By the 1st millennium BC on the territory of Uzbekistan there has been started the process of regional tribal formation.

In the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BC ancient regions  Bactria, Khorezm, Sogd were conquered by the Achaemenids from Persia and became a part of their Great Empire as its eastern possession (satrapy).  

   4th century BC

At the end of 330 BC Alexander the Great with his troops marched into Bactria, and seized its capital  Bactra. Advanced detachment of Alexander met with long resistance of united military forces of Bactrians and Sogdians under the leadership of talented Sogdian commander Spitamen. At the end of 328 BC by the way of tampering with local aristocracy, war ruse and betrayal he succeeded in scotching a mutiny in Bactria and Sogd.       

  312 BC

Great Dynasty of Seleucids was found. Bactria and Sogd became its part in 306 or 305 BC. In the time of Seleucids satrapies that were the part of it became more independent. For instance, in Bactria minting the coins was made on behalf of two rulers Seleucid and Antioch.

 250 BC

In the result of numerous antiseleucid marches Bactrian satrap Diodot proclaimed himself an independent ruler. It was the start for the formation of a new Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, based on the local government.

 2nd century AD

Kushan Kingdom reached its utmost flourishing when the North India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and southern regions of Uzbekistan have become the parts of it. Under the Kushans, Buddhism took hold and the Silk Road brought peaceful contact with the wider world and facilitated the growth of wealthy, culturally diverse towns. 

 3rd century

The process of insensibly weakening of Kushan Empire has started; series of defeats were inflicted on Kushans by Sasanids monarchy. During one of such collisions Sasanids have succeeded to get allocated in Bactria. 

 6th century

Then out of the northern steppe came the Western Turks  the western branch of the empire of the so-called Kok (Blue) Turks. They soon grew attached to life here and abandoned their wandering ways.

 7th century

At the end of the 7th century West-Turkic Kaganat fell into small independent communities.

 8th century

The Arabs brought Islam and a written alphabet but found Central Asia too big and restless to govern.    

 9th - 10th centuries

A return to the Persian fold came with the Samanid Dynasty. Its capital, Bukhara, was the center of an intellectual, religious and commercial renaissance.

In 999 Ghaznavids and Karakhanids seized Samanid possessions. Karakhanids have subdued vast territories from inner regions of China to Amudarya. The Ghaznavids moved into the southern regions. For a time the Turkic Khorezmshahs dominated Central Asia from what is now Konye-Urgench in Turkmenistan.

 13th century 

By 1221 whole Central Asia was in Genghis khan's hands. Cities laid in ruins; irrigation systems were destroyed, hundreds of thousand people has been exterminated and captured.

 1227

After Genghis Khan's death in 1227 Central Asia with Transoxiana and Western Turkestan formed ulus (settling, nomadic camp), the ruler of which has become the second son of Genghis Khan  Chagatai, actually the country has been ruled by merchant Mahmud Yalavach.

 40s of 14th century

Chagatai ulus fell into several possessions, disintegration and internecine dissension started to intensify. Seizing the opportunity of conditions, on the 2nd half of the 14th century Tamerlane came to power. Uniting separated possessions of Central Asia Tamerlane founded powerful state with the capital in Samarkand.  

 The mid 1400s

The Uzbeks began moving southeast, mixing with sedentary Turkic tribes and adopting the Turkic language, reaching the Syr-Darya. Following an internal schism, the Uzbeks pulled themselves together under Muhammad Shaybani and thundered down upon the remnants of Tamerlane's empire.

 1510

All of Transoxiana, 'the land beyond the Oxus' (Amudarya) to the Jaxartes (now Syr-Darya) belonged to the Uzbeks, as it has since. They ruled at this time from Bukhara, with a separate line in Khorezm, at Khiva.

 1538 - 1598

The greatest (and last) of the Shaybanid khans, responsible for some of Bukhara's finest architecture, was Abdullah II who ruled the empire.

 1740

The Great Silk Road fell into disuse, the empire unraveled under the Shaybanids' distant cousins, the Astrakhanids. For a time Khorezm and the Astrakhanid lands again became part of Persia, after the warlord Nadir Shah defeated Bukhara and Khiva.

 18th century

In the early 18th century the khan of Khiva made an offer to Peter the Great of Russia  to become his vassal in return for help against marauding Turkmen and Kazakh tribes  stirring the first Russian interest in Central Asia. Peter's appetite had been whetted by Khiva's potential as a staging post for trade with India, by reports of gold along the Amudarya, and by a mistaken idea that the Amudarya could be made navigable right into the heart of Central Asia. But by the time the Russians got round to marching on Khiva in 1717, the khan no longer wanted Russian protection, and after a show of hospitality he had almost the entire 4000-strong force slaughtered.         

The Astrakhanid throne was usurped by the first of the Bukhara emirs, Masum Shah Murad in 1785.

 19th century

By the start of the 19th century the entire region was dominated by three weak, feuding Uzbek city-states Khiva, Bukhara and a Bukhara breakaway, Kokand. In 1801 the insane Russian Tsar Paul sent 22,000 Cossacks on a madcap mission to drive the British out of India, with orders to free the slaves en route. Fortunately for all but the slaves, Paul was assassinated and the army recalled while struggling across the Kazak steppes in midwinter. The next try, by Tsar Nickolay I in 1839 to 1840, was really a bid to pre-empt expansion into Central Asia by Britain, which had just taken Afghanistan, although Khiva's Russian slaves were the pretext on which General Petrovsky's 5200 men and 10,000 camels set out from Orenburg. In January 1840, a British officer, Captain James Abbot, arrived in Khiva offering to negotiate the slaves' released on the khan's behalf, thus nullifying the Russians' excuse for coming. The Russians finally got themselves together 25 years later; the khanates' towns fell like dominoes Tashkent in 1865 to General Mikhail Chernyaev, Samarkand and Bukhara in 1868, Khiva in 1873, and Kokand in 1875 to General Konstantin Kaufman.

 20th century

The outbreak of the Revolution in 1917 and the infamous sacking of Kokand in 1918, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) of Turkestan. Temporarily forced out by counter-revolutionary troops and basmachi guerillas, they returned two years later and the Khiva and Bukhara khanates were forcibly replaced with 'People's Republics'.

 1991 

31 August the declaration of Independence of Uzbekistan was proclaimed.