Uzbekistan in the context of "Eurasian nomads"

A landlocked country is a country that has no territory connected to an ocean or whose coastlines lie solely on endorheic basins. Currently, there are 44 landlocked countries, two of them doubly landlocked due to being surrounded by other landlocked nations (Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan), and three landlocked de facto states in the world. Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country, Kyrgyzstan is the farthest landlocked country from any ocean, and Ethiopia is the world's most populous landlocked country.

Generally, being landlocked creates political and economic disadvantages that having access to international waters would avoid. For this reason, nations large and small throughout history have fought to gain access to open waters, even at great expense in wealth, bloodshed, and political capital.

Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying 652,864 square kilometers (252,072 sq mi) of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. Kabul is the country's capital and largest city. Afghanistan's population is estimated to be between 40 and 50 million.

Human habitation in Afghanistan dates to the Middle Paleolithic era. Popularly referred to as the graveyard of empires, the land has witnessed numerous military campaigns, including those by the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Maurya Empire, Arab Muslims, the Mongols, the British, the Soviet Union, and a US-led coalition. Afghanistan also served as the source from which the Greco-Bactrians and the Mughals, among others, rose to form major empires. Because of the various conquests and periods in both the Iranian and Indian cultural spheres, the area was a center for Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and later Islam. The modern state of Afghanistan began with the Durrani Afghan Empire in the 18th century, although Dost Mohammad Khan is sometimes considered to be the founder of the first modern Afghan state. Afghanistan became a buffer state in the Great Game between the British Empire and the Russian Empire. From India, the British attempted to subjugate Afghanistan but were repelled in the First Anglo-Afghan War; the Second Anglo-Afghan War saw a British victory. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, Afghanistan became free of foreign political hegemony, and emerged as the independent Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1926. This monarchy lasted almost half a century, until Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973, following which the Republic of Afghanistan was established.

The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (Greek: Βασιλεία τῆς Βακτριανῆς, romanized: Basileía tês Baktrianês, lit. 'Kingdom of Bactria') was a Greek kingdom during the Hellenistic period located in Central Asia and Afghanistan. The kingdom was founded by the Seleucid satrap Diodotus I Soter in about 256 BC, and continued to dominate Central Asia until its fall around 120 BC. At its peak the kingdom consisted of present-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and for a short time, small parts of Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India and Iran. An extension further east, with military campaigns and settlements, may have reached the borders of the Qin State in China by about 230 BC.

A Greek population was already present in Bactria by the 5th century BC. Alexander the Great had conquered the region by 327 BC, founding many cities, most of them named Alexandria, and further settling Macedonians and other Greeks. After the death of Alexander, control of Bactria passed on to his general Seleucus I Nicator. The fertility and the prosperity of the region led to the creation of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom under Diodotus by the early 3rd century BC, as a successor state of the Seleucid Empire. The Bactrian Greeks grew increasingly more powerful and invaded north-western India between 190 and 180 BC under king Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus. This invasion led to the creation of the Indo-Greek kingdom, which in turn was a successor to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, and was subsequently ruled by the kings Pantaleon and Apollodotus I. Historical records indicate that many rich and prosperous cities were present in the kingdom, but only a few of them have been excavated, such as Ai-Khanoum and Bactra. The city of Ai-Khanoum, in north-eastern Afghanistan, had all the hallmarks of a true Hellenistic city with a Greek theater, gymnasium and some houses with colonnaded courtyards.

The Kyrgyz people (also spelled Kyrghyz, Kirgiz, and Kirghiz; /ˈkɪərɡɪz/ KEER-giz or /ˈkɜːrɡɪz/ KUR-giz; Kyrgyz: Кыргыздар; قیرغیزدار) are a Turkic ethnic group native to Central Asia. They primarily reside in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and China. A Kyrgyz diaspora is also found in Russia, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. They speak the Kyrgyz language, which is the official language of Kyrgyzstan.

The earliest people known as "Kyrgyz" were the descendants of several Central Asian tribes, first emerging in western Mongolia around 201 BC. Modern Kyrgyz people are descended in part from the Yenisei Kyrgyz that lived in the Yenisey river valley in Siberia. The Kyrgyz people were constituents of the Tiele people, the Göktürks, and the Uyghur Khaganate before establishing the Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate in the 9th century, and later a Kyrgyz khanate in the 15th century.

Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan" (meaning 'land') in both respective native languages and most other languages. The region is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the southwest, European Russia to the northwest, China and Mongolia to the east, Afghanistan and Iran to the south, and Siberia to the north. Together, the five Central Asian countries have a total population of around 76 million.

In the pre-Islamic and early Islamic eras (c. 1000 and earlier) Central Asia was inhabited predominantly by Iranian peoples, populated by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians, and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Dahae. As the result of Turkic migration, Central Asia also became the homeland for the Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Tatars, Turkmens, Uyghurs, and Uzbeks; Turkic languages largely replaced the Iranian languages spoken in the area, with the exception of Tajikistan and areas where Tajik is spoken.

Eurasian nomads form groups of nomadic peoples who have lived in various areas of the Eurasian Steppe. History largely knows them via frontier historical sources from Europe and Asia.

The steppe nomads had no permanent abode, but travelled from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock. The generic designation encompasses the varied ethnic groups who have at times inhabited steppe regions of present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Uyghuristan, Mongolia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is its capital and most populous city. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east and is narrowly separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. It has a population of more than 10.7 million people.

The territory was previously home to cultures of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, including the Oxus civilisation in west, with the Indo-Iranians arriving during the Andronovo culture. Parts of country were part of the Sogdian and Bactrian civilisations, and was ruled by those including the Achaemenids, Alexander the Great, the Greco-Bactrians, the Kushans, the Kidarites and Hephthalites, the First Turkic Khaganate, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Samanid Empire, the Kara-Khanids, Seljuks, Khwarazmians, the Mongols, Timurids and Khanate of Bukhara. The region was later conquered by the Russian Empire, before becoming part of the Soviet Union. Within the Soviet Union, the country's borders were drawn when it was part of Uzbekistan as an autonomous republic before becoming a constituent republic of the Soviet Union on 5 December 1929.

The Kushan Empire (c. 30–c. 375 CE) was a syncretic empire formed by the Yuezhi in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of what is now Afghanistan, Eastern Iran, India, Pakistan, Western Nepal, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Kushan territory in India went at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath, now near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great.

The Kushans were most probably one of five branches of the Yuezhi confederation, an Indo-European nomadic people of possible Tocharian origin, who migrated from northwestern China (Xinjiang and Gansu) and settled in ancient Bactria. The founder of the dynasty, Kujula Kadphises, followed Iranian and Greek cultural ideas and iconography after the Greco-Bactrian tradition and was a follower of the Shaivite sect of Hinduism. Many of the later Kushan kings after Kujula, were also patrons of Hinduism, including (but not limited to) Vima Kadphises and Vasudeva II. The Kushans in general were also great patrons of Buddhism, and, starting with Emperor Kanishka, they employed elements of Zoroastrianism in their pantheon. They played an important role in the spread of Buddhism to Central Asia and China, ushering in a period of relative peace for 200 years, sometimes described as "Pax Kushana".

The Mughal Empire was an early modern empire in South Asia. At its peak, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan Plateau in South India.

The Mughal Empire is conventionally said to have been founded in 1526 by Babur, a ruler from what is today Uzbekistan, who employed aid from the neighboring Safavid and Ottoman Empires to defeat the sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodi, in the First Battle of Panipat and to sweep down the plains of North India. The Mughal imperial structure, however, is sometimes dated to 1600, to the rule of Babur's grandson, Akbar. This imperial structure lasted until 1720, shortly after the death of the last major emperor, Aurangzeb, during whose reign the empire also achieved its maximum geographical extent. Reduced subsequently to the region in and around Old Delhi by 1760, the empire was formally dissolved by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.