A report on Achaemenid Empire, Persians, Tajikistan and Alexander the Great

The empire had its beginnings in the 7th century BC, when the Persians settled in the southwestern portion of the Iranian Plateau, in the region of Persis.

In contemporary terminology, people from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan who natively speak the Persian language are known as Tajiks, with the former two countries having their own dialects of Persian known as Dari and Tajiki, respectively; whereas those in the Caucasus (primarily in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, Russia), albeit heavily assimilated, are known as Tats.

The Macedonian king Alexander the Great, himself an ardent admirer of Cyrus the Great, conquered most of the Achaemenid Empire by 330 BC. Upon Alexander's death, most of the former territory of the empire fell to the rule of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom and Seleucid Empire after the partition of Alexander’s empire, until the Iranian elites of the central plateau finally reclaimed power under the Parthian Empire by the 2nd century BC.

The area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Achaemenid Empire, Sasanian Empire, Hephthalite Empire, Samanid Empire and the Mongol Empire.

In 334 BC, he invaded the Achaemenid Persian Empire and began a series of campaigns that lasted for 10 years.

Although Persis (Persia proper) was only one of the provinces of ancient Iran, varieties of this term (e.g., Persia) were adopted through Greek sources and used as an exonym for all of the Persian Empire for many years.

After the region's conquest by Alexander the Great it became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, a successor state of Alexander's empire.

The Iranian dominance collapsed in 330 BC following the conquest of the Achaemenid Empire by Alexander the Great, but reemerged shortly after through the establishment of the Parthian Empire in 247 BC, which was founded by a group of ancient Iranian people rising from Parthia.

The Samanid Empire, 819 to 999, restored Persian control of the region and enlarged the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara (both cities are today part of Uzbekistan) which became the cultural centers of Iran and the region was known as Khorasan.

By the 5th century BC, the Kings of Persia were either ruling over or had subordinated territories encompassing not just all of the Persian Plateau and all of the territories formerly held by the Assyrian Empire (Mesopotamia, the Levant, Cyprus and Egypt), but beyond this all of Anatolia and Armenia, as well as the Southern Caucasus and parts of the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Bulgaria, Paeonia, Thrace and Macedonia to the north and west, most of the Black Sea coastal regions, parts of Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea, the Oxus and Jaxartes to the north and north-east, the Hindu Kush and the western Indus basin (corresponding to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan) to the far east, parts of northern Arabia to the south, and parts of eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) to the south-west, and parts of Oman, China, and the UAE.

Alexander founded a series of new cities, all called Alexandria, including modern Kandahar in Afghanistan, and Alexandria Eschate ("The Furthest") in modern Tajikistan.

During the long rule of the Achaemenids, the elite positions in many segments of the empire including the central government, the army, and the many satrapies were specifically reserved for Iranians and to a major degree Persian noblemen.