base map: Natural Earth via world-atlas. Historical extents are approximate and drawn for illustration.