Early history of Tajikistan

This article documents the 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.