Tajik

The Tajiks are the Persian-speaking Iranian people of Central Asia and northern Afghanistan, settled in the Oxus basin, Badakhshan and the cities Balkh, Samarkand, Bukhara. They descend chiefly from ancient Eastern Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, mixed with Persian settlers of the seventh and eighth centuries; Arab and Samanid rule replaced their old tongues with New Persian, the word Tajik, originally meaning Arab, applied by Turkic neighbors to these Persian-speaking Muslims by the eleventh century.

In Samanid Bukhara, Tajik administrators and writers made Persian the language of government and letters across the Islamic east. Thirteenth-century Mongol conquests and Timur's fourteenth-century empire made Balkh and Samarkand centers of Persianate learning again, but from around 1500 the Uzbek Shaybanids overran the plains, confining many Tajiks to mountains and towns as merchants, clergy and scribes of Bukharan and Kokand khanates.

South of the Hindu Kush the Tajiks of Kabul, Balkh and Badakhshan passed under Mughal and Safavid rule and, from 1747, the Afghan Durrani empire.