Tashkent

• Tashkent ((in Uzbek: Toshkent, Тошкент, Toshkent), (Russian: Ташкент, Taškent), [tɐʂˈkʲɛnt], “rock city”, pronounced “Toshkent”) is the capital and the largest city of Uzbekistan.

• An Azeri name believed to be of Turkish origin. It consists of two words: “Tash” meaning stone, and “Kant,” meaning city. It is pronounced in Azerbaijani as "Toshkent" and in Russian as "Tashkent". It was famous in Arabic as Tashkent. There are indications that its name is related to the Shash tribe, which settled in the region in the fifth century BC, and for this reason it was called “Shash-Kind”, meaning the land of the Shashians. And with the days, and especially with the Russians' settlement there, it turned to Tashkent.

• Its registered population in 2012 was 2,309,300 people.

• It was a stop on the Silk Road. It is an important city in Central Asia, and about tens of kilometres away from the Kazakh border.

• Because of its geographical location, Tashkent was influenced by the Sogdian and Turkish civilizations before the arrival of Islam in the eighth century AD.

• The Muslim Arabs conquered the city in the eighth century AD and it was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1219 AD.

• Tamerlane captured it in 1361 AD, then Tamerlane rebuilt it to benefit from the silk trade that was passing through it. 

• After its independence from the Soviets in 1991 AD, it became the capital of independent Uzbekistan and developed greatly, and the city remained with different ethnicities and was mixed with an Uzbek majority.

• 74.3% of the population speaks the Uzbek language, and 14.2% of the population speaks Russian.

• The number of Sunni Muslims in it is about 88%, 9% of the population adheres to the Eastern Orthodox sect, and there are other religions and sects.

• Tashkent hosts fifteen museums, two hundred galleries, more than three hundred theatres, more than three thousand public and specialized libraries, and a higher education system, and has universities that occupied an advanced position that made it among the five hundred advanced universities in the world.