Early history of Tajikistan
Before the Soviet era, which began in Central Asia in the early 1920s, the area designated today as the Republic of Tajikistan underwent a series of population changes that brought with them political and cultural influences from the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the Eurasian steppe, China, Iran, Russia, and other contiguous regions.The Tajik people came fully under Russian rule after a series of military campaigns that began in the 1860s, at the end of the nineteenth century.Iranian peoples, including ancestors of the modern Tajiks, have inhabited Central Asia since at least the earliest recorded history of the region, which began some 2,500 years ago.The ethnic contribution of various Turkic and Mongol peoples, who entered Central Asia at later times, has not been determined precisely.The explanation most favored by scholars is that the word evolved from the name of a pre-Islamic (before the seventh century A.D.) Arab tribe.