azerbaijan the last stop on central asia

viviv, today, we go to azerbaijian, another country used to be overlorded under szar and soviet union. geografically, we have left central asia. since azbaijan is on the other side of the capsian sea. but culturally it still worth taking a glance. Azerbaijan was once a major stopover on the Great Silk Route, and there are many captivating sights to see in this ancient country - Bronze Age petroglyphs, medieval minarets and mosques, the famous carpets. With an oil bonanza incipient, the capital Baku is fast becoming a boomtown.and here a little bit history of azerbaijan.Azerbaijan has been inhabited for at least 3000 years, and probably a lot longer than that. Some theories even place the Garden of Eden in southern Azerbaijan (now part of Iran). Bronze Age settlements have been found in and around Baku. Scythians settled in the area in the 9th century BC, followed by the Medes, followers of Zoroastrianism. The Archaemenid Persians took over half the country 200 years later. Azerbaijan's decision to back Alexander the Great's Greek attack on Persia in 330 BC meant that it drifted into the Seleucid then Parthian empires, which fought interminable wars with the Romans, who finally marched all the way to Qobustan in 66BC. By the 4th century the area had been extensively Christianised.
With a series of Muslim-Arab invasions and the arrival of several waves of Turkic tribes (the ancestors of today's Azerbaijanis), that soon changed. Beginning around 1050, the country enjoyed a cultural renaissance, and achieved many of its greatest architectural and artistic achievements. However, this was crushed by the brutal arrival of various Mongol and Central Asian armies, from Genghis Khan to Tamerlane.
Following centuries saw a three-way struggle between Russia, Turkey and Persia that finally ended in 1828, when Russia and Persia definitively divided Azerbaijan along the Araz River. The south remains in Iran. During the period of Russian rule, many Armenian Christians emigrated from their traditional lands in (what is now) eastern Turkey to the relative safety of the Russian empire, creating a future political time bomb, notably in Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region where they slowly came to form a majority. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan's economy grew in relation to Russia's. The region was a participant in the birth of the modern petroleum industry. The first oil well was drilled in 1848, and the first oil refinery constructed in 1859. Azerbaijan provided Russia, and later the Soviet Union, with crude oil, chemicals, textiles, food and wine.
The denationalisation of the oil industry in 1872 changed Baku from a dusty backwater to a wealthy and sophisticated city, attracting European investors (including the Rothschilds) and accounting for more than half of the world's oil production by the end of the century. But labour exploitation made Baku a political hotbed - it's here that Stalin cut his political teeth.
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Azerbaijan/Azerbaijan.html