Turkmenistan stretches southeast from the world's largest salt lake, the Caspian Sea, to Afthanistan, between Uzbekistan and Iran. Most of the land is the low lying Kara-Kum Desert. On or near the north border is the Amudar'ya River, the classical Oxus. The southwest border is the Atrek river, feeding from the Kopet Dag Range that forms the center of the south boundary. The rest of the southern border is the Tedzhen River, better known from its upstream Afghan name, the Hari Rud. The river dies in the Kara-Kum.
About eight in ten speak Turkmen, less than one in ten Russian, and a slightly smaller number Uzbek. Almost all the Turkmen and Uzbeks are Moslem; some, perhaps almost all, of the Russians are Orthodox Christians.
No city is world class, but Aschabad, the capital, is regionally pre-eminent. It sits on an oasis, with more water brought from the Amu-dar'ya on a desert-crossing canal.
People arrived here when they reached the rest of central Asia: near to 100,000 years ago.
The first local group whose language is known were the Scythians, called Scythi by the Latins, Skythoi by the Greeks and Saka by the Persians. They lived here and in much of central Asia perhaps as late as the sixth century C.E.
Other Iranian groups also lived in the area by that time, such as the Chorasmians along the lower course of the Amudar'ya.
Oghuz (Eastern Turkic) peoples arrived from the sixth to the tenth century, and as late as the 11th century still spoke the ancestral language of Azeri, Turkish and Turkmen. In that same century the new arrivals converted to Islam, but some or most of their subjects may have already converted following their conquest by Arabs in the eighth century. The Mongol conquest and the subsequent rule by their scions had no lasting linguistic effect; Chagatai was a language of elites only. Perhaps in time Russian will decline for similar reasons.
north of the nation's northwest
northeast
southeast
south of the nation's southwest
south of the nation's south-center
west, across the Caspian Sea