MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Turkmenistan

ONE LAND · 6 ATLASES

Turkmenistan, on the map of history

What was Turkmenistan before it was Turkmenistan? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Khwarazm & Khorasan (mod. Turkmenistan) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

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Transcaspia (mod. Turkmenistan) · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

Transcaspia saw one of the intervention’s stranger episodes — a local anti-Bolshevik government backed briefly by British troops from Persia. Reconquered into Soviet Turkestan by 1920; the Turkmen would resist collectivization into the 1930s.

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Russian Turkestan (mod. Turkmenistan) · Indian Independence & Partition, 1905–1948

The Transcaspian edge of Russian Turkestan: conquered in the 1880s (the massacre at Gök Tepe broke Turkmen resistance), crossed by the tsars’ strategic railway that made British India’s planners lose sleep for a generation. The Great Game’s whole logic — Afghanistan as buffer, Persia as sphere — was drawn against this coast. By this map’s era the frontier had gone quiet; the anxiety it bred had already shaped the Raj’s northwest forever.

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Turkmenistan · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Soviet Turkmenistan · The Road to War, 1931–1941

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Turkmenistan · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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