Central Asia's largest city rebuilt after Genghis Khan
Tashkent, Uzbekistan's capital also called Toshkent, held more than 3.1 million people as of 1 July 2025—the most populous city in Central Asia. Sogdian and Turkic cultures prevailed before mid-eighth-century Islam; Genghis Khan destroyed the town in 1219, after which Silk Road rebuilding restored profits.
The earliest known inhabitants of the oasis belonged to the Burgulik culture, Bronze and Iron Age herders dated to two phases between the 9th and 4th centuries BC, who kept animals, probably farmed with some irrigation and lived in sunken huts or caves. One of their biggest villages, Shashtepa, drew on running water from a branch of the Chirchik River. The Kaunchin culture that followed is linked with Kangju, a Central Asian kingdom known from Chinese records between about 140 BC and the 5th century AD, and the town may have been or stood near its summer capital.
In pre-Islamic and early Islamic times the town was called Chach, the name Ferdowsi uses in the Shahnameh. A square citadel went up some 8 kilometres south of the Syr Darya between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC, and by the 7th century AD Chach had over 30 towns and more than 50 canals, trading between Sogdians and Turkic nomads. The pilgrim Xuanzang recorded it as Zhěshí on his way from China to India. Some scholars think Ptolemy's Stone Tower, said to mark the halfway point between Europe and China, stood here, though that identification is contested.
The scholar al-Biruni explained the modern name as Turkic tash, stone, plus Persian kent, town, giving City of Stones. Linguists disagree: Ilya Gershevitch traced Chach to an Old Iranian word for a lake, while Ünal in 2022 dismissed that as resting on too many assumptions and proposed a Turkic word for stone.
Later history brought independence as a city-state in the 18th and 19th centuries, reconquest by the Kokand Khanate, and capture by Russia in 1865, when it became capital of Russian Turkestan. Soviet deportations reshaped its population. The city marked 2,200 years of written history in 2009, remains multi-ethnic with an Uzbek majority, generated 19 per cent of national GDP in the first half of 2024 and follows a master plan running to 2045.
Source: Tashkent
